Jay Shaffer, the VP of Marketing for our partner PowerReviews, wrote an interesting post last week about their competitor Bazaarvoice (who is also one of our partners). It’s interesting because Jay is openly accusing Bazaarvoice of trying to copy some of the PowerReviews capabilities. It’s a very aggressive approach to this sort of problem.

While not taking sides in this issue (as they are both our partners), we typically try not to be so openly critical of our competitors in these situatations because we don’t want to highlight them or tell them what they’re doing wrong.

As to the validity of what Jay is saying - I’ll let you read his post and talk to each company to decide for yourself. Because they’re both partners of ours I’ll remain neutral. We do have customers who are happy with the service from each of these companies. As far as I know they are the only vendors out there who will help you implement reviews on your site (let me know if I’m wrong). We have some customers who implement reviews themselves - as a rule I would recommend against this - the experts will do a better job (it applies to site search as well - but I’m biased about that). However I do recommend having reviews on your site - there are many benefits.

I doubt Bazaarvoice will respond directly - they probably don’t want to have a public slinging match.

This entry was posted by Shaun Ryan on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 10:36 am and is filed under eCommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.