Over the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about how we’re going to handle customers leaving product reviews on webtogs.co.uk.

Originally we’d decided to build our own reviews engine and encourage customers to leave reviews via the usual method of enticements. There’s no doubt that on page product reviews increase conversions, as customers get one step closer to being reassured enough to buy.

This DIY approach, however, has some disadvantages. For a start, there’s the whole trust issue. With high profile stories surrounding sites like trip advisor, more net savvy consumers are beginning to distrust reviews. It’s also a hard area to get right. Enticing users to leave reviews, without offering them the earth, is a science in itself and best practice on this is hard to come by. The other big issue, for a start up like us, is the content (or lack of it). Until your site builds enough momentum to get reviews you tend to have loads of product pages, with “Be the first person to review this item” on the page. What’s interesting here, is that, statistically, people are far more likely to write the 3rd or 4th review, than they are the first.

Bearing this in mind, we’ve looked at out-sourcing this piece of the site to another company. After a bit of thought, we narrowed it down to Reevoo and Bazzar Voice. We met the relevant people from both companies a few days ago and chewed the fat on the whole reviews issue.

Reevoo’s offering is straight forward in its aims. They feel the ‘trusted mark’ side of things is critically important to get right, and offer a co-branded approach, where ‘Reevoo reviews’ sit on the product page. They only contact customers who have made a purchase from our site, and have good conversion rates at getting review content. Once they have the raw review data, they manually (i.e. a human being) edit it, removing all reference to the retailer, price and any unwanted content (bad language, racial comments, etc). The ‘clean’ review is the posted on our site. It’s also posted on other retailer’s sites that occupy a similar space. This sharing of review data is actually quite a benefit to a start-up, as we gain more than we lose, in terms of populating our product pages with reviews. The downside to this shared approach, is ownership. Should we end our relationship with Reevoo, we lose the review content they have collected on our behalf.

The data that is stripped from the raw reviews is still kept, and provided to us in a private manner, allowing us to deal with any customer service issues, that affect our performance as a retailer, rather than the quality of the product itself.

Bazzar Voice, on the other hand, have a different approach. They operate on a total ‘white label’ basis. Their review engine is integrated into our site, with no mention of their brand. From the customers perspective, it’s all Webtogs. They provide some very well researched best practice on gathering review content, mainly via email, and offer a similar manual data cleaning service.

Bazzar Voice also provide private access to comments relating to our service, but don’t provide the shared reviews side of things, so all content that we display will have been collected solely from our customers. Most importantly, they hand over all review content to us, should we part company in the future.

In terms of technology, the Bazzar Voice offering is further ahead than Reevoo, mainly in terms of site integration (site search on top rated, most popular products, etc), but, to be honest, there’s not much to differentiate the core offerings of each company, beyond what I’ve discussed here.

As for cost, both companies are very similar in price. They both charge a fixed monthly fee for their service, based on the amount of review content they have to process (which is largely based on site traffic). We haven’t yet got to the ‘fine print’ level with either company, but guide quotes at this stage are around the £40,000.00 per year mark, for a company such as ours, with conservative traffic projections. I dare say a larger company, with higher levels of traffic, would pay a bit more. On first glance, this seems like a lot of money. But when we sat down and looked at what it would cost us to do this in-house, it starts to make more sense. The nice thing about both companies is they are pro-active in providing tools that identify the ROI their respective services produce. Comparing the conversion of customers who have clicked on a review, against those that haven’t, after all, is a fairly easy thing to do.

We’re still undecided on the way to go. One of the big questions for us, is the ‘trusted mark’ concept. How important is this? I’d love to hear what you think about this.

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