Press Release
NetShops’ Social Merchandising Featuring PowerReviews Wins Social Computing Award From Independent Research Firm
NetShops use of PowerReviews social merchandising solution awarded for energizing its customer base with ratings and reviews
Millbrae, Calif. September 18, 2007 - PowerReviews, (www.powerreviews.com), a leader in customer reviews and social merchandising solutions for online retailers, today announced the company has won a Forrester Groundswell Award in the “Energizing” category for its work with NetShops, a specialty online retailer with 156 separate online storefronts in the home and lifestyle space. The Forrester Groundswell Awards honor excellence in key business uses of social technologies and were announced in a ceremony on October 11, 2007 by Forrester analysts Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li at the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago.
The entry, “NetShops Social Merchandising: Energizing our shoppers from beginning to end of their shopping process” focused on PowerReviews’ “social shopping” tools - customer reviews, social merchandising and social navigation. Netshops’ merchandising team wanted to test how user-generated content could help drive two strategic initiatives for the company - driving higher online conversion on its Web sites and building trust for the “parent” brand - NetShops - to promote cross-selling between individual Web sites. To that end, NetShops launched PowerReviews’ tag-based customer review solution on all 156 specialty sites simultaneously in November 2006. Within six months, the company acquired 19,500 reviews on a wide variety of home and lifestyle products, and currently displays over 34,000 product reviews on their sites.
“We are especially thrilled to receive this award from Forrester - a notable and respected member of our industry,” said Jay Shaffer, vice president of Sales and Marketing for PowerReviews. “We are particularly proud to be recognized for our efforts with NetShops, a truly inspirational client with their leverage of customer reviews in their shopping process.”
To assess the impact of PowerReviews’ solutions, NetShops engaged the University of Nebraska at Omaha to conduct an in-depth study on the cause-and-effect relationship between its tag-based reviews and product revenue. The study concluded that tag-based customer reviews drove a 26 percent increase in same-product sales. In addition, after achieving review volume in 80 percent of its top selling categories, NetShops added a “Top-Rated Products” section to 20 of its categories which prompted a 171 percent increase in conversion for customers going to these special social merchandising pages.
The Forrester Groundswell Awards are an outgrowth of the book, Groundswell, to be published in 2008 by Harvard Business School Press. Written by Forrester's Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li, Groundswell will focus on effective business strategies in a world transformed by social technologies, and will feature the types of case studies recognized by the Forrester Groundswell Awards. More information about the Forrester Groundswell Awards is available at www.forrester.com/groundswell.
About NetShops
Headquartered in Omaha, Neb., NetShops currently owns and operates over 150 online specialty stores, including hammocks.com, binoculars.com and barstools.com. NetShops was named the 13th fastest growing company in America by Inc. magazine in 2006 and has served over 1 million satisfied customers. NetShops, Inc. was recently ranked #104 on Internet Retailer magazine's Top 500 guide of the largest retail Web sites in the country.
About PowerReviews™
PowerReviews is an enterprise solutions company that provides customer reviews and social merchandising solutions to multi-channel retailers, driving higher conversion and increased purchase satisfaction. PowerReviews’ patent-pending PowerTags™ technology captures customer opinions in their own words, making reviews more useful for shoppers, empowering them to make more informed and confident purchase decisions. Its customers include Staples, ToysRus, the Wine Enthusiast, NetShops, REI, Ritz Camera and over 100 more. With the introduction of Buzzillions.com, the company has entered the consumer shopping portal market, leveraging its tag-based technology to introduce social navigation and affinity recommendations into the shopping research process for consumers. Based in Millbrae, California, PowerReviews is a privately held company with funding from leading venture capital firms Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards. For more information visit www.PowerReviews.com.To experience the shopping benefits from Buzzillions.com, visit www.Buzzillions.com.
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Editor's Contact:
Lisa Tarter
TidalWave PR
415-440-4278
lisatarter@yahoo.com