Both Barrels Communications Ltd

Kia Motors UK is moving to adapt to the customer purchase process of today’s car buyers with a proactive, verified review collection system. The car company has chosen Reevoo, one of the world’s top social commerce companies, to provide the verified, authentic reviews and other social features now expected by car buyers. Latest research shows that the purchase experience for car buyers is increasingly ‘social’, with 59% of consumers always or often reading reviews before buying.

The car-buying process has changed hugely in recent years. It is now highly social and involves recommendations or car reviews from friends, family and ‘trusted strangers’. But for today’s buyers, verified reviews carry significantly more credibility and weight than unverified reviews – where the motivation for writing a review or even ownership of the vehicle may be open to question.

Lawrence Hamilton, General Manager Marketing Communications for Kia, said: “The typical 2012 car buyer is very internet-savvy, and knows there’s a lot of information online to help them choose their next car. But they will select – and value – trusted information.”

“Visitors to kia.co.uk will be reassured that they are reading the opinions of real people by the presence of the ‘Reevoo Mark’ displayed alongside each and every review. Knowing that the content they are reading is from verified vehicle owners will boost customer confidence in the Kia brand, give them the information they want and need, and deliver the purchase experience they expect,” he explained.

Reevoo’s portfolio of managed solutions will initially be deployed on kia.co.uk, with plans in place to extend the service to dealer sites later on. This solution includes:

Recent research by Reevoo shows the extent to which consumers rely on recommendations and reviews before they decide which car to buy. Friends’ recommendations are the most important influence on someone deciding what to buy, ranked as important by 74%; the importance of reviews written by strangers is 65%. 59% of consumers always or often read reviews before buying a car.

“With a majority of car buyers turning to reviews and recommendations before making a decision on which car to buy, it’s clear that the automotive industry must embrace social commerce in full,” said Richard Anson, founder and chief executive of Reevoo. “A proactive collection system, where all content is from verified owners and no content is censored or modified in any way, is the only credible system for building real customer trust – and it’s trust in reviews that leads to increased sales.”

Notes to editors
Research was carried out on behalf of Reevoo by Fly Research in September 2011 (n>1000).

Award-winning car dealership Luscombe Suzuki has signed a deal with social commerce company social commerce company. Reevoo for the implementation of Reevoo’s “verified owner” review service. The Leeds-based dealership aims to drive incremental showroom sales by enabling potential customers to read reviews of the cars – new and used – and of the dealership itself, online.

Luscombe Suzuki proprietor Robin Luscombe puts great store in customer service as a selling point. He said: “This dealership provides outstanding service, and we know that the Suzuki cars we sell are incredibly well built and reliable. The most credible way to communicate both of these things is to enable our existing customers to tell potential customers about us and our cars, through the medium of verified owner reviews.”

Richard Anson, Reevoo founder and chief executive, added: “To be of real value to today’s customer, it’s really important that such reviews are sourced, managed and published by a recognised and trusted third party – so we’re delighted that Luscombe Suzuki is going to be working with Reevoo to fulfil those criteria. Whether for major publishing businesses like What Car? or Motors.co.uk, or a regional dealership like Luscombe Suzuki, Reevoo adds real value and can drive substantial additional sales.”

Reevoo will be providing a range of functionality from its market-leading portfolio of social commerce solutions, including:

Luscombe Suzuki will also enjoy improved search engine rankings, since unique user-generated content – such as reviews and customer Q&As – is highly valued by search engines. Improved ‘natural search’ results will make the company’s online presence more profitable and cost-effective.

Luscombe Suzuki was voted Suzuki Dealer of the Year 2011 and also received Motor Trader’s New Dealership of the Year award in 2011.

About Reevoo
Reevoo (http://b2b.reevoo.com) is a world-leading provider of social commerce solutions. Reevoo has been deployed by more than 150 major brands including Sony, Tesco, Orange, Octopus Travel, Motors.co.uk 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 3,000,000 pieces of independent, impartial social content from genuine customers. To help consumers make their purchase decision, Reevoo provides easy access to this content more than 750m times every month to shoppers across the Reevoo network.

Verified owner reviews, in greater quantity, more quickly

What Car?, the UK’s leading car buyer’s guide, is to partner with social commerce company Reevoo as part of its ongoing strategy to consolidate its position as the most authoritative car buyer’s site on the web. The agreement will see Reevoo, which specialises in the collection and publication of reviews from verified purchasers, provide What Car? with an increased volume of review content, more quickly. The deal with What Car? is Reevoo’s first partnership in the automotive sector.

Andrew Golby, publishing director at What Car?, said: “What Car? is Britain’s biggest and best car buyer’s guide, and providing informative reviews is fundamental both to what we do and how we do it. Partnering with Reevoo will enable us to deliver larger volumes of trusted, verified, quality, consumer reviews, providing a representative sample of opinion and covering all models of cars on sale in the UK, including for new vehicles, more quickly than ever before.

“Combined, these factors will help to ensure that we continue to be the most informative and interesting destination on the web for car buyers,” he added.

Richard Anson, Reevoo’s founder and CEO, said: “Recent research shows that 59% of consumers always or often read reviews before buying a car. As such the automotive sector clearly needs to deliver trusted reviews to its consumers, to increase confidence in the car buying process.

“And, with recent guidelines from the Advertising Standards Authority focusing on the authenticity of reviews, it’s vital that any review system is entirely transparent in providing reviews from verified owners of the car they are reviewing. What Car? is passionate about providing its readers with all of the information they need to make the right choice of car for them and Reevoo verified reviews will be a key part of this going forward,” he explained.

Notes to editors
For more information, or to arrange an interview with What Car? Publishing Director Andrew Golby (ISDN available), please contact Karen Parry, 020 8267 5553, karen.parry@haymarket.com or karen@prandmediaworks.com

Reevoo Launch delivers reviews from day one of launch without compromising integrity and authenticity of the reviews process

Black & Decker®, one of the world’s largest producers of power tools and accessories, has solved the conundrum of how to deliver launch day reviews for its flagship eVo Multi-tool product. Reevoo Launch has enabled Black & Decker® to solicit authentic consumer reviews of the tool before it was widely available, giving the product a sales boost in the days and weeks immediately following its launch.

Sourcing consumer reviews pre-launch is increasingly vital because almost nine out of ten consumers – 88% – will buy a new product only after reading reviews, yet the margin on some types of product decreases rapidly in the weeks and months after launch. This accessibility of reviews on launch day is therefore critical for creating the maximum impact from social commerce and for maximising revenue.

Reevoo solicits reviews ahead of a launch by working with the partner or brand to offer engaged customers a product in return for an honest review. For absolute transparency, this process is made clear to readers above each and every review collected in this way.

Daniel Kennedy, Digital Services Manager EMEA for Stanley Black & Decker Inc., said: “The early customer advocacy that Reevoo Launch makes possible is of real benefit to us. We wanted to reassure consumers that although the new eVo Multi-tool combines numerous individual tools it still maintains the level of quality that our consumers have come to expect from Black & Decker.

“Although we are remote from the actual sale to a consumer, our research and analytics show that we are now being included in the purchase process. What’s more, using Reevoo Launch has been a Black & Decker brand-building activity in itself,” he added.

Richard Anson, co-founder and CEO of Reevoo, said: “Reevoo Launch enables our customers to protect their margins and sell while their products are hottest. It also means getting a head start on competitors – this runs across all marketing channels as review content is syndicated instantly to all marketing campaigns. With user-generated content being the SEO equivalent of gold dust, it’s easy to see why Black & Decker is so pleased with its deployment of Reevoo Launch.”

The Reevoo-collected reviews are displayed across nine of Black & Decker’s international sites using automated translations to ensure maximum value is extracted from every review.

Notes to editors
- The nine markets across which Black & Decker has deployed Reevoo Launch are: UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Greece and Belgium (NL) and Belgium (FR).
- Data regarding shoppers’ tendency to wait for reviews before purchasing comes from a Fly Research Study conducted in September 2011, which asked 1,016 nationally representative UK consumers about their shopping behaviour and usage of social commerce tools.
- For more information about Reevoo Launch, see: http://b2b.reevoo.com/products/launch

Social commerce solutions are delivering substantial, measurable business benefits despite the current economic situation, figures show. Reevoo partner Jessops reports that social commerce tools have driven conversion rates up by 10 to 15% and that the level of business conducted online has increased from 8% to 28% in just 18 months. Another partner, Dixons Retail, reports that customer satisfaction with its ecommerce site has improved by 6% in the last nine months alone thanks to its social commerce-enabled site.

Such figures, against a backdrop of challenging economic conditions, are commonplace among retailers and brands that are successfully adjusting to changing consumer purchasing behaviour, according to Richard Anson, founder and CEO of social commerce company Reevoo and one of Europe’s pre-eminent social commerce experts.

“Over the past five years the consumer purchase journey has changed hugely; we now refer to it as the social purchase journey. People interact with each other, with brands, and with social content via the web, mobile, Facebook and in-store for example. But the critical fact to grasp is that there is no single, controllable journey; customers can choose to use any channel, at any point in their decision-making, and at any time,” he said.

“This change brings a huge opportunity for brands to inject trust, and trusted social content, at all touchpoints, in order to influence consumers in a trusted, transparent manner. Retailers like Jessops and Dixons Retail, which are embracing the social purchase journey, are enjoying positive benefits even in these difficult times – and it’s Reevoo’s mission to bring these benefits to as many retailers and brands as we can,” he added.

Aiming to make sense of the consumers’ new shopping habits for hard-pressed retailers, Reevoo has published a new ebook detailing the intricacies of the new social purchase journey. The ebook is freely available [registration required] from the Reevoo website: http://b2b.reevoo.com/social-purchase-journey

Esther Soto, Head of Ecommerce Strategy at Dixons Retail, said: “Customer decision making and purchasing has changed, in three main ways. First: our customers are being much more careful when they purchase a product, and they’re researching much more than they used to do. Secondly, the traditional concept of a shopping journey doesn’t really exist anymore. What [our customers] have now is a number of touch points, and they interact with us when and how it suits them. On top of this, mobile and other alternative channels have just added a layer of complexity.”

Chris Scott, eBusiness Marketing Manager (Northern Europe), describes how Toshiba – a brand, rather than a retailer – has responded to the changing customer purchase journey. “What we’ve seen over the last 18 months is that customers are expecting all product information in one location. We’ve responded to this change in the customer journey by providing shoppers with all of the information they need to make a purchasing decision – reviews, ask-an-owner, videos and retailer links – to make the customer’s life easier. It’s about brand engagement pre-purchase. The result is that consumers stay on pages longer and propensity to buy has increased. We’re also seeing mobile becoming increasingly important: over the next two years, we believe 50 – 60% of our users will be on mobile devices.”

Sean Emmett, Marketing and Ecommerce Director at Jessops, said: “People used to use Jessops to research products, but didn’t always go on to buy from us. We’ve increased the amount of advice, reviews, and content on our site so that when customers do their research at Jessops they then go on to actually purchase either online, or through our stores. The big advantage for Jessops is that a lot of customers still prefer to actually come in store to make the final purchase: we find that over 60% of our orders are actually researched and placed online, and then collected in store. Providing the best multi-channel experience is great for Jessops because it allows us to continue their journey, adding further advice and value to the customer when they pick their camera up from our stores.”

Dixons Retail’s Esther Soto says that Dixons will be keeping its foot on the pedal in terms of staying ahead of the game with social commerce: “The market continues to evolve, so we need to be agile and nimble enough to adjust to what our customers are demanding from us at any given time. We will continue to partner with experts like Reevoo to make our customer experience as enjoyable and effective as possible.”

Notes to editors
1. For more extensive quotes from Dixons Retail, Jessops and Toshiba, watch this video (5 minutes)
2. For images that help to illustrate the social purchase journey, see below.
3. Reevoo’s freely available ebook on the social purchase journey contains many more quotes which may be reproduced, in context and with suitable reference. Quotes include:
- “The reality is that just like most other things in life, there is no one thing that makes something happen. People use a variety of methods to make decisions using a combination of tools and resources.” – Frank Reed, Marketing Pilgrim
- “Customers have been providing user-generated content for a decade through reviews, forum posts, uploading photos, etc. Sharing tools now enable more eyeballs to see this fab content, and, even better, the eyeballs know the fingers who created the content.” – Linda Bustos, Get Elastic
- “In highly complex sales situations, participants in the buying process come and go. They may enter the process at the stage of needs specification, only to depart when alternatives are evaluated, or they may participate only when demonstrations are given, for example.” – Dr Jeff Tanner, MyCustomer

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).

‘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’.

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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.

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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.