Both Barrels Communications Ltd

Consumers spend just six minutes of a 24-hour process on a retailer site

Shoppers avoid talking to brands about their products and even dodge the websites of the retailers they will eventually buy from until their decision to purchase has already been made. Instead, on a scale previously unimagined, they do their pre-purchase research by tapping into a variety of social sources including friends and family, consumer reviews and Facebook friends. When they do decide to buy, they spend an average of just six minutes on a retailer website after a purchase journey of 24 hours, according to research commissioned by Europe’s largest social commerce company, Reevoo.

At all stages of the purchase journey, consumers’ faith in social sources of information is now higher than in any alternative: 70% rate friends’ recommendations as important, while 62% of people rate consumer reviews as important – significantly more than those who rate the media, or shop assistants recommendations as important at 35% and 28% respectively.

The research also shows that mobile and Facebook have become the tools of choice for a significant proportion of shoppers. The proportion using their smartphone to research and solicit information – even while physically standing in a bricks-and-mortar outlet – is now 38%, and a further 39% turn to their social network on Facebook to research and make purchase decisions.

Today also sees the launch of Reevoo’s extensive new portfolio of social commerce products, developed in light of these research results to help retailers and brands respond to the changing consumer journey. Reevoo’s new solutions have been designed to help retailers move beyond product reviews and ratings to address issues of brand, service, engagement, real-time response and post-sales support – in effect, to establish presence and trust, far more widely. (See separate announcement, Reevoo expands portfolio to simplify social commerce.)

See here for a short video of Richard Anson, Reevoo CEO and founder, describing the key research findings. These are:
• Participation in the social commerce process is now the norm rather than the exception. 47% of consumers report that they have written a product review, more than those who haven’t.
• Shoppers spend a long time deciding what to buy, with 90% spending at least 24 hours researching a major purchase. However only a fraction of this time – six minutes – is actually spent on retailer product pages, highlighting the need for retailers to engage and influence consumers across the web, offline and on mobile. This increases to 14 minutes for retailers using social content effectively.
• It’s not just what people are buying, but from whom they’re buying that’s important to them. 73% of shoppers will check consumer opinion before buying from an unknown or little-known retailer, with 58% specifically searching online for service reviews before they purchase.
• People have no qualms about publicly using a mobile device to make checks, even in-store. 38% now use their mobiles to help them research and make purchases in some way, with a third using their mobile phones to research product information, read consumer reviews and check prices.
• 39% of people turn to their social network on Facebook to research and make purchase decisions. While buying activities on the social network is still a niche pursuit, it is increasingly popular for the research and recommendation-type activities that typify the early stages of a purchase journey.
• Advertising is no longer relevant. Only 24% of consumers believe that their purchase behaviour is influenced by advertising.
• Product reviews and ratings remain core to the buying process. 87% of shoppers sometimes or always read reviews before making a purchase.
• Good reviews matter, but bad reviews matter more. 69% of consumers trust reviews more when they can see bad reviews as well as good. In fact, 38% are more likely to read the bad reviews than the good ones – but only 5% say they won’t buy a product with bad reviews.
• Additional social information is welcome, with 86% of shoppers using smart recommendations including what others are buying, frequently bought with, or stock levels, to decide what to purchase. Calls-to-purchase based on what shoppers ultimately bought, urgency, stock levels are deemed useful by 64%, 58% and 45% of shoppers respectively.
• In social commerce, independence is cherished. Consumers trust independent reviews more, at 56%, versus reviews collected by brands or retailers themselves, at 19%.

The purchasing behaviour identified in the survey results requires retailers and brands to re-evaluate their social commerce strategies in order to establish consumer trust at key decision points in that journey. Customers will only engage with a retailer who has managed to establish trust earlier in the purchasing journey.

Richard Anson, Reevoo’s CEO and founder, said: “The raw statistics tell some of the story; the rest of our conclusions are drawn from discussions with, and the experiences of, many of our 120 partners. Taken together, we know how the journey has evolved, where the decision points are, and how those decisions are made. What is clear is that no longer can any retailer control the purchase journey – but all retailers are in a position to influence it.”

“Consumers spend a lot of time considering what to buy with 90% spending at least 24 hours researching significant purchases. Yet our analysis shows that only a tiny fraction of that time, just six minutes, is spent at the final stage of purchase on product pages on the retailer or brand’s site – but this more than doubles to 14 minutes for retailers deploying social commerce content effectively,” he continued.

“While it’s vital for retailers to fine-tune their on-site experience to ensure that consumers get what they need to make a purchase, this is no longer enough; retailers need to engage with shoppers everywhere. That means across the web, on social networks, and on Google, as well as offline and on mobile devices,” he added.

For further research details and analysis, download ‘The Reevoo consumer purchasing report, June 2011’ [pdf].

[ends]

Notes to editors
1. This announcement is made in conjunction with today’s announcement by Reevoo of its newly expanded social commerce portfolio: Reevoo expands portfolio to simplify social commerce

2. A Reevoo analysis of 46 retailer websites revealed that consumers spend just six minutes on product pages, rising by over 100% to 14 minutes if social content is used effectively.

3. The consumer survey was carried out on behalf of Reevoo by FlyResearch in March 2011. 1200 people were interviewed.

4. Download ‘The Reevoo consumer purchasing report, June 2011’ [pdf] from http://b2b.reevoo.com/resources/ebooks/consumer-purchasing-report-june-2011?press

About Reevoo
Reevoo (http://b2b.reevoo.com) is Europe’s leading provider of social commerce solutions. Reevoo has been deployed by more than 120 major brands including Sony, BestBuy, Tesco and Dixons helping them to achieve average sales uplifts of 18% through boosted conversion rates and increased order values, turning browsers into shoppers.

Reevoo has solicited more than two million independent, impartial reviews from genuine customers. To help consumers make their purchase decision, Reevoo provides easy access to these reviews, displaying more than half a billion reviews to shoppers every month across the Reevoo network.

Reevoo’s consumer website (http://www.reevoo.com) also presents shoppers with everything they need to decide what to buy, including impartial customer reviews, price comparison, expert advice, product information and voucher deals.

Harnessing social media the key to “quality, unique content”

Europe’s largest social commerce company Reevoo and its SEO partner Distilled have published a whitepaper outlining the SEO best practices that must now be the highest priority for online retailers in the aftermath of Google’s Panda/Farmer algorithm update.

Panda/Farmer is widely reported as negatively impacting the search ranking results of several prominent online retailers. The whitepaper provides all existing online retailers with executable SEO tactics that enable them to mitigate the effects of the February 2011 algorithm update, and provides invaluable advice for any retailer starting from scratch and intending to design a site that will work well in the new world of search.

One of the effects of Panda/Farmer is to filter out websites that appear not to produce their own content, choosing instead to copy content from somewhere else and republish it. This is a contentious issue for online retailers which, with thousands of products, often resort to publishing either stock manufacturers’ descriptions of products, or content that other retailers are also likely to access and put online. Google also increasingly appears to reward websites that appear genuine and trustworthy to the user.

Will Critchlow, founder of Distilled, says: “The importance of quality, unique content has always been apparent in the SEO industry; indeed, when asked to advise webmasters on what SEO tactics they should employ, the answer from Google typically includes the words ‘quality, unique content’. Getting quality, unique content onto individual product pages has always been a problem for e-commerce websites, and Panda exacerbates the difficulties.”

Richard Anson, CEO of Reevoo, continues: “The problem isn’t one of knowing what to write, it’s more one of scaling the content across thousands of products. While a good e-commerce team can write about the products they sell, writing enough content to cover a growing inventory of products isn’t likely to be the best use of their time.

“It’s also hard to imagine that a team could write infinitely without resorting to stereotypical descriptions. And it ignores the fact that worldly-wise and savvy consumers need to be persuaded by people – not the retailer itself – that what they see and read is accurate and trustworthy,” he says.

Distilled and Reevoo have collaborated to combine the best in search expertise with Europe’s finest social commerce thinking. Through examples and case studies, the resulting whitepaper explains exactly how product reviews and other user-generated content can bring a variety of SEO benefits to retailers and manufacturers – and turn Google’s Panda update into a friend rather than an enemy.

It outlines the opportunities and best practices for improving product and category pages, targeting additional long-tail keywords and gaining more exposure in the search results.

The Distilled/Reevoo whitepaper – entitled ‘User Generated Content for SEO’ – is freely available to download from here.

[ends]

All company, product or service names mentioned herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Notes to editors
The Distilled/Reevoo whitepaper is freely available to download from http://www.reevoo.com/b2b/user-generated-content-for-seo-ebook-2/.

About Reevoo
Reevoo (http://www.reevoo.com/b2b) is Europe’s leading provider of social commerce solutions. Reevoo has been deployed by more than 120 major brands including Sony, BestBuy, Tesco and Dixons helping them to achieve average sales uplifts of 18% through boosted conversion rates and increased order values, turning browsers into shoppers.

Reevoo has solicited more than two million independent, impartial reviews from genuine customers. To help consumers make their purchase decision, Reevoo provides easy access to these reviews, displaying more than half a billion reviews to shoppers every month across the Reevoo network.

Reevoo’s consumer website (http://www.reevoo.com) also presents shoppers with everything they need to decide what to buy, including impartial customer reviews, price comparison, expert advice, product information and voucher deals.

About Distilled
Distilled (http://www.distilled.net/) is a leading SEO consultancy with offices in London, New York City and Seattle. Working with major brands, international companies and high-growth startups, and running advanced SEO conferences in the UK and US, Distilled’s consultants are considered at the forefront of SEO research and knowledge.

Lack of reviews culture across most of continental Europe is now kein Problem/no problem/pas de problème, says Reevoo

Social commerce company Reevoo has developed an automated review translation tool that enables reviews from one country to be translated and used in other countries where the same product is sold. Reevoo’s new software has been piloted successfully by Sony across eight of its European websites, helping Sony to overcome the lack of an established reviews culture across continental Europe.

Reevoo used machine translation to supplement valuable and irreplaceable local language reviews, giving Sony a clear advantage of volume at launch. The near-instantaneous translation of reviews enables products to benefit from a high volume of reviews during the earliest part of their lifecycle, when products are at their most desirable and profitable. Reevoo’s use of machine translation also maintains vital objectivity in the process of translation, meaning there is no inadvertent interpretation of the voice of the consumer by a human translator.

Reevoo’s software employs Google Translate, a free translation service that provides instant translations between 57 different languages and can translate words, sentences and web pages between any of the supported languages. Using the Google Translate AJAX API, Reevoo’s developers created a tool that enables users to translate reviews into their native language.

Since the start of 2011, the ReevooMark™ service – complete with new translation tool – has gone live on Sony’s German, Italian and Dutch sites, with Reevoo already providing tens of thousands of ‘additional’, translated reviews. Reevoo’s ability to deliver ‘international network reviews’ means that hundreds of Sony products in these countries, which would otherwise have had no reviews at go live, have had reviews right from the first day of launch. In Germany, the proportion of products ‘review-less’ at launch was 34%, while in Italy and The Netherlands the figures were 35% and 30% respectively.

In fact, Sony’s German site had 511 local reviews at launch – but 58,395 network reviews. In Italy, the figures were 283 and 45,733, while in The Netherlands it was 375 and 49,100. Expressed differently: of every 114 reviews on the Sony Germany site, 113 were international network reviews made possible by Reevoo’s new software. Across all eight Sony sites on which Reevoo’s solution is deployed, nearly half a million international network reviews have been delivered.

The average number of network reviews for otherwise review-less products on Sony’s German site was more than 24; in Italy, 22; and, in The Netherlands, 41.

Kyle McGinn, chief technology officer for Reevoo, said: “For some time Reevoo has been the only social commerce solution that syndicates reviews of any given product across all partner sites – the ‘network effect’ – and now we have the only solution that delivers an ‘international network effect’.

“On average 78% of Sony products across the eight countries benefit from reviews, with a maximum of 94% – compared with a typical average for a similar business of below 20%. It’s impossible to overstate how important this is: the majority of products are most profitable in the first few weeks of sale, so brands like Sony need reviews quickly.

“Just from a volume perspective, what we’re doing is only possible using machine translation, but equally significantly it maintains the integrity of each and every review. Human translation is necessarily subjective, and risks turning something from a real customer review into a piece of marketing collateral,” he added.

Simon Moutzouris, Social Media Manager at Sony Europe, said: “Sony’s objectives for the roll-out of ratings and reviews across its European sites were for both the deployment and the ongoing function to require as few of our resources as possible, and for all the international sites to have reviews from day one. Because of the way that ReevooMark is deployed, and because Reevoo developed the translation tool, both of these were achieved.”

[ends]

Notes to editors
Try out Reevoo’s tool: visit http://mark.reevoo.com/reevoomark/de-DE/product?sku=DSCHX1.CEE8&retailer=SGM&badge_style=sonyde230by45 and click on ‘Reviews from other countries’ (from top tabs).

FalconStor today announced that Diamond Point International (DPI) has joined its UK reseller channel. DPI is the European distributor of Violin Memory, with which FalconStor announced the FalconStor® NSS SAN Accelerator flash memory-based storage system in March 2010. DPI will resell this solution as well as other solutions from FalconStor’s data protection portfolio.

“Diamond Point is very excited to become a FalconStor partner” said John Vaines, managing director at DPI. “As the main distributor for Violin Memory in Europe, I can see great advantages marrying the two technologies together. The FalconStor NSS gateway gives us a certified connection to a virtualised environment and a level of sophistication that power users of Violin high-performance solid state storage arrays have come to expect.”

Thomas Barrett, regional director for northern Europe, FalconStor, said: “Using FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator, a solid-state layer of 1 percent of a SAN´s total storage capacity will increase overall SAN performance by more than 100 percent. With solid state disk prices falling, we think this is a solution that more and more customers will look at in order to squeeze more value and performance, cost-effectively, from their SANs. Working with DPI is an entirely logical step for both parties, and we look forward to a productive relationship.”

Diamond Point International is a distributor and manufacturer of computer equipment and GPS devices, headquartered in Rochester, Kent, UK, and servicing a mix of OEMs and system integrators.

[ends]

Notes to editors
In March 2010, FalconStor and Violin announced FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator, the first flash-memory-based storage system that simultaneously accelerates reads and writes for mission-critical applications as well as general SAN performance.

FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator leverages solid-state storage as an on-demand dynamic storage tier to accelerate both writes and reads with two key features: FalconStor’s SafeCache™ and HotZone® technology respectively. Either solid-state disks or solid-state memory resources can be dedicated to specific workloads or can be global to the whole storage environment, allowing efficient allocation of the solid-state storage cache. The intelligent algorithms of SafeCache and HotZone features accelerate and protect applications where performance enhancements are needed the most.

Devastating impact of passive reviews on sales conversions clearly revealed

Social commerce company Reevoo today highlighted the perils to retailers and brands of relying solely on ‘passive’ customer review systems. Passive review collection systems – in which anyone may leave a review via a feedback form – generate six times as many extremely low scores of 1/10 in comparison to proactive review collection systems. Since such low scores trigger conversion rates 5x lower than good scores, the inevitable result of passive systems is damage to retailers’ brands and to their bottom lines.

Figures collected by Reevoo show that, compared with systems in which all purchasers of the product are proactively contacted, passive review collection systems have a remarkable negative bias [see accompanying graphs]. Passive reviews generate:
- 6x as many extremely negative scores of 1/10
- 4x as many scores of 5 or less
- 20% fewer consumers giving extremely positive scores of 8, 9 or 10.

The subsequent impact of poor ratings on sales is dramatic. Reevoo’s own statistics – which come from analysis of its records of more than £1bn of transactions every year – show that:
- for products scoring 6 or below, the average conversion rate is 0.6%
- for products scoring over 6 but under 7.5, average conversion rate is 1.9%
- for products scoring 7.5 to 9 the average conversion rate is 3.3%.

Reevoo, Europe’s largest social commerce company, is a strong proponent of proactive review collection. CEO Richard Anson said: “Choosing the right system can mean the difference between a product receiving a glowing 8/10 score, driving sales and improving conversion – or an undeserved score of 4/10 that misleads consumers, damages your brand and costs you sales.

“The confusing polarisation of opinion that you see with passive systems – where readers are confronted with nothing but very positive and very negative reviews – is no help at all to consumers. In fact, consumers are likely to stop paying attention to your reviews altogether, ensuring you won’t see any of the benefits to your conversion and sales figures, and the effort you put into collecting them is wasted. Anything other than a proactive approach is pure folly,” he added.

Passive review systems make no effort to solicit reviews from customers, instead relying on site visitors to leave reviews and with no checks to ensure that ‘reviewers’ are genuine customers of the product. Unfortunately, because anger and disappointment are great motivators, unhappy customers are far more likely to write reviews in passive systems than happy ones, resulting in much lower scores and more negative reviews.

By contrast, proactive review systems like that operated by Reevoo reach out to all customers to request reviews. The benefit of proactively soliciting reviews from customers is two-fold: capturing the opinions of these purchasers makes reviews more reflective of the true range of consumer opinion and removes the inaccurate negative bias results in higher average review scores.

Developing trust in online markets, and ensuring that continuing innovation in the UK’s £50 billion online economy is met with strategic enforcement to tackle emerging or complex fair trading issues, is one of the OFT’s focus areas during 2011-12.

‘Measurement of impact’ a key element of the project

Kitchen appliance manufacturer Breville is to add Reevoo’s ratings and reviews solution to its web site. The new system will replace the previous complex, manual and labour-intensive process of maintaining ‘Buy’ links to Breville distributors across the web; instead, automated, Reevoo-provided links will direct consumers to the best places to purchase Breville products at the best prices, providing a marked improvement to the site’s usability and manageability.

Breville’s solution – ReevooMark™ – will display reviews for Breville products aggregated from more than 120 locations around the web. This will enable visitors to the Breville site to see Reevoo scores and detailed reviews for any Breville product without navigating away from its product page.

James Sizer, communications manager at Breville, says: “Our objective with reviews is to provide some additional peace of mind for customers as they make purchasing decisions. We want reviews to help customers make informed selections and choose the right product for themselves, ensuring satisfaction and encouraging brand loyalty.

“We’re also aiming to increase sales conversion for our retailers, because consumers will be making educated, informed decisions based on trusted, independent reviews from their peers. We also believe that the sharing of reviews via Reevoo will encourage a community aspect on our site. This will help us to understand consumer perception and needs, something we can feed into future product development,” he added.

Measurement is a key part of the project. Breville monitors every click on its site, enabling it to measure how many people decide to look at the Reevoo reviews on each product page and to track where the visitor goes next. “If the visitor then leaves our website via an external link to a retailer, we will consider the Reevoo review to have had a significant impact upon their decision making process,” explains Breville’s James Sizer.

The Breville range comprises approximately 150 products, of which a quarter will have reviews at launch. The long term aim is to feature Reevoo reviews for every product. “Over the next 12 months we’ll be able to measure the impact the Reevoo reviews have had on visitors, and to measure those products with Reevoo reviews against those without,” concludes Sizer.

Breville will also be displaying the Reevoo “Just Buy This One” badge on any products which have been chosen by Reevoo reviewers as ‘Best Buys’. For example, this Breville kettle is presently ‘best kettle’.

[ends]

About Breville
Breville is a leading brand in the small electrical appliance industry and holds the Number 1 position in several product categories including kettles, juicers and sandwich toasters. Breville’s success is driven by innovation and design, as well as a determination to provide great looking, high quality products. Breville and TV chef Antony Worrall Thompson have been working in partnership since 2000 to deliver a range of professional quality, easy-to-use food preparation products for homeowners. Worrall Thompson is host of ITV’s Daily Cooks Challenge and calls upon 20 years of experience at the highest level of cooking, having released best-selling books and owned a number of top UK restaurants, as well as making his name on the top cookery TV shows. Stockist information: 0800 525 089; visit www.breville.co.uk for more information.

About Reevoo
Reevoo (http://www.reevoo.com/b2b) is Europe’s leading provider of social commerce solutions. Reevoo’s social commerce services have been deployed by more than 120 major brands including Sony, BestBuy and Tesco, helping them to achieve average sales uplifts of 18% through boosted conversion rates and increased order values, turning browsers into shoppers.

Reevoo has solicited more than two million independent, impartial reviews from genuine customers. To help consumers make their purchase decision, Reevoo provides easy access to these reviews, displaying more than half a billion reviews to shoppers every month.

Reevoo’s consumer website (http://www.reevoo.com) also presents shoppers with everything they need to decide what to buy, including impartial customer reviews, price comparison, expert advice, product information and voucher deals.

Reevoo’s ratings and reviews solutions will increase conversion rates and improve engagement by providing customers with all necessary buying information on product pages

Bambino Direct, the leading online nursery goods retailer, is to add social commerce platform Reevoo’s reviews and ratings capabilities to its already-successful online store. Buy It Direct, parent company of Bambino Direct, is aiming to increase conversion rates and boost visitor engagement by providing customers with all of the information they need to make a decision to purchase without leaving its site.

Nick Glynne, managing director of Buy It Direct, said: “We aim to continuously improve the experience for customers using our website. By making Reevoo’s ratings and reviews available right there on the product page, we can help potential customers answer the question ‘is this the right product for my child’ without even leaving the page, never mind the site, which should turn more ‘browsers’ into ‘shoppers’.

“The fact that reviews are trusted and independent is important too, because people need to be able to believe what they’re reading when they’re choosing products for their children. We’re aiming for higher conversion and increased sales with Reevoo, and that’s how we’ll be measuring its long-term success,” he added.

Reevoo’s own figures show that retailers and brands embracing reviews and recommendations into their online retail strategy see an average sales uplift of some 18%: 11% due to conversion improvements, 5% to increased average order value and a further 2% to repeat visitor uplift. When reviews are read by consumers, conversion rates increase by 177%, average product purchase value almost doubles, and visitor return rates rise by 13%.

Bambino Direct will be deploying the ReevooMark™ service across all of its product categories, containing thousands of products. The ReevooMark service uses proactive harvesting to solicit reviews from verified product purchasers only, collecting and aggregating them, and then displaying those reviews with their Reevoo scores directly on the product page, for all products.

Richard Anson, CEO and co-founder of Reevoo, said: “The issue of trust is key to consumers everywhere, but rarely can it be more important than when buying something for children or babies because it is an emotional decision. Because all of our reviews are verified, this makes ReevooMark a great fit for Bambino Direct, as we provide customers with trusted opinions. Reviews are key to building trust and enabling consumers to feel confident that they are making the right purchase decision.”

[ends]

About Bambino Direct
Bambino Direct (http://www.bambinodirect.co.uk) is one of the UK’s largest nursery goods specialists. It stocks a huge range of prams, pushchairs, car seats and travel systems from brands such as Bugaboo, Maxi Cosi, Quinny and Britax. Its focus is on providing customers with the best deals available, coupled with great service. Customers may order via the website, over the phone or in its Huddersfield showroom.

About Reevoo
Reevoo (http://www.reevoo.com) aims to give the shopper everything they need to decide what to buy, in an impartial and straightforward environment. Reevoo reviews are independent, impartial and from genuine customers. Reevoo currently delivers over 100 million reviews a month for over 8m unique users. It is Europe’s leading social commerce aggregator working with top retailers and brands (see http://www.reevoo.com/b2b/ or visit our Social Commerce Blog), including TescoDirect, Dixons, Currys, Jessops, Orange, T-mobile, Sony, Kodak, Hotpoint, Sharp and Toshiba.

Provides rapid data recovery to any point in time;
Ensures continuous business operations in event of data loss;
Eliminates the backup window

London-based luxury retailer Radley + Co has deployed FalconStor® Continuous Data Protector (CDP) to provide both disaster recovery (DR) and backup services. As a company with an international supply chain and retail outlets, Radley + Co produces a lot of data, in many different formats and across multiple sites. The company’s primary aim was to replicate data from its data center in London to a remote warehouse location that also serves as its DR site.

With Radley + Co’s London infrastructure almost entirely virtualized on VMware ESX Server, the objective was achieved by deploying a FalconStor® DiskSafe™ agent on each virtualized server. The DiskSafe agent synchronizes data back to a FalconStor CDP appliance which, in turn, replicates to the DR site over a leased line. Snapshots are taken every three hours, enabling roll-back, in three-hour intervals, to up to a week before any disaster occurred or was discovered.

However, the company realised that the same FalconStor solution could also meet its backup requirements. “At one time, we had a sizeable window available in which to do our backups,” says Francis Rodrigues, IT support manager, Radley + Co. “However, once the business expanded into the USA, systems were put to use for far longer periods of time, reducing the backup window to the point where it was almost non-existent. But we realised we could use the snapshots generated by FalconStor CDP to solve the backup problem by employing FalconStor® HyperTrac™ Backup Accelerator technology to archive data onto tape.

“FalconStor CDP with HyperTrac Backup Accelerator capability is a completely non-disruptive solution and the business benefit is clear: we have protected the business against failure caused by data loss, however that data loss might occur,” he added.

Previously, the company’s DR provisioning consisted primarily of backing up to tape, with a strategy of restoring from tape and restarting operations as well as possible. Scenario testing – the results of which inspired the FalconStor project – showed that recovery was time-consuming, required the involvement of expensive consultants, and would involve a loss of operations and data.

Radley + Co is a market leader in handbag and accessory design, with operations in several countries.

[ends]

About FalconStor CDP
FalconStor CDP combines local and remote data protection into a cost-effective, unified, disk-based backup and DR solution. It enables data to be recovered back to the most recent transaction, shrinking recovery point objectives (RPO) to mere seconds. Using sophisticated technologies including application integration, physical-to-virtual (P2V) recovery, and WAN-optimized replication, FalconStor CDP enables businesses to come back online quickly so entire systems can be restored in minutes. Data is protected in its native format and is instantly accessible. Recovery time objectives (RTO) can change from hours to minutes, minimizing downtime and consequent economic impact.

About FalconStor HyperTrac Backup Accelerator
HyperTrac Backup Accelerator technology works in conjunction with FalconStor CDP to increase tape backup speed, eliminate backup windows, and offload processing from application servers. Data can be backed up at any time without disruption, even during peak production hours, making it ideal for organizations requiring tape backup for archiving or regulatory compliance.

Reevoo’s ratings and reviews solution to build community and improve trust

JustShops, a collection of speciality e-commerce pet stores, is to add social commerce to all of its online stores with Reevoo. Social commerce will build greater trust, improve on-site conversion and make its sites more interactive and engaging.

JustShops provide pet owners with handpicked products, ranging from dog beds to rabbit hutches and chicken coops to parrot cages. Robbie Reddy, manager of E-commerce at Forward Internet Group Ltd – parent company of JustShops – said: “Social commerce is about building trust, raising brand awareness and adding value for our consumers. We want to encourage our customers to interact with us and with each other so that users can enjoy a more social, community experience on our sites. Word-of-mouth, peer-to-peer advice and recommendations are incredibly important to consumers, especially when they’re buying something online; we think it’s vital to bring this interactive quality to our sites so that users can get reassurance from other pet owners.

“Going forward, we will also be able to ask customers for their feedback on our sites and service; this information will help us to improve our sites and to provide our customers with the things they really want. We see this as the start of something really good for both our sites and our customers,” he added.

JustShops will measure the success of its social commerce solution by tracking review response rates, monitoring feedback on its products and services and, ultimately, by measuring the uplift in conversion rates that comes from providing impartial reviews to customers.

JustShops will be deploying the Reevoo Mark service across all of its product categories, to help customers make the right purchase decision. The Reevoo Mark service uses proactive harvesting to solicit reviews from verified product purchasers only, collecting and aggregating them, and then displaying reviews and Reevoo scores for all products directly on the product page.

One of the ways in which JustShops customers will be able to interact with each other is via the Reevoo Ask An Owner service, which transforms customer reviews from a broadcast medium to a conversation. Ask an Owner enables would-be purchasers to ask questions of already verified purchasers of that product, and to get a speedy response. Currently 55% of all Ask An Owner questions are answered within 24 hours, and response times can be as little as 12 minutes from question to answer.

Recent research by Reevoo shows that consumers are now more strongly influenced by consumer reviews (92%) than by friends’ or family recommendations (87%). Richard Anson, CEO and co-founder of Reevoo, said: “Everything to do with reviews and recommendations online is built on trust and it is at the heart of everything we do. Our research shows that people now trust Reevoo reviews more than word of mouth recommendations from families and friends; people have learned to trust the wisdom of crowds.

“And the size of the crowd can grow very quickly: as we sign additional retailers in any given market sector, we gather more and more product-review content which is then aggregated and syndicated on the sites of all relevant partners,” he added.

[ends]

Notes to editors
1. Reevoo recently published an eBook entitled ‘The Six Essentials of Social Commerce’, analysing common mistakes and how to avoid them. Reevoo’s eBook can be downloaded from www.reevoo.com/b2b/social-commerce.

2. Research figures quoted refer to a survey conducted by Reevoo in January 2011 among a sample of 736 Reevoo Plus users.

About JustShops
JustShops (http://www.justshops.com) is a collection of highly specialised online shops currently working within the pet vertical sector, designed to let consumers find and buy niche products quickly and easily online. JustShops currently comprises: JustCages.co.uk, JustDogKennels.co.uk, JustDogBeds.Org, UKParrotCages.co.uk, JustHamsters.co.uk, JustDogCages.co.uk, JustGuineaPigHutches.co.uk, JustVivariums.co.uk, JustChickenCoops.co.uk, JustRabbitHutches.co.uk and JustRabbitCages.co.uk.

JustShops is owned by Forward Internet Group Limited (http://www.forward.co.uk), a privately funded collection of internet-based businesses focused on consumer engagement and innovation.

About Reevoo
Reevoo (http://www.reevoo.com) aims to give the shopper everything they need to decide what to buy, in an impartial and straightforward environment. Reevoo reviews are independent, impartial and from genuine customers. Reevoo currently delivers over 70 million reviews a month for over 8m unique users. It is Europe’s leading social commerce aggregator working with top retailers and brands (see http://www.reevoo.com/b2b/ or visit our Social Commerce Blog), including TescoDirect, Dixons, Currys, Jessops, Orange, T-mobile, Sony, Kodak, Hotpoint, Sharp and Toshiba.

Online retailers using social commerce techniques risk inadvertently falling foul of the ASA’s new rules governing user-generated content unless the new guidelines are clarified further, Europe’s leading social commerce company Reevoo warned today. In force from today, the new rules specify that the new regulations only apply if user-generated content is used for marketing purposes – but fail to make clear how the ASA will assess this.

Richard Anson, CEO and co-founder of Reevoo, said: “ We welcome the guidelines as they make it very clear that online content must be ‘legal, decent, honest and true’. In that respect they should strengthen consumer confidence in social commerce, which is vital for the continued growth of these emerging channels. Where the guidelines are not insufficiently explicit is in what constitutes marketing. For example it’s arguable that reviews generated by customers to help others make a buying decision ‘marketing’. It’s here that we feel further clarification on the implications for brands using user generated content for social commerce purposes is needed.”

“Retailers using respected reviews and ratings platforms largely have nothing to worry about because these typically proactively harvest and moderate reviews from verified purchasers only, and are already fully compliant with the ASA requirements. However there are still e-commerce sites with a manual, ’DIY’ approach to reviews, and there are also platforms that are non-compliant, which could catch some retailers out,” he added.

Reevoo’s advice for online retailers aiming to act in accordance with the new guidelines is to follow ‘best-practice’ for reviews, which includes:
- not censoring reviews
- ensuring all reviews are by verified purchasers
- actively preventing fake reviews
- never rewarding reviewers.

All partners of Reevoo’s social commerce platform are already compliant with the new ASA guidelines. All reviews are from verified purchasers so cannot be fake or ‘planted’, are uncensored (except for foul language), and reviewers are not rewarded. Additionally, Reevoo has published an eBook on best practice for social commerce, entitled ‘The Six Essentials of Social Commerce’. The eBook is downloadable from www.reevoo.com/b2b.

[ends]

About Reevoo
Reevoo (http://www.reevoo.com) aims to give the shopper everything they need to decide what to buy, in an impartial and straightforward environment. Reevoo reviews are independent, impartial and from genuine customers. Reevoo currently delivers over 70 million reviews a month for over 8m unique users. It is Europe’s leading social commerce aggregator working with top retailers and brands (see http://www.reevoo.com/b2b/ or visit our Social Commerce Blog), including TescoDirect, Dixons, Currys, Jessops, Orange, T-mobile, Sony, Kodak, Hotpoint, Sharp and Toshiba.