I’m really impressed with Pluribo, a Firefox plug-in that summarizes Amazon reviews (currently only for select categories).

How Pluribo Works

In a nutshell, Pluribo collects millions of reviews from Amazon and other review sources, scanning the text and pulling out phrases that express consumer opinions like “easy to install,” or “I was disappointed by the battery life” using natural language data mining. Pluribo calls this “sentiment analysis” and even assigns a numerical score to various features about a product, so long as there are enough reviews on each feature to be statistically significant. Not only that, the algorithm favors reviews that have been voted more “helpful” by other customers and filters poorly voted and redundant reviews.

Here’s an example of a Pluribo summary on Amazon:

Despite reservations with the low battery life and size, reviewers enjoy the video mode, sharp zoom, and large display. If you don’t care about the battery life and size, it’s a decent option.

Pluribo compares extracted feature scores for a product against others in its category and presents them in a visual way:

And hovering over the underlined features in the summary produces something like this:

Here’s a bit more about Pluribo, the company. If you have the budget, you might want to contact them about developing similar technology for your site’s reviews or product descriptions? Hopefully they will release an API - I’d love to see what kind of tools can be built from natural language data mining and summarization technologies!

Patent-pending summary technology

Pluribo faces the challenge of continuously aggregating a massive quantity of opinions, mining their textual content, extracting key statistical trends, and summarizing the results in natural language. What’s more, we are committed to doing this in a fully automated way, which reduces human bias and allows for greater speed and scale.

To meet this end-to-end challenge, we developed a novel suite of natural language data mining and summarization techniques. These techniques are encapsulated in our summary engine, and are covered under a U.S. patent application. Given the right data, the summary engine can rapidly summarize opinions on nearly any topic. At present, we are applying the summary engine mainly to product review data from Amazon.com. If there is demand, we may soon open our API to developers working in other topic areas.

Make sure to check into Get Elastic on Monday, I’ll be posting more about customer reviews and how to optimize them for usability and conversion. Don’t miss it!

A while back I blogged about a Webinar I attended presented by Lauren Freedman of The Etailing Group and Power Reviews in which Power Reviews’ Jay Schaffer provided some tips and examples from retailers on how to ask for customer reviews post-purchase.

I was recently forwarded this email from Amazon calling for customer reviews - not just textual, but customer photo and video reviews.

Dear {customer},
Thank you for your recent purchase from Amazon.com.

We invite you to submit a review for the product you purchased or share an image that would benefit other customers. Your input will help customers choose the best products on Amazon.com.

It’s easy to submit a review–just click the Review this product button next to the product.

Flip Video Ultra Series Camcorder, 60-Minutes (Black) (Purchased on 06/03/2008)
by Pure Digital

…or share an image.

New on Amazon! Grab your video camera or webcam and add video to your customer review. Click on ‘Review this product’ above to upload a video or find a different product to review.

Need help?

If clicking the button above doesn’t work, you can review your product by following these simple steps:

Go to Amazon.com and navigate to the product.
In the “Customer Reviews” section, click the “Create your own review” button.

We hope you found this message to be useful. However, if you’d rather not receive future e-mails of this sort from Amazon.com, please opt-out here.

Please note that product prices and availability are limited time offers and are subject to change. Prices and availability were accurate at the time this newsletter was sent; however, they may differ from those you see when you visit Amazon.com.

(c) 2008 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Amazon, Amazon.com and the Amazon.com logo and 1-Click are registered trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.

Amazon.com, 1200 12th Ave. S., Suite 1200, Seattle, WA 98144-2734.

Reference 9702130

Please note that this message was sent to the following e-mail address: emailaddress@emailservice.com

Here’s what Amazon does right:

• Thank customer for the purchase.

• Mention submitting a review benefits fellow customers.
• Give clear directions how to participate.
• Give options - text, images or video.
• Show an image of the product to jog the memory.
• Offer a plan B if the link malfunctions for whatever reason.
• Offer an opt-out of future review requests.
• Remind customers that prices are subject to change, so they don’t feel jilted when the item is $5 cheaper than when they bought it.

Earlier this week we discussed why enlarged images, alternate product views and showing products in context can help conversion.

But what about “user generated images” (or the friendlier term “customer submitted photos”)? Are they just social media / Web 2.0 hype or do they really improve customer experience?

Customer images may be used to help sell product (like customer reviews complement product descriptions) or just build community (if the retailer has a community section). Either way, customer submitted photos have their challenges:

• Image quality can vary from submission to submission. Dark or fuzzy images really don’t add value and can hurt the consistency and professionalism of your site.

• Attracting images can be a challenge - only a small percentage of customers will take the time to create a picture and send it to you.
• Moderating images for appropriateness and relevance takes extra time.

Let’s look at some examples of how online retailers are using customer submitted photos:

Product Pages

You may have noticed that Amazon shows customer images along with its own product images:

You can roll over the thumbnails to view larger versions and even read notes that users have left on them:

This is helpful as a customer review - the color on the web is not the color in the box.

Customer Reviews

Power Reviews allows photo attachments to reviews, as spotted on Uncommon Goods:

(Sometimes customers pick useless tags…)

What I like about this approach is it’s seamless. Good review content is not separated into text vs. image reviews. On Amazon, a very helpful tip like the color is actually more mint than neon green could be missed unless you read reviews AND view pictures. Plus, it’s less programming work when your reviews product has image upload already available.

Customer Testimonials

Modern Line Furniture has a testimonials page with customer images linked to from the home page (though the call-to-action gets a bit lost in the home page clutter).

The testimonials page links through to the product pages for items featured in the room. Yay! There’s hope for a transaction!

Community / Resource Section

Some retailers actually have a community component to their e-stores, like David’s Bridal. Customers can upload pictures from their weddings, and brides-to-be can surf them to get inspiration for dress styles and color schemes.

While this is a good idea, the community section is kind of a dead end — there is no link back to products or tools that facilitate a purchase decision like shop-by-color.

Alternative Energy Store has a similar community gallery, but without links to products or buying guides, it’s not very helpful.

With links to products, the gallery could be a social tool for product discovery. I just haven’t come across a retailer who’s doing that well (community gallery that aids shopping). Have you? Please share your find in the comments.

We talk about Amazon often here on Get Elastic, because you’ll always find some innovation, design or usability improvement to blog about there.

Amazon sometimes attracts more reviews than customers want to read. So Amazon provides tools to filter reviews by star rating and displays the “most helpful” positive and negative review as determined by Amazon’s community.

Plus, you can also search reviews by keyword.

Which is helpful, because you don’t want to buy a product that sucks unless it’s a vacuum or a Flowbee.

Today, we all know how important customer reviews are to retailers and customers alike. They help convert buyers by building trust and confidence in the product, they reduce returns, draw long-tail search traffic and are a simple entry into on-site communities for ecommerce websites.

But there was a time when no one had them. It makes you wonder what we’re missing today that we don’t know we’re missing.

Let’s take another effective merchandising tool: cross-selling. Currently, ecommerce marketers are banking that their personal cross-sell suggestions or algorithmic-based recommendations will be relevant and attractive to shoppers. This *can* be really hit and miss. But what if we gave customers a crack at cross-selling?

Continue Reading:
User Generated Cross-Sells? Why Is Nobody Doing It? »

From Amazon.co.uk:

941 of 947 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Very good if you need to write on paper, 7 Mar 2007
By M. Williams “Matt Williams” (Essex, England) - See all my reviews

Since taking delivery of my pen I have been very happy with the quality of ink deposition on the various types of paper that I have used. On the first day when I excitedly unwrapped my pen (thanks for the high quality packaging Amazon!) I just couldn’t contain my excitement and went around finding things to write on, like the shopping list on the notice board in our kitchen, the Post-it notes next to the phone, and on my favourite lined A4 pad at the side of my desk.

My pen is the transparent type with a blue lid. I selected this one in preference to the orange type because I like to be able to see how much ink I have left so that I can put in another order before I finally run out.

When the initial excitement of taking delivery of my new pen started to wear off I realised that I shouldn’t just write for the fun of it, this should be a serious enterprise, so by the second day of ownership I started to take a little more care of what I wrote. I used it to sign three letters, and in each case was perfectly happy with the neatness of handwriting that I was able to achieve.

I have a helpful tip for you that you might not know about - if you let the ink dry for a few seconds you can avoid the smudging that sometimes happens if you rub the ink immediately after writing. Fortunately the ink used in this particular Bic pen seems to dry very quickly.

Via Lonny Paul, who’s posted a couple other good examples of bright Brit Bic reviews.

I really enjoyed this morning’s webinar with Andy Chen of PowerReviews and Jay Gordman of NetShops. (If you missed it, you can catch the recap here). Today I want to expand a bit on fake reviews and bad reviews.

Liar, Liar?

We all know how easy it would be for a marketer, manufacturer or etailer to post fake reviews of a product - whether positive for their own products or negative for competing products. This is one of the challenges of not only building trust online, but cultivating authentic communities online. A reviewer could fall into any of the following categories:

• Manufacturers, etailers and others submitting fake positive reviews
• Competitors submitting fake negative reviews
• Customers with an axe to grind, even exaggerating
• Anyone paid to write reviews for the product on popular sites
• Customers writing a review in order just to get that 25% off their next order
• Authentic brand/product evangelists

Haven’t we all read a review that goes something like this…

Continue Reading:
Fake Customer Reviews, Bad Product Reviews: What to Do? »

63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)

Are you missing out on the trend towards social commerce? Find out how to capitalize on consumer generated content in this informative session including a case study on NetShops’ success with product reviews and ratings.

View On-demand Webinar
User Reviews: The Power of Social Commerce
(Windows Media Player is required)

Note:
We apologize for the audio quality and will do our best to improve it in next month’s webinar: 7 Simple Ways to Boost Your Holiday Conversion Rate

Questions and Answers

What about moderating “dirty words” from reviews? How much of an effort is that?
Jason Billingsley: PowerReviews offers a profanity filter and it is basically automatic. Other review solutions like Bazaarvoice likely have the same capabilities. If you are using an out-of-the-box system included with your ecommerce software, it will vary - there will be no 1st level moderation by a service provider so you will be on the hook for ALL moderation. I have seen numbers in the 10% range for the amount of reviews that need some level of scrubbing.

Continue Reading:
Ratings and Reviews webinar »