January 30thCan You Corner the Review Market?
Christopher Kenton
[tag]PowerReviews[/tag] is getting a lot of buzz for a company that won’t officially launch until sometime late this year. But the company’s potential to aggregate a significant swath of consumer product reviews, and a host of user-friendly features to help customers filter through those reviews seem pretty compelling. Based on the concept of taking Amazon’s review system to the wider Web, PowerReviews will offer it’s review platform for free to online retailers, while centrally aggregating and disseminating reviews across their network. That means consumers can research a potential purchase at their favorite online store, while tapping into a much wider network of customers who have reviewed the same product at other stores. The product will be free to retailers; the company says it will earn revenue from its own shopping portal, leveraging the reviews to drive optional Pay-Per-Click traffic back to retailers.
There are a number of interesting features designed to enhance usability for posting and researching reviews, from a social tagging system to a review summary that filters up the topline takeaways from consumer reviews. One of the more interesting features is Verified Purchaser, which spotlights reviews written by consumers who have actually purchased the product in question, as validated by the retailer.
What makes this product interesting is the opportunity to consolidate a large portion of consumer review data. This would provide huge opportunities not only for advertising, but also for direct market access and research for merchants. Imagine as a merchant having a dashboard highlighting review trends and individual alerts so you can stay more closely in touch with consumers commenting on your products. Instead of having to monitor a huge number of sites, you’d have them consolidated in one place. The site already mentions the opportunity for merchants to “respond to reviews”, but the terse wording of this feature, and the otherwise narrowly defined revenue model suggest this might be a bigger part of the upcoming release than they want to announce. But now I’m just speculating.
What’s useful for marketers to consider is how to keep your ear close to the ground where consumers are commenting on your products. That’s a daunting task in a world full of vastly distributed social sites offering their own forums for product reviews. To the extent that a company like PowerReviews might draw some of those disparate threads together, marketers should pay attention.
[tag]PowerReviews[/tag] is getting a lot of buzz for a company that won’t officially launch until sometime late this year. But the company’s potential to aggregate a significant swath of consumer product reviews, and a host of user-friendly features to help customers filter through those reviews seem pretty compelling. Based on the concept of taking Amazon’s review system to the wider Web, PowerReviews will offer it’s review platform for free to online retailers, while centrally aggregating and disseminating reviews across their network. That means consumers can research a potential purchase at their favorite online store, while tapping into a much wider network of customers who have reviewed the same product at other stores. The product will be free to retailers; the company says it will earn revenue from its own shopping portal, leveraging the reviews to drive optional Pay-Per-Click traffic back to retailers.
There are a number of interesting features designed to enhance usability for posting and researching reviews, from a social tagging system to a review summary that filters up the topline takeaways from consumer reviews. One of the more interesting features is Verified Purchaser, which spotlights reviews written by consumers who have actually purchased the product in question, as validated by the retailer.
What makes this product interesting is the opportunity to consolidate a large portion of consumer review data. This would provide huge opportunities not only for advertising, but also for direct market access and research for merchants. Imagine as a merchant having a dashboard highlighting review trends and individual alerts so you can stay more closely in touch with consumers commenting on your products. Instead of having to monitor a huge number of sites, you’d have them consolidated in one place. The site already mentions the opportunity for merchants to “respond to reviews”, but the terse wording of this feature, and the otherwise narrowly defined revenue model suggest this might be a bigger part of the upcoming release than they want to announce. But now I’m just speculating.
What’s useful for marketers to consider is how to keep your ear close to the ground where consumers are commenting on your products. That’s a daunting task in a world full of vastly distributed social sites offering their own forums for product reviews. To the extent that a company like PowerReviews might draw some of those disparate threads together, marketers should pay attention.