A small California based start-up has recently made appearance with a sneak peek at their soon to be shopping portal full of consumer product reviews. Earlier this year this same company started offering product reviews outsourcing to big and small retailers for free. That is right, they offer service that such companies as BazaarVoice.com are charging thousands for. How is it possible? Here is their story on it. In a nutshell:
- PowerReviews will use the reviews they collect from their clients customers to build their own shopping web site and will monetize it via affiliated sales commission.
- PowerReviews will license the technology to businesses who themselves want to maintain the product reviews database.
The idea sounds great and PowerReviews team is working hard to get into the market. Among other things, they are patenting a number of leading edge technologies to make use of their services by retailers as easy as possible. The real question is, as a portal will they be able to compete with the behemoths like Epinions and Amazon who currently dominate the market? The answer to this question ultimately defines if they stay afloat 2 years from now or not.
My personal opinion is that they have a very good shot at it. Unlike TheFind – one of the price comparison engines I reviewed earlier – PowerReviews doesn’t sacrifice the quality of the information they provide by taking a different approach to monetizing their idea. Their business model looks sound and they should be able to pull it off.
0 Responses to “PowerReviews – Web 2.0 approach to Product Reviews”