eCommerce and

Normally I try to keep my blog posts “above the fold” technically, and shield you from the code that makes everything work under the hood. I realize that there are many great tech blogs out there, many of which I read, and that readers of this blog are more interested in the business of eCommerce rather than the technical aspects that make it work. As such, I try to talk about technical things of interest, but without any tech jargon or degree needed.
 
Recently this has begun to backfire on me, however, as some now view my job as “plug and play”. In discussing the available technologies and possible usages of them, I’ve been hearing comments like:

“Doesn’t SQL just do that already?” – In response to trying to figure out the best way to write search relevancy logic.

 “I’m sure Microsoft has figured out a way to do that” – Yes, they have. They have developed programming languages and technologies that allow highly skilled professionals to spend long hours writing code to accomplish that task.

Or my personal favorite, when comparing our needs to a product written for a different database, in a different language, and has been in development for 7 years – “we can likely do whatever they are doing”.

In an effort to reduce complexity when talking to non-technical users and speak in plain English, I’ve apparently erroneously conveyed to them that there is really nothing technical involved in eCommerce development. As far as some know, we have a “website”, a “server”, a “database”, and a long 3 pronged cord that connects them all seamlessly. Fortunately for us, this cord also connects to Amazon, Google, and our supply chain network as well.
 
I considered just posting a few large blocks of code to keep you on your toes, but figured it would get the same blank look I do when I try to explain what I do to my kids. So instead, just a friendly reminder to all you business types to give your developer a hug today, and be thankful you don’t have to hear about fine tuning SQL procedures for maximum speed and relevancy.

Lately over here at the Surplus we’ve been focused on a lot of internal development to better streamline our processes, interactions with customers and suppliers, and other types of projects that add value to us as an organization but remain invisible to our customers. However, we have been looking ahead to this year’s development projects and have plans to do a lot of work on what we call “Customer Experience”.

With this focus, I’ve been poking around, looking for ideas and the technologies that may support some of the cooler features we may want to implement. In a post Web 2.0 world, we are looking for things that really add value to the customer, not just every cool little gadget, widget or flashy thing that might look cool.

One topic that has been particular warm in the online developer community as of late is the pros and cons of the new interactivity features as well as the tools used to develop them (read: AJAX, JQuery, javascript). In an effort to make the web work much more like a desktop application, developers are using more and more sophisticated techniques to push data back and forth without the user noticing. This provides much more real time feedback to the user, as well as adds a lot of functionality and makes interacting with the internet a lot more convenient with fewer time-wasting page reloads.

Take, for example, a familiar concept I’m sure you’ve seen and used yourself, what we call the “Product Selector”, where a user can choose a high level product they want to purchase, such as a bathtub, and using various slider bars, checkboxes, and other mechanisms, narrow down the result set to see the products that match their filtering criteria. BlueNile.com has used this for their diamond search for a long time. Product selectors like this are often very helpful and kind of fun to use. It increases customer retention and gives customers the ability to really find what they are looking for, or better yet, shows them a range of products that meet their criteria. However, there are drawbacks to the product selectors, including the inability for Google to crawl your products that are only accessible through the selector, the inability to have direct links to filtered results, and the ability to build a tool that the customer finds intuitive and helpful.

One big problem web-developers face in this post web 2.0 world is finding the balance between cool and functional. There is a fine line between enhancing a customer’s experience and frustrating the heck out of them. What is intuitive for a developer may seem obtuse to a customer (I’m pretty sure the developer is right though).

You can make a web page take you through 5 steps to create an account, choose your options, confirm your purchase, and agree to the terms, all in one single, seamless AJAX-enabled application. That is, until they realize they want to ship it to Aunt Gertrude instead, click their browser’s back button, and lose all the information they’ve entered, frustrating them to the point of abandoning the process.

Many of these new technologies break the expectations of the browser’s back button and bookmarks. Often these technologies can completely block search engine’s ability to find relevant data on your site. Often a page refresh or other unexpected action can cause the user to lose their place and what they were doing.

As a fan of emerging web technologies, I am looking forward to tackling some of these challenges in the coming year. However, I will be sure to be on the lookout for the unexpected consequences of clever web development.

So stay tuned, keep hitting F5, and look for some new features coming soon!

Some upgrades are proactive. After careful consideration and considerable time spent evaluating options, you decide it is time to replace a crucial component with a newer, better version.  Sometimes things go bump in the night; a server crash, your car’s transmission falls out, or Number 5 needs more input.  Whatever the cause, sometimes upgrades are forced upon you and you have to react quickly.

And sometimes upgrades are needlessly mandated; say, when a third party vendor, that you rely on for a major aspect of your business, sends you an email like this out of the blue:

Translation: We want to upgrade you to our new, unproven, untested system. And we want it when we want it, not when you want it. Oh yeah, and please do this as you head into the holiday shopping season.

This email caught us off guard and created quite a stir in our department. As a small to medium sized business, we don’t have the unlimited resources to do whatever we want, whenever we want. We plan our development projects out and schedule them in advance. So when we have a board full of projects such as EDI integrations, a new supplier interface, and a backend architecture upgrade already slated, and then a vendor, we pay for the use of their stable product, tries to dictate to us when to upgrade an already working product, we're not exactly thrilled.

The email went on to inform us that they realize that the upgrade window and timeline was small, so they’d happily recommend some high-priced consultants we could use to do the upgrade. How nice of them! So now we can pay through the nose to do an unnecessary upgrade we don’t want to do.

Apparently this didn’t go over well for their other customers either.  A few weeks later we received an email stating that due to the response from their customers, they were postponing the upgrade until after the New Year. It turns out that customers who pay good money for a reliable product don’t like being told how to run their business. And we don’t like being told to make major changes heading into the busy season. But mainly, we really don’t like throwing money and resources away for upgrades we don’t want or need.

Hopefully you don’t have this experience anytime soon. And if you do, make sure you let them know how you feel about it. Ultimately they have to listen to the people who pay their salaries.

I’d just like to take a minute out of my day to thank our Manager of Customer Service, Josh, for his management of our internet connection. You see, when we were small and starting out, Josh was there from the beginning and it fell on him to set up our internet connection. Then as we grew, moved, expanded, and moved again, Josh has maintained his maniacal death grip management of our internet connectivity.  In fact, Josh single handedly maintains all of our connection issues, including designing and implementing our VOIP phone system. And a job well done, I might add.

However, up until very recently, we at PlumberSurplus.com were the red-headed step children from the wrong side of the tracks, literally. Well, not the red-headed part, but some of us are step children, and we were definitely on the wrong side of the tracks. Due to the archaic monopoly structure that limits cable service options, our area was serviced by Charter cable, who in turn refused to service our particular building. And although we are a mere stones throw from the regional headquarters of Charter, we have been unable to get Charter high speed internet access due to the fact that we are located 50 feet on the wrong side of the railroad tracks.

So here we are, a fast-growing, expanding company, complete with VOIP (did I mention that the “IP” in “VOIP” refers to internet protocol), sharing a slow T1 connection at several times the price we could pay for high speed cable internet. Download a large file and be ready to become the office pariah and heaven forbid you have a webinar to call into. But thanks to Josh’s relentless pursuit and a little luck, a couple of months ago we finally got Charter to service our area, and now we cruise the internet at true broadband speeds. Ah, life is good. We have become spoiled by our high speed connection, streaming episodes of The Office and playing Sudoku at will.

That is, until the day the sun stopped shining; the day Charter disconnected us. Due to some clerical error on their end, one recent morning Charter disconnected us. The internet was no more. We panicked. We didn’t know what to do. We quickly reverted to our early days before Al Gore invented the internet; selling bathtubs on the street corner, filing invoices in a drawer, and using those calculators with the rolls of paper that keep a record of your every keystroke.

Josh alone remained calm, level-headed, and undaunted. Since we still had our T1 line (dedicated solely to our VOIP system), Josh set about restoring our internet connection via the T1 line. As we set out to restore connectivity to the masses of employees huddled around a stapler, I was concerned. How long would it take? How complicated would the switch over be, and then the subsequent switch back once Charter reconnected us? Fortunately, it took longer to vocalize my fears than it did to enact the redundancy plan.

For Josh had designed the system, spanning two buildings across the street, with redundancy in mind. He simply patched a couple of connections and we were up and running, splitting the T1 connection between our VOIP and networking systems. A couple of hours later when Charter got it all figured out, we simply reversed the process.

The best part is that when Charter made the same mistake the next day, I didn’t even need Josh to restore the connection. As the office descended into panic, I simply walked across the street, made the appropriate connections, and waltzed back into the office full of adoring fans, all thinking I was a networking genius. All thanks to Josh!

Fish or Cut Bait?  This phrase came to mind this week as I have been putting off some new development to assess our website’s infrastructure. Lately I’d noticed more and more lag time and performance issues and wanted to take a look under the hood before it became a serious problem. Since our current systems were developed, we’ve added scores of thousands of products, orders, and customers to our databases, and experienced high site volume and traffic growth. And while things are still working pretty well, I thought it was time to address these issues.  That is before we hit that next level in daily orders, data storage, etc., and overwhelm our current systems.

Fish or Cut Bait? 

For you land-lubbers unfamiliar with the term “fish or cut bait”, this term refers to the age old fishing operational dilemma: Is my time better spent catching more fish now, or cutting bait so I can catch more fish later? If I decide to fish now, I may catch more fish, but soon I will run out of bait. Or I could cut bait right now, but that means I will not be catching fish. It is a valid question, and one that is almost as inextricable as the “Tastes Great – Less Filling” debate. 

Obviously, fishing is far more appealing. We all get excited when sales pour in, new suppliers are established, new markets are tapped, and new systems are implemented. Fishing is fun. Fishing feels good. Fishing is what makes the world go ‘round.

By contrast, cutting bait is not as exciting. Making the decision to slow growth, delay new supplier relationships, and hold back products until we stabilize shipping performance does not feel very rewarding. Putting off new development projects so that we can optimize database and site performance can feel like we are spinning our wheels and spending time and money on something that “already works”. And cutting mackerel and cod leaves your hands feeling slimy, and you smelling like, well a dead fish.

Why Not Fish and Cut Bait?

In a perfect world, we have fishermen AND bait-cutters. OK, pop quiz: raise your hand if you live and run your business in a perfect world. Unless your hand is raised (and by the way, you probably look a bit foolish to the person sitting next to you), you have to spend some time fishing and some time cutting bait just like the rest of us.

By nature, we want what’s new and exciting. We want to keep pushing ahead, keep forging new paths, and keep growing at a break neck pace. But in reality, sometimes that is the worst thing you can do. We’ve all heard stories of businesses that fail because they grew too fast. That seems paradoxical on the surface, as “growing too fast” generally means more revenue. But if you aren’t prepared to handle the rapid influx of business, you can get buried in the avalanche that you worked so hard to create.

So I encourage you to take a brief time out to sit back, evaluate your operations, and do a quick SWOT analysis before leaping into that next venture. Make sure your systems, procedures, and employees are prepared to handle the growth before you get there. Make sure your site, server, and databases can handle all the traffic you want to drive to it. Invest in the resources it takes to ensure solid operational performance for the sales you want to get. Make sure you are staffed to handle the influx of orders so you don’t overburden your employees. Then rinse and repeat as necessary.

It may not be as thrilling as landing Moby Dick, but then again that didn’t end well for Ahab.

Like other online retailers, we have a presence on the Amazon Marketplace. Amazon has a great model that allows quality sellers to make their products available to millions of buyers. However, their integration model for Marketplace sellers is kind of like the Bejing Olympics; dirty and dirtier.

We began with a smaller offering of some of our most popular products, and gradually increased the offering (and sales) on Amazon. Recently we were offered the chance to become an Amazon Gold Seller, meaning among other things that we’d offer more products for sale on Amazon. More products listed on Amazon = more sales from Amazon. A good thing, to be sure; however, we were currently manually entering Amazon orders into our site, and this was about to flood our customer service department.

Never fear, IT would come to the rescue (I left the cape at home though). As we had successfully integrated with PayPal and Google Checkout over the past year, I was pretty confident that the Amazon integration would be pretty straight-forward. After all, we are talking about the world’s largest online retailer. Why, they probably had a team of monkeys on standby to help with my every need, sample code to do the work for me, and color coded, easy to follow documentation that would point me right where I needed to go. Heck, I may put this one on autopilot and go golfing with my son.

So I began this integration the same way as always – looking for documentation online. Hmmm… that’s funny, I can’t seem to find what I’m looking for. No, that’s not it. No, I don’t want Amazon Web Services.

After a couple fruitless hours of searching, I finally just emailed our Amazon representative...

Matt: “Hi, can you email me the documentation to integrate with Amazon so we can process orders programmatically” 

Amazon: “Let’s schedule a call with your technical team and we can discuss the options.  We currently don’t have a formal document that describes this process.” 

Say what?!?!? The world’s largest online retailer and Marketplace to thousands of merchants doesn’t have documentation for integrating with them? Turns out no, they don’t. 

Some key paraphrases from that call and subsequent emails:

Matt: “Can you tell me how to access our orders?”

Amazon: “In order to download your orders, you have to use this tool (AMTU) that is open source. We wrote it, but we don’t support it at all. You have to download it from somewhere else”.

Matt: “I see online that you have a sandbox for testing this integration. Can you set me up with access to that?”

Amazon: “We no longer have a test environment. You have to test it live.”

Matt: “How can I push our order ID back into Amazon’s system?”

Amazon: “That option is not supported using flat file or manual fulfillment.” (The method they recommended we use)

This story does have a mostly happy ending. In a matter of a couple of days, we were able to integrate with Amazon and import our Amazon orders into our order management solution, relieving a large burden from our awesome customer service team and freeing them up from data input to actually helping our customers.

If you are interested in more information regarding integrating with Amazon, PayPal, or Google Checkout, feel free to comment. I’m here to help!

A Great, but Simple Promotion

When you are in business to sell products online, you may be after such things as more sales, increased internet traffic, and online communities touting your site as a great deal and encouraging people to buy from you. And usually these are good things. But as we found out recently, sometimes you have to be careful about what you wish for. An example of this is the Omaha Steaks promotion that we had just initiated, a promotion that had been highly successful and was well-received.  A little too well-received, actually, and that caused a few tense hours over a recent weekend.

Our Omaha Steaks promotion was simple: when you make a purchase from us, we’ll send you a gift certificate in the form of a coupon code for $20 off your Omaha Steaks order, which we sent along in the order confirmation email. We had partnered with Omaha Steaks, purveyors of fine steaks and other food products, to provide this great value to our customers. This seemed to be a great promotion, and all was running smoothly until it got SlickDeal-ed.

Deal Wars: When Slickdeals Strikes Back!

Slickdeals.net is a great site for sharing, finding, and aggregating deals. I am a frequent visitor of the site, and have made some great buys based on deals I’ve found there. Slickdeal-ers tend to be a savvy bunch who really know how to game the system. They are a great source of information about products, pricing, and great buys.

So when a Slickdeal-er made a purchase from our site and instantly got their free $20 Omaha Steaks gift card in their order confirmation email, a light went on. They posted this great deal onto SlickDeals.net and pretty soon the frenzy began. The Slickdealers searched our site, found the cheapest item they could with free shipping, and began placing orders. One guy even placed over 60 orders! Being the sophisticated online retailer that we are, we allow customers to easily cancel orders that haven’t shipped. Since this happened on a Saturday, customers were able to place orders, receive their coupon codes instantly via email, then cancel their orders and repeat the process over and over again.

While we are all for good deals, we felt it wasn’t fair to our promotion partner to give away these gift certificates to fraudulent consumers whose only goal was to sell them on eBay. So after some discussion, we decided the best course of action would be to send out the coupon code after we knew the order wouldn’t be cancelled rather than instantly. Our terms of use stated that the offer was only good on non-cancelled orders, so those who placed orders then cancelled were not sent the coupon code.

Lessons Learned

This was a great lesson for us in the value of community sites as well as their potential dangers. While we loved the idea of our site getting a lot of notice and exposure, we also learned that we have to protect ourselves from situations that can spiral out of control. Rest assured, while our next promotion or deal may be a “slick deal”, we will take measures to prevent an incident like this from occurring again.

Third party software is like a box of chocolates. Once you buy them, they quickly get stale and can get quite messy.

OK, so this isn’t always the case. However, often you can have buyer’s remorse when it comes to buying software or a service from a vendor. Of course it’s all roses during the courtship phase; they tell you how much better and cheaper they are then their competitors, how reliable they are, and how we’ll see tremendous growth by using their product. It’s almost like it’s their job to sell us something.

Of course we do our research, including price comparisons, competitor research, and cost/benefit analysis, but in the end you really do have to make a decision without first hand experience. Sometimes these vendors work out great, and we get more than we bargained for and that leads to a great experience for all involved. But sometimes things aren’t all they are cracked up to be, and you could end up with something you can’t fully utilize, something that doesn’t work like it is supposed to, or something that flat out is a waste of money.

So for all vendors and potential vendors out there, here are a few suggestions that the decision makers want out of a partner.

• Get to the point - My time is valuable. Don’t waste my time with glossy presentations that offer little real data I need to make an informed decision. Give me useful facts. 


• Don’t belittle your competitors - Rest assured we have or will research them and they are going to say the same things about you. Feel free to point out solid differences that apply to our situation, but don’t get petty. 


• Deliver as promised - Often the salesperson’s job is to get the sale and it is someone else’s job to deliver. If you are willing to say it, put it in writing. We have been burned before and don’t care for your “I’m pretty sure we can do that” or “It should be no problem”. I may like you and I may trust you, but forgive me if I don’t take your word for it. 


• Keep us informed - Have a scheduled downtime? Tell us in advance. Making a major upgrade? Gee, that would have been nice to know yesterday. You’d be surprised how forgiving we are if we are kept in the loop. A major problem discussed in advance is better than a minor one that surprises us. 


• Work with us - Value us as a current customer or risk losing us at the end of our contract. We may not be your biggest client, but we have needs too. Be flexible when you can. A minor sticking point on your end could make a major difference to us. 


• Be supportive - Specifically with your technical support. Have a clear, concise way for us to get answers to our questions. Don’t put us in the support ticket loop and wait for us to call three times before you escalate it. We don’t want to waste your time or ours.
  

Fortunately, we have many outstanding third party partners that we love to tout.  Hopefully a peek into the mind on other side of the equation can be of use to those of you who are or hope to be vendors to eCommerce companies.

As you may or may not know, we at PlumberSurplus.com have just completed the process of launching a brand new site in a completely new market, OutdoorPros.com. For the 7 week time period it took us to launch I was in the middle of making that happen. Our plan was to simply take our existing site and infrastructure, and copy it over and start a new site. We call it our “Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V” plan. Sounds simple, right?

Well, yes and no. Our site has been around for about 3 ½ years, and in that time a lot has changed. We’ve made many improvements and modifications along the way, and left some things alone. All that to say that after more than 3 years of coding, the task of doing this copy/paste has left me thinking more about proper site architecture methods and the modularizing of code and processes. Fortunately we’ve done a lot of that all along, though not perfectly and not everywhere.

So given that it’s on my mind right now, I thought I’d share my thoughts to help you eCommerce developers out there as well as remind myself of some of the more important things to consider when it comes to site design and architecture.

1. Plan on Succeeding – You will grow. You will increase sales. You will offer more products. Don’t build anything thinking “ah, this will be good enough for now”. Don’t take shortcuts because it’s good enough for your current needs. It just adds layers of problems once you finally do outgrow it but are dependent on that piece. A small example is our name, PlumberSurplus.com. We only sell brand new, top notch products. Nothing “surplus”. And we sell a lot of non-plumbing products, including power tools and lighting. Very early on, we had no idea how broad our product line would get. 


2. Separate Your Layers – This is kind of a no-brainer to programmers, but we all get lazy, rushed, or think something is so small and trivial it doesn’t matter. And we all eventually regret those decisions. Take the time to separate your data, business, and interface layers. To the lay-persons out there, what I mean is this: don’t hard code your site based on your current products, database, email system, etc. Because when you need to change something out, the world blows up. Renaming our mail server was a bit more tedious than it needed to be due to numerous references to it by name throughout the site. Now we use a global setting to refer to our mail server, so when we need to change it again it is a one line change. Even things as simple as a state drop down list; you may say “well how often are the states going to change?” They may not, but what if you start shipping to Canada? Now you have to add those provinces to all of the associated drop downs you have. It is much better to utilize your database for data and save your interface for content and actions. 


3. Stretch the Limits With Third Party Vendors – One thing that our legal department is so good at is thinking ahead when negotiating contracts. Some vendors have arbitrary limits on products, categories, requests, bandwidth, etc. These are mostly arbitrary, as in not due to technical or physical capabilities. So if a vendor says they can support 40K SKUs, get them to bump that number up to 100K. You may only have 1500 products, but by agreeing to a ceiling you increase the chances of having to renegotiate later on. And most of the time it doesn’t cost them anything extra to change that number in your contract. 


4. Imagine Everyone in Their Underwear – OK, so maybe that is a tip for public speaking. Skip that one. 


5. Imagine Quadrupling Your Estimates – If you are just getting going, you really have no way to estimate your growth. You never know when you’ll land that major supplier, customer, or piece of market share. So plan as best as you can; just make sure you build it to handle a lot more. 


6. Modularize –As much as is possible, develop your site so that components are hot-swappable. One thing we struggle with is our shipping logic. Our logic is based on many layers: boxing (how many packages to ship this order), warehouses (where is each package shipping from), weights, dimensions, etc. It is a cumbersome mess. This leaves us with a huge black hole that does not easily lend itself to upgrading or making relatively minor changes. As much as possible, spend the time modularizing and breaking out segments so that if you ever need to change one component you can with no problem. If you are writing custom shopping cart code, make the part that does the credit card processing its own piece. You give it the data, and it gives you the response. That way if you ever change credit card processors, it’s a simple integration with your existing checkout page rather than a page rewrite. 


7. Globalize – So many times something needs to be referenced in multiple places. Things like a merchant ID for third party software, an ftp location, or even the aforementioned email server. Don’t hard code these references! You will only regret it later. Instead, put all these variables in a global location and reference them that way. In .NET, use the web.config <appSettings> section to refer to all your connections strings, account IDs, mail servers, email notification addresses… well, you get the idea. You will save yourself a lot of time down the road. Extensive utilization of globalization has made the copy/paste that much easier for me. 


8. Strategize – Develop your code as if you were going to expand to other sites and industries. It will probably help you architect your site a lot better using a lot of the above mentioned techniques regardless of whether or not you ultimately do your own copy and paste. However, when you do come to that road (or quit this business and start a new one), you won’t have to do it all from scratch again. A few minor techniques planned in advance can save you so much time later on. One example: throughout our site, none of our links, pages, or images (in code, not rendered) link to PlumberSurplus.com. In code they all look something like this: [SiteName]/images/imageName.jpg. Our site is built for multiple domains, so now instead of looking for hundreds of references, I just change our site name variable and it’s all there. This is just one small example of how to develop your site with expansion in mind.
   

Power to the People: Customer Reviews on Your Website

Let’s face it: no one wants to go it alone any more. James Dean died young, and with him the rebel that wanted to do things his way. Now it’s all about what others think.

Now it’s your turn, and thanks to PlumberSurplus.com, you too can be the owner of a faucet, tankless water heater, or sump pump that other users with experience think are cool. That’s right – it’s your turn to join the cool crowd now. And it’s all because we recently rolled out PowerReviews, a third party application for customer reviews. Let the sharing begin!

User reviews are all the rage these days. Ushered in with the web 2.0/social networking phase of the last few years was the concept that you care what someone else thinks about something you’re interested in. And there are very good reasons for this.

Why Reviews?

Customers like reviews because it helps them make a more informed purchase. Someone may not like the product, and because of the background and reasons they share, you can confidently assume you won’t like it either. Or they may not like it for a different reason, one that doesn’t bother you. Of course, the glowing reviews only make your decision that much more informed.

Retailers like it because it stops the sale, and subsequent return, refund, and poor customer experience involved in purchasing a product that is sub-par. And customers who purchase products with good reviews are more likely to be happy with their purchase, thereby decreasing complaints and returns.

Why Power Reviews?

So deciding to implement customer reviews was a no-brainer. And the decision to go with PowerReviews was almost as easy. PowerReviews offers:

• Fast, easy implementation
• Great technical support
• They took us to dinner at Arcadia Modern American Steakhouse (I had the filet mignon)
• Our Products are automatically on Buzzillions, a PowerReviews shopping engine
  

Competitors

We looked around a bit, but quite honestly not too much. PowerReviews has a great reputation, and a well-deserved one in my opinion, making our decision that much easier.

When I say fast and easy implementation that is exactly what I mean. I’ve successfully implemented other so called “easy” integrations. You know, the kind that offer convoluted, ill-informed documentation and obscure, decidedly not “best practice” techniques. PowerReviews provided a very helpful timeline, complete with what tasks happen when, and by whom (developer, marketing department, network admin, etc.) and an implementation guide that was actually useful! The actual development needs on our end were relatively simple and very straightforward. Not to mention Blake was there in an email with an instant response any time I had a quick question. Seriously – the technical implementation of PowerReviews was a breeze. Trust me developers.

Another cool thing about PowerReviews is Buzzillions, their comparison shopping engine that acts like an affiliate -they only get paid on conversions. Affiliate sales are great for us. Their ROI is significantly better than that of our ad spend, such as some of our SEM campaigns. And since we are on all the major shopping engines already, the addition of Buzzillions was great for us. Another great part about Buzzillions is that there is no additional development involved for it. It is all based on our reviews data. And that is good, since developers don’t really like building data feeds for every shopping engine under the sun.

Oh yeah, and the best part: the price is right! There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but a simple integration, your products on an up and coming shopping engine, a steak dinner and Johnny Walker Blue (if you are lucky) can be yours for the grand sum of zero dollars. Yep, you read right. They offer all this for free! They are in the data aggregation business, and are happy to offer all this in exchange for honest customer reviews and access to over a million products to list on Buzzillions.

Truly a win-win. I can’t recommend PowerReviews highly enough. You can be up and running with a great customer review product in a week (or less). Your customers will thank you, your customer service team will adore you, and your returns team will bring you donuts.

Special thanks to Blake, Tara, Cathie, and Jay from the PowerReviews team!

One of the Surplusers had a chance to speak at eTail 2008 this week.  While there, he stopped by the Buzzillions booth and the Power Reviews booth.  Pictured above, Jay and Cathie struck a pose.

The possibilities are endless with a bathroom remodel. Discover your classic side with a clawfoot tub, experiment with fresh bathroom vanities and coordinate it all with matching faucets. Shop PlumberSurplus.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for all of your bathroom needs.