Posts Tagged ‘trust’

Diary of a Tech Start-Up: Idea to Soft Launch

One of our ideas that we have here at KikScore is to provide a running blog on how we started business, what challenges we face, and what we’re doing to make our concept a viable (and hopefully profitable) concern.  There won’t be one voice in this diary, as each of us have a different view of events.  Hopefully this spectrum of views and running history will help our readers with similar challenges (and if you have some advice on approaching a similar problem, we’d love to hear it as well).  We’ll try to be useful and interesting, but most of all, honest (and hopefully humorous).  Ok, let’s get to it.

About 3 years ago, a thought comes across my mind.  I recall this moment well, as I usually don’t have a lot of thoughts.  The concept was to come up with a way to provide some transparency to shoppers — allow an ecommerce site to provide verifiable information on who they are and why they should be trusted (so they can compete with established brands and brick-and-mortar stores).  And if we can supplement this transparency with third party data on these businesses and score the likely shopping experience — well, that’s a home run.  Shoppers benefit from more competition and an excellent shopping experience, Sellers use their good name to sell more online, and we have a nice business.

In an effort to save readers from lighting themselves on fire out of boredom, ala Airplane: The Movie, I can summarize what we did between coming up with this idea and now having our soft launch of KikScore.  We hired a patent lawyer; filed a patent; hired outside developers to supplement our efforts; we futzed around with these developers far too long; 12 months later we fired those developers; we spend 6-8 months working and re-working on our scoring model and securing third-party data sources; we developed a look-and-feel of the site (twice); and came up with a name and trademark (twice).  We all did this while each of us were working full time (and often overtime) with day jobs!  Alot of late, late nights and plenty of weekend work got us to where we are at. 

We’re now live and have several beta customers out there.  While the past couple of years have been busy, we know that the next two will be even busier.  Though it will be a lot more exciting actually being in business, instead of talking about it.

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Posts Tagged ‘trust’

Lexis Survey Finds that Small Businesses Drink the Ratings Kool-Aid

A new survery from LexisNexis and Martindale Hubble provided a very interesting trend amoung small businesses and their use and perceptions of rating sites.  According to the survey, small businesses rely on rating and review sites — for service and product choices — at a rate that is double the average consumer.  This is in despite of the fact that these same small business owners indicate a couple of things: (1) that the normal review sites are easily biased by positive or negative reviews; and (2) the reviews can easily be faked by the businesses being reviewed.

Why do small businesses find review sites to be of such value when they can be manipulated?  Despite these short-comings, reviews allow for much needed guidance in aggregating data and sorting out, in relatively quick fashion, where to get your goods and services.  Another point that the survey reveals is what something we already know (so it’s really a stretch to say it’s “revealing” anything) — that not all ratings are created equally.  More trust is put into the rating if (a) its from a independent third party; and (b) is based, in part, on actual customer feedback (but again, for some of these review sites, it can be hard to know if the data is from real customers or the reviewed business faking the review).

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Posts Tagged ‘trust’

KikReport: Helps Businesses Demonstrate Trust to Shoppers

Are you losing sales because shoppers do not know enough about your business? It is human nature that when shopping online customers look for indications and information that they can trust the online business that they are about to buy from. More and more shoppers decide that if an online merchant does not have indications of trustworthiness, they will not buy from a business. That is the reason it is so important for online merchants to quickly and in a powerful manner demonstrate trustworthiness and security to shoppers. If merchants fail to do this, they will lose the chance to close a sale.

Shoppers Concerns When Shopping Online

When shoppers look at an online store that they want to buy from, they often want to know more about the following:

1) Who is the management for this business?
2) Where is the business located?
3) What kind of return and customer service policies does the merchant have?
4) Does the business store credit card and other sensitive information securely?
5) Does this business have a track record of delivering a product?
6) What have other customers thought about shopping with this merchant?

Use a KikReport to Answer Shoppers Questions Regarding Trust

Merchants can use a KikReport to help answer each of these questions.  By answering each of these questions, a merchant has a much better chance of getting a customer to understand that the merchant’s business is trustworthy.  The KikReport acts as a merchant report card that provides dynamic and real time information that is organized in an easy format for shoppers to understand.  Each KikReport contains detailed information such as:

1) Details regarding the management for a business;

2) Information regarding website security and website traffic for your business;

3) Key pieces of information about your return, privacy and customer service policies;

4) Recent comments from other shoppers and customers of yours;

5) Information on where your business is located; and

6) An optional video that you can use to introduce yourself to shoppers

The KikReport allows you to display this information to shoppers.  Using the KikReport and your KikScore is a powerful way to demonstrate trust to online shoppers.  By using these tools to demonstrate trust you can get more shoppers to buy from you. To see a sample KikReport, click here.  This is the KikReport for the Interactive Security Group.

More information, means more trust which translates into more sales for your business.  Find out more information about KikScore and KikReport here.

Please let us know if you have any feedback on the KikReport.  We would love to hear from your.

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Posts Tagged ‘trust’

Startup Checklist for Small Businesses

As we know, most business start out small. Starting a business is a very busy time in an entrepreneur’s life. So busy that many critical steps are often overlooked. In an effort to help those small, but soon to be large, businesses identify critical areas for success, we have put together a short 10 step checklist to make sure you are covering all of your bases.

Top 10 Checklist:

1. Research the Product or Service You Seek To Sale.
2. Create a Business Plan.
3. Determine Your Capital Budget.
4. Choose and Register Your Business Name.
5. Decide on the Legal Form of Your Business.
6. Open a Company Checking Account.
7. Determine if you need any state or local licenses/permits.
8. Obtain a Federal Employer Identification Number.
9. Set up a business website and business email address.
10. Research various trust products in the marketplace to help you fast track your credibility with your potential customers.

As you may know, there are many more factors that determines a small businesses success; however, if you were to ask me what are the top 10, then you the ones above are it.

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Posts Tagged ‘trust’

Algorithms — They're Not Just For Big Businesses Anymore

Thanks to the internet, online buyers and sellers have access to a lot of data to help guide their buying and selling decisions.  Finding the average price of a 1984 Chevy Citation (my first car) is a couple of clicks away.  But the problem with data is that it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.  As I mentioned in a previous post, online reviews often suffer from grade inflation, and determining a reliable trend really requires thousands of transactions — not really possible for individual buyers and sellers.  So though it is easier than ever to gather information, that has just resulted in information overload.  This isn’t really a unique problem.  Big businesses have faced this issue for quite some time.  What’s their answer?  Scoring models with sophisticated algorithms.  Or stated more simply, math.

Though our interest in math prevented us from being very popular in high school, it has allowed us to create complex risk models for many types of decisions that big businesses face.  So why not use our nerdy interests to help small businesses sell online and provide comfort to shoppers that would like to buy from a small business, but isn’t sure of the shopping experience he/she will face?  That’s exactly what we did.  I can’t get into the details of the scoring m0del, or others (much like the popular kids in highschool) will just steal our homework.  But in general terms, KikScore takes public information about the online business (e.g. site security, traffic, links, domain registration, privacy policies, consumer reviews) and joins it with permitted information about the business owner (e.g. financial stability, public records)  — ultimately creating a tailored recommendation of the shopping experience to be expected.  This helps potential customers feel more comfortable doing business with a lesser-known small business.  Math…leveling the playing field for online sellers and bolstering trust for online shoppers.  Take that, Geography!

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Posts Tagged ‘trust’

WSJ Article — Online Reviews Suffer From Grade Inflation

A recent Wall Street Journal Article examined a troubling trend with online shopping reviews — that these reviews benefit from higher grade inflation than a star power forward at Duke.  As Geoffrey Fowler and Joesph De Avila write, the average review given is 4.3/5 stars.  There are a handful of explanations offered for this trend, including  psychological — people are more likely to remember positive experiences.  But the most interesting reason offered is that critical reviews are removed from the calculation and reviewers are repeatedly critical are barred from some sites.  While this practice definitely skews the reliability of these reviews, I’m sure it’s similar to the corrective action taken when a rogue Spanish professor tries to fail that same Duke power forward for skipping language lab.  It’s simply not going to happen — or if it does happen, that Spanish professor will not be teaching at Duke very long.

Back to the point.  While shopper/user reviews can be very helpful, if the grade inflation persists, they will just become an empty marketing tool.  Continuing the academia analogy, using these inflated reviews to make shopping decisions (and who to share your personal information with) will be like getting a medical referral from the hacky-sack playing hippie who is in the 7th year of his Pre-Med undergrad.  I’ll go easy on our product pitch, but the ability for these reviews to be marked up (or less than objective) was a big motivation to create KikScore.  More on that later.  Until then, let’s all start providing realistic shopper reviews.

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