Press Release
Kiddicare Integrates PowerReviews and Endeca to Offer Unique Social Commerce Experience
Leading UK retailer generates 14,000+ reviews for thousands of products, leverages Endeca relationship to become first UK retailer to drive "Social Navigation" of products and reviews
CAMBRIDGE, MA and SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- October 7, 2008 - PowerReviews (www.powerreviews.com), the Internet's most comprehensive developer of customer-review solutions for retailers and their shoppers, and Endeca Technologies, Inc., a search and information access software company, today announced that Kiddicare (www.kiddicare.com) has deployed a new social navigation shopping experience on the company's popular online store. Kiddicare, the UK's premier retailer of Nursery products, integrates tag-based product reviews and reviewer profiles, created using PowerReviews software, with Endeca's site search, navigation and merchandising capabilities. As a result, shoppers can find and browse products using any combination of product attributes (price range, brand, age range) and consumer opinions ("comfortable", "easy to clean," "durable"). It is the first UK retailer to offer this kind of social navigation experience on its online store.
Kiddicare selected PowerReviews due to its unique ability to offer tag-based reviews as well as sentiments expressed by product owners. It selected Endeca, due to its proven reputation of powering the search, navigation and merchandising of many of the Europe and North America's most popular online destinations. It also cited the unique integration and complementary capabilities of Endeca and PowerReviews to offer such a unique Web 2.0-friendly, social navigation experience.
Scott Weavers-Wright, partner at Kiddicare, says that, "the tag-based reviews give the customer the ability to navigate around the site based on other customer opinions. Furthermore, shoppers are presented with customer reviews as the primary content, and in fact the product descriptions created by Kiddicare are actually secondary to the reviews."
For example, Kiddicare offers 86 car seats designed for new born to 12 month infants. The shopper can interchangeably browse these products by consumer sentiments, product ratings and product attributes. As a shopper browses the site, they are presented with a "tag cloud" offering common terms fellow parents have used to categorise the "best uses" and "pros" of these 86 carriers and car seats. All these opinions are generated using PowerReviews patent-pending tag-based review software and all tap into Endeca offering the shopper new options to refine the collection of 86 down to the most relevant subset of desirable products. These products are also flanked by both traditionally product refinement criteria, like price range, as well as more user review criteria like a 5-star rating system. By clicking on the 5-star filter, the seats meeting that criteria are refined to only the 15 matching options, and the sentiment tag cloud and other options are dynamically updated to reflect ratings for those specific products. The shopper then clicks on the "easy to clean" tag rating and the options are honed down to the 7 seats that meet both criteria. In two simple clicks of the mouse - and with the benefit of opinions of like buyers - the shopper is now down a manageable list of desirable options.
"Working with Kiddicare is a vendor's dream come true." said Jay Shaffer, VP, Worldwide Sales and Marketing for PowerReviews. "Not only did Scott and his team embrace our vision of incorporating product reviews, but they took it way beyond the next level. Their willingness to try new approaches to marketing has propelled them to the top echelon of online retailers."
"Kiddicare offers a glimpse into the future of online shopping and one of the most unique uses of Guided Navigation to date," said Matt Eichner, SVP strategic development and marketing for Endeca."We're quickly evolving to where the merchandisers that can master the art of dynamic shopping experience - one that embraces a dialogue with the shopper rather than one-way marketing - are going to have a dramatic advantage over the competition."
About PowerReviews
PowerReviews (www.powerreviews.com) is an enterprise solutions company that provides customer reviews and social merchandising solutions to multi-channel retailers and their shoppers. Our technology platform for collecting, organizing, structuring and moderating relevance-based reviews helps online retailers significantly boost their sales. PowerReviews' user-generated content and community drives the highest sales uplift in the industry, and in addition to working with more than 260 online retailers, including Staples, Toys "R" Us, REI, Ritz Camera, Walgreen's, Diapers.com and The Sports Authority, we have also launched our own shopping portal, Buzzillions (www.buzzillions.com). The company is based in San Francisco and is backed by Lehman Brothers Venture Capital Partners, Menlo Ventures, Atomico and Draper Richards.
About Kiddicare
Kiddicare is a family business established in 1974 and is now the largest privately owned nursery supplier to the public in the United Kingdom. They operate from the largest nursery showroom in Europe which features dedicated sales areas for key nursery brands, including Maxi Cosi, Britax and Silver Cross. The showroom also has 35 payment kiosks on the shopfloor to allow customer self service. Kiddicare.com was launched in 1999 and now dispatches stock using a leading-edge, automated picking system from its distribution centre in Peterborough. Kiddicare employs over 120 full time members of staff.
About Endeca
Endeca's innovative information access software that helps people explore, analyze, and understand complex information, guiding them to unexpected insights and better decisions. The Endeca Information Access Platform, built around a new class of access-optimized database, powers applications that combine the ease of searching and browsing with the analytical power of business intelligence. More than 500 leading global organizations including ABN AMRO, Boeing, Cox Newspapers, the (US) Defense Intelligence Agency, Dell, Ford Motor Company, Hyatt, IBM, John Deere, the Library of Congress, Texas Instruments, and Walmart.com rely on Endeca to power business-critical applications that increase revenue, reduce costs, and streamline operations. Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., Endeca has operations in North America, Europe and Asia. For more information: endeca.com or info@endeca.com
Media Contacts
Craig VerColen for Endeca: cvercolen@endeca.com +1-617-674-6190
Jennifer Johnson Avril for PowerReviews: jen@verbfactory.com +1-718-871-7117