Ratings and reviews c/o the International Retailer Conference & Exhibition

The International Retailer Conference & Exhibition took place at Chicago’s McCormick Place more than three months ago. Oh how time flies. Regardless of the time that’s passed, however, the team at NetSphere Strategies is still benefiting from the networking and educational opportunities provided there. Long story short, if we were to give the event a rating and review, we’d be sure to bestow it with a high number of stars as well as a comment indicating the caliber of speakers who presented each day and the exhibitors that came from far and wide.      

Speaking of ratings and reviews, Yotpo was one of many esteemed businesses that we learned about while we were there. Yotpo, a plug-and-play social reviews solution used by more than 65,000 eCommerce websites worldwide, was a no-brainer in terms of business solutions that we wanted to promote. And it looks like we weren’t alone in that regard.

Focused on providing an exemplary social review experience for online shoppers, Yotpo has been getting attention from businesses and investors alike. In fact, it was announced today that U.S. billionaire investor Len Blavatnik just turned his eyes on the Israel-based firm. Blavatnik’s firm ClalTech, a high-tech investment organization, put several million on Yotpo’s ability to boost sales for online retailers around the globe.

“Earlier this year, Yotpo announced that it closed an $11 million funding round from Blumberg Capital and its previous investors: Rhodium, Gandyr, Oliver Jung (who also invested in Facebook and Airbnb), Plus Ventures, Zohar Gilon and others,” said a reporter at Globes.co. “The company had raised $13 million before the latest investment by Blavatnik's ClalTech.”

ClalTech’s investment seems to be a safe bet, considering the benefits that come from using Yotpo solutions. Take for example its newly revamped reviews widget, which rolled out this summer.

With Yotpo’s new widget, shoppers can read and write social reviews, get automatic reminders to write reviews and can even take advantage of an automatic review loyalty program. The new widget, as expected, shows the reviewer’s name, the star rating of the review as well as whether the reviewer is a verified buyer, verified reviewer or an anonymous reviewer. A few additions to the widget include:

Sharing on social networks: Site visitors now have the option to share their favorite reviews on their social networks, which complements Yotpo’s comments feature. After a shopper comments on a specific review, Yotpo emails that reviewer to let them know that they can share their review and the comment on their social platform of choice.

Customizing the widget’s look and feel: Users are given the ability to pick a core color, which Yotpo will then use to match elements within the widget. For technically oriented users with knowledge of CSS or access to developers who can customize CSS, the widget can be further customized.

SEO enhancements: Because Google takes performance into consideration when ranking sites, Yotpo’s R&D team made three changes to the way the widget is rendered. First, Yotpo dropped the number of server calls from more than 80 to three. Second, Yotpo now uses a CDN for hosting both the resources of the widget and the actual reviews. Third, Yotpo developed the widget to load in the back-end as opposed to within the browser. Combined, these changes dropped the load time from 5 to 6 seconds on first load to 700 milliseconds on average.

Beyond those benefits, Yotpo also provides analytics reports, giving eCommerce business owners actionable insight that can help them improve their merchandising strategies.

So not only did NetSphere Strategies get the chance to learn about Yotpo and its reviews widget while attending IRCE this year, we also learned that the company would be making a new announcement while they were at the show: Yotpo’s new Premium suite – geared for small businesses – would soon be available, featuring Google search integration and community Q&A. For smaller online retailers, this additional offering was great news, considering how critical it is to provide verified customer reviews on-site when trying to compete with retail’s bigger players.

To learn more about Yotpo or other tools that can give a small- to mid-sized business the upper leg online, stay tuned to the NetSphere Strategies’ blog.