PowerReviews Offers Retailers and Brands Free Consumer Product Review Service; Enterprise-Class...

MILLBRAE, Calif. -- PowerReviews today announced the launch of its premium consumer product review service. With PowerReviews, brands and retailers can now benefit from the most complete solution available for consumer product reviews -- fully outsourced, white-label and most important, free of

"We formed the company with one objective: to make reviews accessible to retailers, large and small. Most retailers haven't yet added product reviews to their web sites, not because they don't know there's value in them, but because the ROI is difficult to quantify and moderation is time-consuming and expensive," said Andy Chen, CEO of PowerReviews. "The easiest way to remove the ROI debate that retailers face is by offering the entire service for free and making it easy to implement. That's what we've done."

PowerReviews co-founders Andy Chen and Robert Chea have extensive e-commerce experience. In 1994, they founded industry leading online sporting-goods retailer Fogdog.com. Since then, they helped optimize the e-commerce platforms of over 50 major brands including Gloss(TM), Palm(R), Linens 'n Things(R) and Kmart(TM), and served in senior management roles at companies including GSI Commerce and Yahoo!(R) Shopping.

"We believe that reviews are central to the online shopping experience and that the consumer realizes the most benefit when everyone participates, so we created an enterprise-class service that all retailers can use," said Robert Chea, COO of PowerReviews. "What makes reviews so valuable to the retailer is the right kind of reporting. Our reports give retailers relevant and accurate information about their products that help them make better merchandising and product development decisions. Reviews should be a starting point, not a dead-end."

To accomplish this PowerReviews developed a number of unique, patent-pending features that improve the consumer and retailer experience, and deliver better, more accurate information about products. These include:

--PowerReviews Asymmetrical ASP(SM), providing the ease of ASP integration without the risk and expense of a traditional ASP,

--PowerSummary(SM), solving the 'too much information' problem by allowing consumers to see pertinent information at a glance, and

--PowerTags(SM), efficiently and effectively capturing relevant information from reviews and allowing this information to be automatically tabulated.

A key PowerReviews partner is the leading e-commerce design, development and managed services provider, Fry, Inc. "We work with more than 80 major retail brands including Brookstone(R), Crate and Barrel(R), Eddie Bauer(R), Godiva(R), The Home Depot(R), Kmart, Lillian Vernon(R), and Whirlpool(R). We evaluate software to decide what's best for our customers' online businesses," said Rudy Pataro, CTO of Fry, Inc. "We selected PowerReviews because it's one of the most advanced review services we've ever seen, it's easy to implement and the business model works for our customers. Clearly PowerReviews understands how retailers think. They deliver."

Retailers of any size can implement PowerReviews. The company's proprietary Asymmetrical ASP service supports retailers large and small, whether they have one million or one billion page views each month. By using an advanced AJAX engine, PowerReviews utilizes the stability of the retailer's servers and safeguards the customer experience.

"As COO for our $100 million business, my primary responsibility is to deliver a consistent and high-quality customer experience while minimizing our operational costs," said Joe Seibert, COO of Home Decor Products. "PowerReviews really impressed me because they anticipated and solved every possible concern. The functionality that they provide is far superior to any other option we've seen, whether it's in-house or outsourced. Period."

PowerReviews is a privately held company with $6.25 million in Series A funding from leading Silicon Valley venture capitalist firms Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards.

About Company

PowerReviews provides brands and retailers with a complete solution for consumer product reviews -- fully outsourced, white-label and most importantly, free of charge. The company developed patent-pending implementation and customer-facing technologies to deliver this service free to retailers while providing enterprise-quality functionality and reliability. PowerReviews is a privately held company with $6.25 million in Series A funding from leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards. For more information visit www.powerreviews.com.