Bazaarvoice Lets Brands Push Ratings to E-Commerce Partners

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A new solution from Bazaarvoice allows manufacturers to push reviews and other content to a merchant's store. The company, best known for its Ratings and Reviews product, says the new offering -- called BrandVoice -- increases the number of reviews, and ultimately conversions, a product can garner online.

That's been the experience of Kingston, a manufacturer of digital memory products that was among the first brands to test BrandVoice. The company began using Bazaarvoice's flagship Ratings & Reviews product at Kingston.com early this year. Last month it began syndicating that user-generated content to Office Depot, a retail client of Bazaarvoice, using the BrandVoice system. In October, after content was syndicated, the overall conversion rate for Kingston products increased by 92 percent, and products with more than six reviews saw a 110 percent conversion rate increase.

"The results are much more likely to be featured [by Office Depot]. They like to choose products that have lots more reviews," said Kingston's Mark Leathem, director of corporate marketing and business development.

BrandVoice is only as powerful as Bazaarvoice's e-commerce partner network, Leathem points out. "With BrandVoice, what [Bazaarvoice] needs to do is syndicate to more e-tailers," he said. "The more e-tailers they have the more value it is to us."

Other Bazaarvoice products include Stories, which brands can use to invite consumers to share their personal experience with a product, and Answers, which allows consumers to ask and answer questions about a particular product. Bazaarvoice has a total of 290 clients across all of its offerings.

Adding user-generated content is a boon for retailers and manufacturers, according to Decker. "What we see is that as our retailers grow as they get more reviews it drives conversion. If you think about the SEO impact, more content equals more searchability," Decker said.