Bazaarvoice, the market and technology leader in hosted social commerce applications that drive sales, has extended its product line with the launch of the new hosted Ask & Answer™ service. Ask & Answer taps the power of online communities to address the unanswered questions that can stop a purchase and send a visitor to a competing site. The new service is built on the industry-leading Bazaarvoice platform that has delivered word of mouth marketing success to over 90 leading online businesses including Bass Pro Shops, Dell, Macy’s, Overstock.com, PETCO, QVC, Sears, and ZipRealty.

Online businesses lose as many as 67 percent of consumers due to a lack of online product information, but 83 percent of online shoppers would make purchases if sites offered increased interactive elements and innovative ways to purchase products.1 The Ask & Answer service is the first to encourage shoppers to post and respond to specific questions about products and services directly alongside standard product information. Questions like “What features are important in an HDTV?” or “Do these plants grow well in Texas?” can be answered by customers who have direct experience with the product. Shoppers can use this authentic, credible consumer-generated content to make more confident purchase decisions. Businesses gain a valuable new way to integrate consumer-generated content into their sales, service, marketing, merchandising, and manufacturing processes.

“Shoppers have millions of questions unique to them that aren’t addressed by the manufacturer’s product description or a company’s marketing department,” said Bazaarvoice founder and CEO Brett Hurt. “Businesses are learning that consumers trust each other more than anyone else for product advice. Ask & Answer gives online businesses another great way to tap into the social nature of the shopping experience to drive sales, satisfaction, and loyalty. Having reached profitability as a company, we will continue to lead the market and innovate new social commerce applications.”

Social Commerce: Building on Ratings & Reviews Success

Shopping is an inherently social experience. More than 30 percent of consumers report that they primarily rely on recommendations from friends and family when making a purchase, and 56 percent regularly tell friends and family about products that interest them.2 According to a recent Edelman Trust Barometer study, 68 percent of consumers trust “people like me” first for product advice, up from 22 percent in 2003. Online, one out of three Internet users have used sites containing user-generated content to help make a decision to buy, or not to buy, a product.3

Launched in February 2006, Bazaarvoice’s flagship ratings and reviews solution offered one of the first fast and easy ways for businesses to facilitate and listen to online customer-to-customer conversations. Bazaarvoice currently handles more than 250 million reviews per month and is the leading ratings and reviews solution, used by 8 out of 10 top retailers who outsource ratings and reviews.4 Industry-wide, Bazaarvoice has been instrumental in building a new market, resulting in the launch of ratings and reviews on 46 percent of eCommerce sites, double the 23 percent of sites that offered the functionality in 2005.5 Shoppers who read reviews had a 21 percent higher purchase satisfaction and an 18 percent higher loyalty score versus other survey respondents.6

Now Bazaarvoice is extending its word of mouth marketing product line with the new Ask & Answer service. Ask & Answer draws on the established advantages of Bazaarvoice’s ratings and reviews solution – outsourced technology, community management services, analytics, and open syndication – to ensure risk-free implementation and maximum business impact from consumer-generated content.

“We’ve already seen tremendous success from introducing Bazaarvoice ratings and reviews on the Shoes.com site,” said Dan Zuckerman, chief operating officer at Shoes.com. “When it comes to our line of business, we find that our customers have very specific questions about our products. We are excited to roll out Ask & Answer and give our community of shoppers a new way to connect with each other to make the best decisions – without leaving the Shoes.com site.”

The Ask & Answer Solution

The hosted and fully managed Ask & Answer service integrates seamlessly with a client’s site to allow customers to share product information with other customers online. Key features include:

• Hosted Technology: Ask & Answer is offered as a software-as-service solution that seamlessly integrates with Bazaarvoice Ratings and Reviews functionality, and can integrate with email, Web analytics, and existing discussion forum software. Product page and category-level implementation can be completed in approximately 20 IT hours with no software or hardware to buy, install, upgrade, or maintain. Ask & Answer is a fully customizable white-label solution that blends seamlessly with the retailer’s brand, customer authentication, and user experience. Plus, custom integration is available with over 30 eCommerce leaders in site search and navigation, email marketing, Web analytics, and personalization and recommendations.
• Moderation & Management: Bazaarvoice specializes in professional content moderation. Human review and best-practice policies work together to ensure accuracy and relevancy of answers. Questions and answers are screened for profanity, racial slurs, and inappropriate comments. Bazaarvoice’s community managers also work closely with each client to execute a proven community and content-development strategy that maximizes the benefits of consumer-generated content. Clients can also choose to moderate content and manage their community on their own.
• Analytics: Ask & Answer incorporates actionable analysis of answer content and trends to derive greater impact from word of mouth. In-depth insights and content-management capabilities are available via the Bazaarvoice Workbench and the Bazaarvoice Answer Management tools. Each Bazaarvoice client is also assigned a dedicated community manager to develop recurring insights, reports, and executive presentations to drive business improvements. Community managers provide tactical and strategic recommendations across multiple product categories to improve product merchandising, product management, customer service, and marketing.
• Open Syndication: Bazaarvoice clients are also able to amplify the business impact of customer-to-customer conversations by extending answer content beyond their Web sites to attract new customers. Ask & Answer search engine optimized (SEO) landing pages effectively attract natural search traffic from Google, Yahoo!, and other leading search engines. Integration is also available with the SyndicateVoice™ program, which extends the reach of user-generated content to the major portals where many consumers start shopping, including MSN, Shop.com, and PriceRunner.com.

“At Dell, I managed over 100 projects launched on Dell.com. The ones that failed took people off the purchase path,” said Sam Decker, vice president of marketing and products at Bazaarvoice. “Ask & Answer keeps customers on the product, category or service page. Any visitor can ask a question, answer a question, and read the answers right where they are to accelerate a purchase decision.”

About Bazaarvoice

Bazaarvoice offers outsourced technology, services, analytics, and expertise to help companies enhance the online shopping experience with social commerce applications that drive sales. Bazaarvoice Ratings and Reviews and Ask & Answer deliver immediate success by minimizing implementation risk and maximizing the strategic impact of user-generated review content through complete customization, deep integration, community management, advanced analytics, search engine optimization, and syndication across the Web and to offline channels.

Bazaarvoice was named a Red Herring Top 100 company in 2006 and received the 2006 ClickZ Marketing Innovation of the Year award. Bazaarvoice currently serves over 90 eCommerce leaders including Bass Pro Shops, Dell, Macy’s, Overstock.com, PETCO, QVC, Sears, and ZipRealty. The company has headquarters in Austin, TX and offices in London, UK. For more information, please visit the company’s Web site at www.bazaarvoice.com or email info@bazaarvoice.com.

1 Allurent, October 2006

2 Forrester Research, April 2007

3 iProspect and JupiterResearch, January 2007

4 Internet Retailer Top 100, May 2007

5 MarketingSherpa, February 2007

6 ForeSee Results, January 2007