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The Power of Reviews: Buzzillions Brings Confidence to the Consumer’s Search for the Perfect Product.
The internet represents the largest research tool in history with millions of information sources available. But how do you know the validity of the sources you come across? Beyond the realm of academic research, this challenge also impacts consumers when it comes to finding unbiased reviews of a product. It is often difficult to tell whether a review is coming from a real consumer or if it was placed there inorganically as a marketing tactic. Buzzillions has set out to provide a resource where consumers can trust the reviews they read.
Founded by parent company PowerReviews in September of 2007, Buzzillions is the consumer facing portion of the PowerReview network. The model works like this: retailers engage PowerReviews to implement product review services on their websites, a service provided at no cost. In exchange the retailers allow PowerReviews to aggregate those reviews on Buzzillions.com.
Recently Buzzillions won the 2008 Golden Link Award for Most Innovative Publisher of the Year. I sat down with PowerReviews CEO Andy Chen to discuss Buzzillions’ innovative platform and their commitment to quality reviews.
What kind of shopper comes to Buzzillions?
Some people feel that reviews and review sites are fairly ubiquitous. But the reality is reviews are only ubiquitous in a few categories: electronics, books, and music, and video. If you’re looking for other items like furniture, golf clubs you would be very hard pressed to find any place to go.
If I am looking for a digital camera, I’d go to CNET or Consumer Reports to find that review. However if I’m looking for a barbecue grill where do I go? Buzzillions provides that space. The merchants who sell in the niche categories do a lot better on our website then they do anywhere else. We are one of the very few places where you can look for a porch swing or a pot rack and find reviews on those types of items.
Our goal is to be a credible resource for consumers searching for unbiased reviews to help them find the right product. Consumers are smart. If they go to a site where all the reviews are overly positive then they don’t believe the reviews are unbiased. And the consumers go away.
The thing that actually makes us really unique is that we allow users to narrow product searches by certain criteria like: pros, cons, best uses, and lifestyle. For instance if you’re looking for a digital camera you don’t have to just browse by price you can say, “Hey, I am a professional, Show me products that are recommended by other professionals”. The type of lens, tripod, or a case you would buy to go with that camera depends on what you do. A wildlife photographer would have a different case for their camera then a wedding photographer.
How do you build lifestyle profiles?
When a consumer buys off our retail partner’s site they often solicit their users to come back and post a review of the products purchased. This is how we collect the reviews. For example, a retailer will send an e-mail to a customer that says, “Thanks for buying. We hope you’re happy with the product, tell us what you think.” Within that review process we give them the opportunity to answer profile style questions.
Let’s say I went to Toys “R” Us and I bought a car seat. I might say, “Hey, this is a great car seat for travel. The best thing about it is that is lightweight or it folds and I can carry it. And oh, by the way, I’m a mother of twins.” Using that example we would then we create a profile around mother of twins.
When you combine product category plus the type of information in the review survey Buzzillions turns into a customized recommendation engine.
What about consumer privacy concerns?
There is no private information that is this transmitted during this process. The customers are the retailer’s customers and the retailer manages the login and all shopping cart information. All the retailer does is pass us the information attached to the review and survey itself. We don’t expose the e-mail address or other information that is passed between us and the merchant.
Now we do, on Buzzillions, have an optional Craigslist style verification with our system that allows people to verify who they are after they post a review. On our site there are verified reviewers and we also have verified buyers. Since our retail partners know who has purchased from their site, they flag this person as a verified buyer. Ultimately, will this help increase the credibility of the review. It also limits others’ abilities to game the system by posting faulty and fake reviews. Amazon, for example, is pretty notorious for such reviews appearing on their site, where in a book review you will notice that the reviewers are both the writer and the publisher. Our goal is to maintain the credibility of our reviews.
What about merchants who shy away or are concerned about posting negative user experiences?
First and foremost, at Buzzillions the reviews are all about the product. Our moderation policy is to filter out comments that deal with the level of service and not the product. For example, if a customer buys a great product they loved but it’s shipped late and the customer posts a one star review that would not be a valid review because they loved the product. We try to separate views about the product from views about the retailer. We actually do provide a service review which we separate and send to the retailer so they can get feedback, but we see really spend a lot of effort to make sure the product review is about the product and not the service.
Still, a merchant has to be able to be stand behind what they sell and be ready to deal with positive and negative reviews.
What about retailers who feel like they can do build the review system themselves?
I think it’s widely accepted that reviews are a good thing. Most retailers who haven’t done them yet realize that they are never going to get to implementing reviews them themselves. They realize they are not to be able to build it, manage it, and more importantly moderate it because it takes staffing people to read reviews and to maintain editorial policy. The advantage with Power Reviews is that a hard technology is provided free of charge as well as the moderation. Both are important. Plus installation can be very quick. As fast as 48 hours we can have a retailer up on the site. That kind of implementation is just not within the realm of possibilities for most companies; to do it that fast with so many features and moderation resources.
Why CPA over CPC?
One of the big problems with CPC businesses is that you are forced as a retailer to trim your feed. Meaning, I am willing to pay 35 cents a click for a $200 set of hiking shoes but not 35 cents a click for a $20 pair of flip-flops. So I am going to eliminate all the flip-flops from the feed. What happens is that you tend to get only the high-margin high profit products and even at that standard it’s a barely profitable proposition for the merchant. A lot of merchants find themselves participating in CPC types of models like because they have to because that’s where all their competition is. However it is not hugely profitable place for them to acquire customers.
The other aspect of the CPC model is it is solely about lowest price. Customers often go there when they’ve already decided what to buy and are just trying to determine the lowest price. If you think about how it works; if I’m a customer looking for lowest price I am only going to search for those items on sale or discount off of MSRP. For merchant to pay CPC in that model lowers the profitability significantly.
Buzzillions is all about finding the right product and not the cheapest product. The best product can be the $20 flip-flop. So here are a couple reasons why we chose the CPA model. We wanted to encourage variety and not have merchants feel the need to remove products from the feed. CPA is perfect because every transaction is going to profitable. Plus, because we are helping customers to find the right product, customers tend to convert easily after they found that product.
As an affiliate what is more important to you Commission or Conversion?
We normalize all of our leads we send a retailer into the effective revenue per click. To a certain extent it doesn’t matter what the merchant offer is, it matters what the results are. If we are sending a thousand potential customers to one merchant and thousand to another merchant we will measure success in terms of revenue per click. That is how we determine where we want the clicks to go.
Obviously there are good rules of thumb. We know that reviews are more of a research phase than a ready to buy phase and we take that into account. Obviously the cookie length the retailer provides is important to us. Ideally we need a certain cookie in order to capture to capture any of the benefit. The ideal cookie length would be a minimum of seven days but 15 days is where we capture most of the value.
What is the biggest challenge in working with data feeds?
One of the big issues we run into is that sometimes retailers use different SKUs for the same product. Sometimes when they send the feed to a network like LinkShare, they have different SKU set then when they send the same feed to us. So we spend a lot of time matching them together. If you imagine a SKU was written for product 123 you would expect that the skew you would receive from LinkShare to match. The price, the stock status, the current description and the photo should all match. That’s the largest challenge: how do we take this standard data feed and match up to the review data because some merchants use different methods in creating feeds.
We would like to see more normalized product data. Just to be able to see that product A from a certain retailer is the same as product to B from a different retailer quickly. I think that is one of our biggest issues. If they had unique universal product numbers attached we could do a lot better job. It could certainly make it easier for us to help our customers to find the right products.
As a Golden Link winner what do you find different about LinkShare than other networks?
What I find is that they are very proactive about matching Buzzillions to the right merchant partners. They actually spend time reaching out to merchants that they feel are appropriate for us and vice versa. Plus they have a good technology base that we can leverage and scale.
I think one of the main reasons we won the award is that we have an incredibly high conversion rate and we don’t use coupons to do that. When you think of typical affiliates they show some kind of the hot deal, but we have among the highest conversion rate and we don’t show any offers. I think it’s a pretty amazing feat and is what makes merchants love us.
It would be nice if LinkShare could give us a normalized category within Merchandiser, for example, a master category tree. We have spent a lot of time mapping products to the right category within Buzzillions.
What are Buzzillions’ goals over the next year?
We are working on how to increase the customer’s confidence even more when they are in the buying cycle. You’ll see more confidence building features built into the site.
Think of a great off-line experience, for example, going into an REI and buying a backpack. You say, “Hey, I want a backpack.” A great sales per person would ask you what you want to do with it and what other types of backpacks you’ve had in the past. You could want to use it just for school, on a day hike, or use it for a three month trek. Based on what you say and what the sales person gathers from experience, they will say, “Here are three great backpacks that are going to be right for you.” Very likely you’ll leave with one of those three.
So for us it’s about getting a better understanding of what drives that purchase decision and incorporating it better into our recommendation engine. We have a big challenge because we cover thousands products from over 2,500 merchants. Some categories we understand very well but some niche categories are not well developed. We are always looking for those specialty retailers to help us develop niche categories who are experts in the products they sell.
Video is a big topic these days. Do you see a video element playing a role your reviews?
We actually do support and do have the functionality currently for customers upload video reviews. We haven’t seen much use of that feature. I think it’s mostly because there is a high barrier to entry: you have to be willing to videotape yourself plus you have to have the technical ability to process and to edit and upload the video. All that is out of a lot of people’s range, plus people don’t have the desire to go through that much effort. I think video is interesting and you can see it is a growing trend but it is definitely not a driver of today’s sales.
Thanks for the review. Buzzillions looks like a great site!