In an actual store, you have to decide how to arrange your merchandise. Should items be arranged by type? Or use? Do running shoes go in the shoe section? Or should all the running equipment be kept together? How do most people shop? What helps them find things easier?

These are all questions a store has to think about in order to keep shoppers as happy as possible. However, everyone is a little different and no matter where items are placed, not everyone will be able to find it with the same ease.

The advantage of being an online store is that we can place products wherever we want. We’re not limited to just one aisle in a store; we can put products in as many areas as we think will be useful. So we can put running shoes with shoes and also with other running equipment. We can put hiking clothing with clothing and also with other hiking equipment. You shouldn’t even need to think about where to find something. Wherever it could be, it should be.

No more “it’s in aisle 3 next to the canned tomatoes”.

Shawn Collins of AffiliateTip wrote a great post today highlighting our success metrics which helped us win the Innovative Publisher of the Year Award.

Take a read to see some interesting stats about our best performing affiliate partners including OneStepAhead, BiggerBras, REI, and Overstock (in that order), our conversion rate, and our performance rank in affiliate networks.

Factoids from Innovative Affiliate Buzzillions.com

There’s a lot of great buzz around consumer reviews lately, as more market researchers and retailers see the benefits of giving customers a public voice. I had a great exchange of ideas recently with Paul M. Banas who writes a top content marketing blog Insight Buzz on the topics of consumer reviews and social elements of online retail.

There have been many studies done on the influence of consumer reviews, such as the Deloitte stats Paul pointed out: “we find the 82% of online shoppers who read reviews say reviews have a direct influence on what they buy, either changing their minds on which product to buy or to provide reassurance on purchasing their original choice.”

This leads into what kind of consumer reviews people trust and why. Jeremiah Owyang delves into this in his post citing a study that shows people trust the opinions of their friends or acquaintances who have used the products themselves most, and the opinions by bloggers least:

So when it comes to consumer reviews, it’s interesting that people trust consumer reviews on a retailer’s site (60%) more than consumer reviews on a content site (52%). Buzzillions is in an interesting mix between the two, since we aggregate consumer reviews from all of our retail clients, yet we are considered a consumer reviews site.

The stats show that consumer generated reviews overall are trusted a lot more than editorial/expert reviews, discussion boards, and especially reviews by bloggers, and Jeremiah emphasizes the need for product manufacturers and marketers to recognize this as a big priority.

A while back I came across a really great post by Joshua Porter about “Why You Shouldn’t be Afraid of Customer Reviews.” A lot of what he discusses is key to our own understanding and strategy around product reviews, and we’ve come to discover ourselves through conversion metrics, case studies, and other findings.

He discusses the common fear that retailers have had about consumer reviews, with the assumption that negative reviews would have a bad impact on their business. He points out how negative reviews are actually very beneficial to a retailers business: “While it’s easy to imagine negative reviews leading to lost sales, they more often lead to increased sales of good products and increased customer happiness resulting from helping people make smart decisions.”

When making a purchase decision, the following are general validation points that a person takes into consideration:

1. Negative reviews

He points out that when a person is already interested in a product, they want to go straight to the negative reviews. The reason being is that a manufacturer site or description would never tell you what’s bad about the product, and people want to see what the worst possible negatives of the product are so that they can make an informed decision. It’s no surprise that our “cons” tags are one of our most popular features.

If a product has really bad reviews, a person will go and find a product that has really positive reviews, and feel all the more confidant that they’re making the right decision. Also, negative reviews help retailers save costs from fewer returns, and manufacturers get great feedback on how to improve their product.

2. Credibility of reviews

In a recent article featuring an interview with our CEO, the author stated “It is often difficult to tell whether a review is coming from a real consumer or if it was placed there inorganically as a marketing tactic.” This is a widespread question people wonder when reading reviews online, given review sites like Epinions who pays people to write reviews.

Our “Verified Buyer” feature was born on trying to solve this issue. We work with our retail partners to send out product review requests to people around 3 weeks after they purchased it. Since it’s sent to the same email address used to make the purchase, we can tag that review as a “Verified Buyer” review.

3. Validation that this product is “right for me.”

People put various levels of emphasis on different factors that shape their purchase decision.:

• The physical features/image
• Star rating/reviews - both positive and negative reviews, and the credibility of those reviews.
• Pros and cons - It’s reassuring to see cons because no product is perfect.
• Best uses - we ask people to tag what the ‘best use’ of the product is.
• Affinity - people always want to know, who is this review written by? Is it someone with the same needs and wants as me? Is it a person who is an expert and knows more about the product than I do? That’s why we ask people during the review writing process what type of user they are. Professional? Beginner? etc. That way, we can roll up the tags, and show people the recommended products by each affinity.
• Price - of course, when a person is weighing the positives vs. the negatives, features and specs and so forth, they take into consideration how much that product is worth spending on.

All of these factors are obviously weighed differently in different peoples’ minds, while some factors might not even matter to some at all. If one of these decision points is weighed really negatively in a persons mind, say for example the “cons” or the price are things the person isn’t satisfied with, that will come in the way of making the final purchase decision.

One of my first projects as an intern was to implement a feature we call Customer Images. The project took a while, partly because it was a new and unfamiliar codebase to myself, partly because the technology didn’t want to play nicely, and partly because some other unforeseeable issues came up. Nonetheless, when the first image came in, I remember everyone in the office being pretty excited. Here it is:

Actually, that image came from Jim in the office, taken on a sub-par camera phone for a mousepad
on Allsop. No shame in bootstrapping the feature, right? That was August of 2006. By now, thousands of customer images have come in, and I’ve graduated from intern status. Fortunately, I will admit that all of the images look better than Jim’s hand in the first customer image. Here’s a recent example from a review on the Nikon D200:

We’d love for you to try out the feature yourself. Perhaps you already own a product from one of the following popular retailers that use Customer Images. If so, share your experience with the product by writing a review and be sure to attach an image while you’re at it!

• Adorama
• Netshops
• Evogear
• Ritz Interactive

This morning I noticed that Mashable covered Buzzillions as well as other product review sites as places to go to do your shopping research. It’s a pretty good article that you should check out - it clearly states what each site is useful for, and why it’s worth going to.

A few of the more well known sites they pointed out were Amazon reviews, CNET, ConsumerReports, and Epinions.

Amazon

They pointed out that since you can sometimes find pages of reviews, Amazon is a good place to check. However, while certain Amazon categories such as books have pages of consumer reviews, many of the other categories are sparse and you might not find very many reviews.

Buzzillions brings to the table more reviews across more products and categories than Amazon. Since we work with a diverse array of online retailers to bring reviews, from Staples to Toys R Us, you’ll find tons of customer written reviews within each category. Who knew you could find hundreds of reviews on men’s underwear?! Well, because of our partnership with FreshPair.com for example, we have plenty of those

CNET

Mashable noted that CNET has a wealth of information from in-house experts reviewing consumer electronics. For the heavy electronics researcher, CNET is a credible place to start.

Buzzillions represents the consumer voice rather than the expert voice. We show you what the crowd is saying about a product, the pros, cons, best uses, and the average rating. Unlike CNET, we have a broader range of consumer electronics, not just the ones meant for the gadget geek with paragraphs of spec data.

ConsumerReports

ConsumerReports is a very old and trustworthy customer review source, although they don’t have a breath of product coverage, and it’s a paid subscription.

Epinions

Epinions has been around for a very long time, and has amalgamated thousands of reviews over time. Two things not pointed out however, is that people are paid to write reviews on Epinions, making the majority of them fluffy and unhelpful. Also, a lot of the reviews are so outdated, that they aren’t really relevant anymore.

The other sites mentioned seemed to be in development stages, except for Retrevo which is a site worth checking out for consumer electronics search, product manuals, and overall community sentiment.

I remember hearing Esther Dyson speak a few years ago where she said something to the effect of:

“The biggest difference between a real-world store and an online store…is the presence of OTHER CUSTOMERS”

…meaning that the informal process of observing other customers “just like them”, seeing what other people are considering, and getting the unsolicited “that’s fabulous…I have the same one and love it” is an extremely powerful influencer.

Well, we’re happy to report, Esther, that your intuition was correct, as evidenced by the fact that the “customer images” viewer is one of the most popular features on our site

[Images from one of our most popular Graco products]

So, who do think is the better salesperson…the happy, cuddly baby or this guy?

This is just another great way that Buzzillions can help customers feel more confident and make better decisions about their online purchases.

Lastly, if you want to get a daily does of interesting, funny, cute, or just plain weird pictures of our “customer-driven salesforce”, subscribe to our RSS feed

…reviews. Yep. Reviews.

The Washington Post has just highlighted a great study done by our parent company PowerReviews that talks about how users read reviews to feel more confident in the purchase process. Reading reviews also leads to the following conditions:

1. laughing -
2. screaming -
3. living longer -

Don’t get screwed when you’re buying online, consult our 2 million reviews here on Buzzillions.

(props to our whiz moderators for finding such emotionally effusive reviews)

Our cycling category on Buzzillions is one of our most populated, with over 21,857 consumer reviews across 7220 cycling products. We get these consumer written reviews directly from top cycling retail clients like Trek , Performance Bike, REI , SierraTradingPost , and so forth. You can see our complete list of review partners on our PowerReviews client page .

The people who purchase and review products on our clients’ sites are called Verified Buyers (we verify that they actually purchased the product they’re reviewing) .

Also, when people write a review on say a mountain bike they just purchased, we ask them what kind of cyclist they are - are you a competitive cyclist? A casual/recreational cyclist? and so on. This way, we can aggregate this data and provide recommendations for people based on their cycling affinity :

Once you’ve selected an affinity, for instance “Competitive cyclist ,” you can see that you’ve now narrowed down to 17 mountain bikes recommended by competitive cyclists, out of a total of 2269 mountain bikes.

When you go onto a product page, you can see the product review summary, and read the individual reviews as well.

You can find recommendations for most cycling products including:

Sometimes I wonder how Google is still the “best” search engine out there.

Because we are a “product reviews” site, we naturally track where we show up in Google for key terms. “product reviews ” is the main term…and we are thrilled to know that we are #7 (3 months ago, we were #50 or so), which is a great accomplishment and an indication of our growing “authority” in this space.

What baffles me, however, is the #5 result, “Product Reviews.net”

I can certainly see why Epinions, CNET, etc are up there. They are old, credible and popular sites. But product-reviews.net seems to me more of a “adsense parasite” site than anything else. To add insult to injury, their home page has a huge link to Buzzillions.com via an adsense ad.

You would think that Google would be able to figure out that these sites that just churn adsense clicks and reduce their relevance. And, I think it would remove  a lot of the incentive to game the system.

I’m sure that we are not the only ones to face this problem…and I’m optimistic that other sites like Mahalo and others can find a way to improve search.