PowerReviews, a provider of customer review and social commerce solutions, announced that it is partnering with Shopify to provide easy access to PowerReviews Express to Shopify’s more than 5,000 online retailers.

PowerReviews Express is an award-winning customer reviews solution designed specifically for small and medium-sized retailers.  In fact, PowerReviews Express was the recipient of a Small Business Computing 2009 Excellence in Technology Award (See the E-commerce Winners here).

Darby Williams, product manager for PowerReviews, said that they see a dramatic shift in how people make decisions when they buy online.  Product reviews, according to Williams, are no longer just a nice-to-have feature, but something customers expect you to have. “The last holiday season showed that 81 percent of all purchases included customers reading reviews. By not offering on-site product reviews, it reduces your sales potential,” said Williams.

Key benefits for Shopify retailers include:

• A quick and easy installation process.  Shopify retailers can launch product reviews within minutes.
• Rapid (and automated) review collection. PowerReviews sends an e-mail to Shopify’s customers 21 days after purchase, asking them to submit a review. The result is a ten times higher response when compared to having a “Write-a-Review” link on a product page. 

PowerReviews Express Offers Features for SMBs

If you want to add user-generated reviews to product pages but don’t have the time to moderate the content, PowerReviews can handle that task for you as an additional service.  A PowerReviews moderator reads each customer-submitted product review and screens it for inflammatory and non-product-related content. This saves retailers time and also ensures quality user-generated content.

Other features include:

• Review Snapshot: an at-a-glance review summary that streamlines the research process for consumers.
• Verified Buyer: a feature that builds consumer confidence with more credible reviews.
• SEO Mini-site: a search-engine optimized version of the reviews that drives a significant increase in natural search traffic to a retailer’s site.
• Affinity Views: lets consumers find reviews from people just like them.

The SEO Perks of User Reviews

Williams pointed out another benefit PowerReviews offers e-tailers. It adds customer reviews directly to the product pages, which can help you get a higher natural search placement on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Since Google and other search engines like fresh content, these user reviews can help boost rank for some words and phrases that customers use in the product review.  The PowerReviews’ SEO Mini-site feature offers a search-engine-optimized version of user-product reviews to help increase the natural search traffic to a retailer’s site.

Pricing and Availability

PowerReviews Express is now available for Shopify merchants.  Retailers who host their own shopping site can also integrate PowerReviews Express in three basic steps.  You simply need to provide product information, choose one of 2,500 review forms provided by PowerReviews, and then add some basic Java code to the site. 

Pricing for PowerReviews Express starts at $80 per month.

Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG.