PowerReviews

Today’s consumers have near-limitless options when it comes to researching and purchasing products. E-commerce giants like Amazon.com — equipped with a variety of products, ratings and reviews, and competitive shipping rates matched by few — have wide appeal for information-hungry consumers. However, smaller merchants shouldn’t give up hope. By leveraging user-generated content (UGC), including ratings…

Room & Board is a Minneapolis-based retailer offering modern, American-made home furniture and accessories. Founded in 1980, the family-owned, privately held company has 14 stores and 900 employees. About 40 percent of Room & Board's transactions occur online. In this interview with Kimberly Ruthenbeck, director of web customer experience at Room & Board, we discuss…

Brand advocates are retailers’ best friends. They’re highly vocal, influential consumers, and their opinions carry weight. Loyalists are known to rave about the products they love (and love to hate) on social media pages and, most importantly, on brand and retailer websites via ratings, reviews and Q&A. Reviews play an important role in the consumer…

Here are three valuable lessons brands and retailers can learn in light of Amazon’s ongoing crackdown on fake reviews.

Brands must ensure product and review information is easily accessible to those curious consumers at the moment of purchase. As consumers' purchase behaviors continue to evolve with new channels, more brands are looking to increase visibility of their products through the syndication of product reviews to retail sites and search engines. Here are the three most important reasons brands should maximize their reach through review syndication:

Forward-thinking retailers have come to view online customer reviews as a key tool to help shoppers gain confidence in their purchases and drive conversions. Instead of being threatened by reviews, they embraced them, integrating them into their sites and social outposts and honing techniques to make them as authentic and useful to shoppers as possible. Here are a few ways to make sure your customer review program is best-of-breed:

Now is the time to begin planning your email marketing strategy for the holidays. Anything you do now to improve your email performance will pay benefits for the rest of the year and position you for success during the holidays. Consider the following tips to help you get started: 

What to test? When to test? How to test? Questions for the ages! It's a little hard for me to tell you without knowing what your mail quantity is, but I'm going to suggest something that may take away the sting of an A/B split test. First, do a control test vs. an A vs. B test. That's right, a true test will take equal-sized blocks of your housefile and devote each one to a control (i.e., no offer) vs. an A and a B.  

Bazaarvoice, a company that works on branding and marketing information for clients by tapping social media sites for direct responses, is spending $151.9 million in cash and stock to purchase competitor PowerReviews Inc.

With a vast array of products, product pages, categories and themes, personalized party products retailer Shindigz was faced with the daunting task of manually merchandising products and providing product recommendations across its four websites, including brands Stumps Party, American Prom and SpiritLine. Shindigz sought a product recommendation platform that integrated data, wisdom of the crowd and click behavior to streamline and automate recommendations across multiple shopping channels.