PowerReviews portal — customer reviews by keywords and ratings

By Vivek Puri | October 31st, 2006 at 12:29 am ET         

PowerReviews has been working on developing a new way for organize customer reviews. Instead of using the regular search box to locate products and then checking out reviews, PowerReviews organizes information around words and phrases created by consumers. So if you want to search for digital cameras at PowerReviews sneakpeek portal, you can jump right onto the Digital Cameras category and start refining your results by the pros and best uses that suit you needs. You can quickly come up with a result set which contains digital cameras that have “Great Resolution” and are also “Rugged”. These results can further be narrowed down by sub-categories, brands, and product rating to come up with the most suitable product.

I think this is an amazing new way to research products online. Usually when we are looking for a particular product type all we have in mind is a broad set of features we need.  We don’t really have a list of products and models to choose from. To come up with that list we need to consult our family and friends, and search on Amazon or related sites for reviews of these items. PowerReviews drastically reduces the times required to come with a list which has the product, and models, having the features you require.

For each product review, PowerReviews also indicates if the reviews have been written by a verified purchaser. So how does PowerReviews know whether the reviewer really purchased the product? Well, for that PowerReviews banks on it’s original business model. PowerReviews currently provides customer reviews services to multi-channel retailers. Instead of retailers going out and building their own product review and rating  system, PowerReviews offers them its enterprise-class review service. This service, which is provided for free by PowerReviews, helps attract more customers through the PowerReviews aggregated review network. Retailers are easily able to integrate the customer reviews as a fully managed service from PowerReviews, with no downtime. Current PowerReviews customers include TicketsNow, Adorama, Abt Electronics, Sam Ash, and Mountain Gear.

While the reviews for a particular product are available to the participating retailers, they are stored at the PowerReviews severs(unless retailer chooses a PowerReviews stand-alone install). As PowerReviews works on building its retailer network, they are also working on building this customer review portal, which will take advantage of the customer review data collected.

I don’t know how quickly the idea will click with the consumers, but it does look promising. PowerReviews co-founders Andy Chen and Robert Chea, who have more than a decade of experience in building products in the web-domain, will make sure that the plan works. Andy and Robert had co-founded Fogdog.com in 1995 and went public in 1999. For this venture, PowerReviews team had raised $6.25 million in funding from Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards in February 2006.

Links:
PowerReviews Sneakpeek
PowerReviews

Tags: StartupSquad - Shopping - Web-20 - Search