This week in e-commerce news, Bazaarvoice offers a way for shoppers to share their stories by posting them at your Web store, Wigix makes it easier for community members to make money without selling at the site, Miva Merchant bolsters compliance with payment card industry laws and RatePoint updates features of its e-mail marketing service.
Tell Me a Story
Bazaarvoice just announced the launch of Bazaarvoice Stories, a new product that lets e-tailers create an online destination within their own site where customers and visitors share their real-life experiences related to a product, service, or brand, including how and why they purchased and what happened next. As a result, says the company, merchants can increase brand involvement and interaction. Additionally, they can attract new visitors with the user-generated content, which will appeal to them on an emotional level, according to the company. Key benefits of Bazaarvoice Stories outlined in a company statement include:
Fast Implementation: Companies can be live on Bazaarvoice Stories within 30 days. The hosted implementation and full API suite provide a range of high-impact functionality including: photo and video upload, client-specific user tags, user attribute questions for segmenting, and reader helpfulness voting to identify and promote the best stories.
Customizable Deployment: Built on the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Platform, Bazaarvoice Stories is a fully customizable solution that integrates seamlessly within an existing Web site. Styling and input options are based on site design and preference and can be easily restyled for holiday or themed promotions.
Shout It!: With a single click, contributors and visitors can easily share stories through their favorite social network or bookmarking site, such as Digg, del.i.cious, or Facebook.
Search-Optimized Landing Pages: Search-optimized landing pages allow companies to fully leverage the keyword-rich UGC to increase natural search rankings and maximize traffic generation.
Two-Tier Content Moderation: All content is human-moderated for appropriateness and relevancy, plus tagged for rich analytics.
Client Support: Bazaarvoice Stories clients receive personalized account support, as well as promotional techniques and best practices to maximize the return on their investment.
Advanced Analytics: Sophisticated tools help mine and analyze all content so e-tailers can devise appropriate marketing and management strategies.
Partner Integrations: The Bazaarvoice Radius partner program helps integration through APIs and feeds to e-mail, search and navigation personalization partners.
"Forrester Research recently predicted that engaging website visitors — not just informing them — is the next critical metric for marketers," Brett Hurt, founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice, said in a statement. "We are very excited to introduce Stories, to help brands achieve this goal by getting to the heart of their brand and product experiences. With Stories, companies can now organically broadcast their brand through authentic content in which contributors have an ownership stake."
John McCullough, director of marketing at James Avery, a 54-year-old jeweler that recently created a Bazaarvoice Stories microsite, says he's a fan of the new marketing plan. "For years, many of our customers have shared with us that James Avery designs have marked special occasions and events in their lives," he said in a statement. "Bazaarvoice Stories allow us to present a collection of these inspiring narratives organized by the special events in our customers' lives... these stories are quite powerful and moving. It gets to the core values of our brand and helps create a community of loyal James Avery clients whose enthusiasm and passion is obvious while providing us the opportunity to also connect with new visitors an emotional level."
Wigix Adds Category Expert Tools
Wigix , a new online marketplace styled after the price quoting of the NASDAQ and being touted as an alternative to eBay, announced it now has approximately 1 million unique catalog items, and to manage the influx of merchandise, rolled out a program to help community members (called Category Experts orCEs) who oversee product categories.
Wigix's Certification of Category Experts (CCE) includes training and testing of the CEW (Category Expert Workbench) tool-set to help CEs perfect the organization of the items, correct information on the item detail page, effectively answer item queries, manage their category communities and provide insight to the greater Wigix community, the company said in a statement.
While the site certainly lets people conduct sales transactions, Wigix community members have three ways to earn money without even selling at the site. These include:
Category Expert: Submit and manage unique item listings from in an entire category and get compensated by receiving 1 percent of that category's revenue (both advertising and transaction fees).
Homesteaders: Submit a new item to a category and earn 5 percent of that item's revenues (both advertising and transaction fees).
Referral: Use your network of contacts to bring a new Homesteader to Wigix and you can get compensated for first-, second- and third-generation referrals, paying 4, 2 and 1 percent, respectively, of any revenue (both advertising and transaction fees) made by your referral's homestead items.
Miva Merchant Boosts PCI Compliance
Miva Merchant, a supplier of e-commerce software and services to small and medium-sized businesses, joined with ControlScan, a provider of Payment Card Industry(PCI) compliance and e-commerce security solutions, to help its merchants meet mandatory requirements set forth by the PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC).
Miva Merchant customers will have access to ControlScan's PCI compliance solution, which includes on-demand security scanning and the PCI Self Assessment Questionnaire. These merchants can also take advantage of ControlScan's array of security certification seals, according to the company.
RatePoint's What You See is What You Get
RatePoint, a company specializing in customer feedback management and e-mail marketing, just announced some new tools have been added to its services. E-mail marketing enhancements include the ability for Web shop owners to edit content, images and links through a new "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) editor that does not require knowledge of HTML coding. Images and text can be dragged and dropped into place. Other new features include new e-mail templates that can be used to create over 140 different e-mail design combinations, enhanced list-management capabilities and a new dashboard for tracking and reporting e-mail campaign metrics.
Michael Cohn, owner of 4x4 Rock Shop, online retailer of high performance 4x4 and import parts and accessories, says he is using RatePoint's services successfully. "We've used RatePoint for over a year and have seen tremendous improvement in customer satisfaction, as well as a significant increase in the number of new customers as a result of promoting our reviews online," he said in a statement. "With RatePoint's e-mail marketing tools it's very easy to stay connected to our customers with newsletters, special offers and promotions that help us drive more repeat business and maintain a loyal customer base."
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