Bazaarvoice, the market and technology leader in hosted social commerce applications that drive sales, today launched Social Recommendations for its popular Bazaarvoice Stories product. Built on the Bazaarvoice social commerce platform, Social Recommendations help consumers discover and purchase new products by directly tapping into the real-life experiences of other shoppers. With Social Recommendations, consumers can easily enhance their personal Stories with links to products that are relevant to their experience. Stories readers are now just one click away from purchasing a suggested product that has inspired, pleased, or helped a person like them.

For brands using Stories to build community and drive customer engagement, the addition of Social Recommendations delivers an immediate and measurable impact on product sales and cross-sell. For example, a customer may write a story about their new LCD TV, and include a link to the TV, but also include links to the TV stand, cables used to hook it up, sound system, etc.

“After serving more than 60 billion Answers, Stories, and Reviews for over 575 brands, we can say with certainty that consumer-generated content is most effective when it drives business goals,” said Brett Hurt, founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice. “Social Recommendations tap into the power of word of mouth to make a direct connection between personal Stories and product purchases. By introducing the ability to link to recommended products, companies using Bazaarvoice Stories give consumers a vehicle to further express themselves and help fellow shoppers by placing readers just one click away from purchasing a product that they may not have known existed.”

“Of the many community platforms and social media vendors, Bazaarvoice clearly leads the way as the only provider to give customers the ability to share their story and associate it with products they use, recommend, and enjoy.” said Mona Van De Weghe at CHEFS Catalog. “In sharing stories, we are seeing our customers find their voice and create a community. Within three days of going live, more than one-third of all Stories contained links to recommended products. It is exciting to see our customers creating a community where our products are prominently featured. As our customers develop an affinity within the community, we expect the unique social exposure of the product to drive incremental sales.”