peer-2-peer Archives

Brand Management and Reputation Management: What’s the Difference?

As every avid LinkedIn user knows, individuals are exercising brand control and reputation management in a way that was traditionally the preserve of companies and corporations in years passed. No longer content to hide behind the brands of big box online platforms, sellers and sharing economy enthusiasts are developing their own, unique identities. It means they can travel across platforms, attract their own buyers and users and ensure product and brand security is dominated by their own decisions - not executives.

So what’s the difference between brand control and reputation management? Brand is how you want the world to see you and your reputation is how the world actually sees you. As far as we’re concerned, brand may get customers and clients to your website or to your product pages, but it’s your reputation that induces them to click through and make a purchase. Brand is the carrot, but getting bites requires you to have a proven track record of sales. Ultimately, it requires people to trust you. Reputation becomes brand when you have a long history of success where your logo, picture and/or name actually create the fuzzy feeling of confidence buyers need to make a purchase.

What IS a brand? In concrete terms, a brand is how people identify you at a glance (or, half a glance nowadays). Scanning through a page of products, companies or platforms, your brand is your logo, name, two line description or the intangible emotion of the viewer. Do they recognize you? Do you interest them?

What IS reputation? Reputation is the impression the viewer or buyer has of you given what they’ve heard or seen before. In many cases, you will have no reputation because they’ve never heard of you. However, all it takes is one bad review for them to have a negative impression and keep on scrolling, no matter how good your brand is. Reputation is what you’ve done, said and these days been before. What you (and your staff) have done in the past influences your reputation. If your product or business has no reputation yet, beginning with what you’ve done before is a great place to start.

Your brand is easier to control than your reputation, because it starts with you. Think carefully about framing before you launch your store, platform or product. Turning your brand around after it’s already out there is like turning a ship away from an iceberg (and we know how that turned out). So what can you do at the design and content stage? A great way to test your brand is to harness the growing community of start-ups providing cheap, instant polling. Why not try Verdict, Voicepolls or Pollfish? These guys let you toss your design around and provide you with quick, actionable feedback. Most of us can’t afford expensive marketing consultants at an early stage, so finding tangible alternatives is critical.

A later installment will deal in-depth with reputation, but for now check out an older piece on reputation dos and don’ts for online sellers.

Brand is the foot you put forward and reputation is the ground you stand on. It’s up to you to make sure you’re doing your utmost to inspire confidence through good design and content. It’s also up to you to make sure your reputation becomes a solid foundation on which to grow, not a mucky pile of quicksand beneath your feet.

Tripda & eRated Global Partner to Certify Trust for Ride Sharing

Hitch-hiking the galaxy has never been safer, thanks to today’s partnership announced by eRated and Tripda. Learn more here!

The world’s leading ride sharing platform, Tripda, and eRated, the global trust certification solution announced their partnership integrating eRated’s trust solution in Tripda’s global marketplace. With the partnership, Tripda is the first car sharing marketplace to add a definitive trust and security solution for its users. eRated allows Tripda passengers and drivers to import their social media identities (Facebook, LinkedIn) and their ratings and feedback from other marketplace transactions ( as in AirBnB or eBay) to bolster trust between them.

Tripda is a genuine ride sharing and carpooling platform for long-distance travel. Drivers can offer empty seats in their cars on trips they are already making, and passengers can search and book seats on rides that are already going where they need to go. Both sides have plenty of information available on the platform to select the travel companions they’d like to ride with, they can read reviews that other travellers wrote, see other users’ affiliation with any organization such as a college or a corporation, view their Facebook profile, check if they have any mutual friends or choose to communicate with them directly before the trip.

Far from creating more friction on the journey to find the right rideshare, the eRated integration is simple and gives drivers easy customization abilities. eRated’s intuitive backend has made it simple for Tripda to roll-out the security solution worldwide instantly, removing the heavy efforts previously needed to rebuild the trust and security of potential riders on a new platform. Eduardo Prota, Tripda’s Co-founder asserted, “we selected eRated as our strategic partner to build Tripda as the most safe and secure ride sharing marketplace in the world. Security is of paramount importance to our users and eRated gives us the authoritative, 3rd party trust-certification our riders need to feel comfortable.”

For eRated, Tripda is the 15th marketplace its partnered with. Sellers on marketplaces that have previously partnered with eRated like eBay and Sidelineswap have seen an increase in transactions by 150%. “Our mission is to increase trust in the sharing economy,” said eRated CEO and Co-Founder Boaz Cohen, “our partnership with Tripda is the first step in building a safer experience for drivers and passengers.”

Contact us at [email protected] to learn more about how you can introduce the eRated widget to your marketplace.

Guest Post for Duct Tape Marketing: Turn Window-Shoppers into Buyers

Increasing conversions online is the most important consideration for online sellers, whether they are working from their own platform, from a major online retailer or in one of the hundreds of new collaborative consumption websites. Turning window-shoppers into buyers is about more than making sure signs are polished and windows are clean: It’s about conveying trust.

UK-based WebRetailer has confirmed once again: Online sellers and businesses convert better the more they are trusted by buyers. The top sellers on Amazon as ranked by Internet Retailing all have feedback which is over 90% positive. Additionally, they’ve also got a track record of hundreds of thousands of reviews. Online sales are like a snowball – the more ball rolls the bigger it gets. So how does trust help to get the ball rolling?

It’s the cozy feeling that separates you from the pack. Unless you’re selling homemade products on Etsy or Hbzy, your products and services are likely very similar to your competitors. Whilst marketing and branding are important, reputation is what differentiates merchants as it’s the one thing they earn through responsible practices and good behaviour. Unlike product pictures or prices – reputation is free, but something that can’t be adjusted by you.

It’s the elephant in the room. You’re doing everything else well. Your tag lines are effective, you’re at or near the top of search results and your photos are dead gorgeous. However, 98.5% of all your visitors are bouncing before they bag your products. The problem is likely that you have one too many bad reviews, not enough reviews or not enough positive reviews. It’s proven. By increasing the number of reviews, you can increase your conversions far easier and more cheaply than by spending more on branding or marketing. Reputation management product users with an enhanced reputation are converting up to twofold better than those relying solely on one reputation. Indeed, by importing reputation data from their other identities, new marketplace sellers are getting their first transaction at least three times as quickly through using eRated.

So how can you do this? Reputation management products allow users to import all of their ratings and reviews from all of their online identities and platforms they operate in. If you are a seller in Amazon and want to increase your conversions in eBay, get a reputation management plugin for free and take your reputation from Amazon over to eBay. Recent case studies have shown that sellers using reputation management tools increase their sales by up to 30%. After price, the second most important consideration for any buyer is trust.

Reputation Management in e-commerce isn’t just about SEO optimization and getting seen through expensive branding and marketing campaigns, it’s about getting the most out of what you already own: Your reputation. So who provides these products? Check out eRated, Traity and Trusttribe.

Users are only now beginning to understand that they can actually use their reputation to their benefit. This is a ripe opportunity for savvy online entrepreneurs to get ahead of the pack and start using a reputation management tool to optimize their conversions through increasing trust with buyers.

Coincidence? World’s Top eBay Sellers are Most Trusted

Perhaps not as well-known as the Forbes and Telegraph Rich List, the UK’s WebRetailer is quietly keeping track of the world’s top sellers, who they are, where they live and what’s brought them to the pinnacle of their success in a hyper-competitive, ever-changing space.

Hot on the heels of the 2015 top Amazon Sellers, the Webretailer team has yet again broadcast abroad the standard-bearers for Amazon’s Professor Moriarty: The World’s Top eBay Sellers. Following the former’s success, they’ve added additional data, helpful graphics illustrating trends and the product verticals that dominate.

So what’s in the data? The world’s top three sellers are in the UK, but the largest proportion of the top 1000 are in China. China dominates cross-border sales, with more than 50% selling with stores in the United States alone. Australia and Europe are also destinations for Chinese cross-border merchants. With little discrepancy, the top three countries for sellers are China, the United Kingdom and the United States.

As for product verticals, the top three are Clothing, Shoes and accessories, home and garden and phones and accessories - sporting goods, collectibles and health and beauty round out the bottom.

The critical conclusion by way of performance is simple and straight from the horse’s mouth:

What makes these sellers the “top” sellers? Well, they have gained the most positive feedback in the last 6 months, and they are all Premium Store owners (or the international equivalent such as Featured Shops in the UK). Feedback volume is a useful approximation to selling volume.

If you want to know you’re eWorth, it’s not a great leap to base that conclusion on what your reputation metrics are. How much you sell depends on your reputation, which lends credence to the importance of reputation management and optimizing sales through aggregating your platform reputations into one place.

Congratulations again to WebRetailer for leading the way in ecommerce performance reporting!

Drive Safe with Tripda & eRated

One of the most famous car ads of all time was the 1987 Michelin tire ad: Because so much is riding on your tires. It reminded motorists that while cars may have thousands of parts needed to keep them running, only four wheels are responsible for keeping a car safely on the ground. Featuring a baby in the ad, it also made the connection between car safety and family safely - this meant that tires are responsible for family safety and you can only trust Michelin to keep your family safe. It’s not hard to see thousands of American families switching to Michelin after that.

Nearly thirty years later, motorists are still principally concerned with safety when they get into a car. What has changed is that it would have been almost unthinkable for four strangers to get into a car together and take a long drive along a lonely road with only a bit of leather seat to separate them. Cars were for families and single guys drag-racing.

These days, an environmentally conscious generation having families later and opting to spend money on things other than four wheels and time at the pump are leading motorists to find new ways to get the most out of their vehicles.

The advent of online marketplaces has met the need to create platforms that connect motorists with spare seats and passengers looking to get from A - B where public transport fails to make the connection. While Europe’s more communal society has advantaged continental marketplaces, the lack of high-speed rail in the US presents an enticing opportunity for marketplaces like Tripda to lead the way.

Tripda values convenience, environmental responsibility, social engagement and safety. Founded in 2014 and powered by Rocket Internet, the world’s largest platform, Tripda’s New York-based team is growing along with its user-base. Tired of not making connections on older platforms and definitely not keen on cramped, smelly buses American commuters are opting for the convenience of a rideshare. They’re making new friends, saving money and travelling with safety, comfort and convenience.

Like four good tires, eRated helps keep drivers and passengers safe by ensuring everyone filling the seats knows one another as much as possible before they meet up. By providing users with data from AirBnB reviews, eBay ratings or social media connections, eRated lets users get to know one another on a deeper level before they set out on their journey together.

Ridesharing is all about unexpected journeys - eRated and Tripda make sure that journey is a safe one.

Ride Sharing: Don’t Sing Alone

Even if you’ve never been to LA, everyone has the image in their mind. Lane after lane, mile after mile of big, gas guzzling vehicles grumbling alone like wallflowers at a high school dance. A grey fog of smog hangs above as stationary as the cars and the drivers sit inside alone, fuming for hours on their way in and out of the city. Or, singing by themselves with the windows up.

If there was a starker image more in contrast with the sharing economy, I’d like to see it.

Car-sharing landing page images always contrast the most - it’s usually a group of relatively young, mid-20s to 30s gender balanced bunch laughing their assess of together driving down a forested road with every seat filled. The idea is that they have never met and are going somewhere together. Are they happy because they’re sharing a joke? or because they’re saving the environment, money, car performance, or the world? Could it be they’re singing together?

The sharing economy began with sharing apartments - but it’s ridesharing where collaborative consumption is ensuring users get the most out of their assets and truly contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and save money.

So what is ride-sharing? Like the sharing economy itself, definitions are fluid and stick about as well as sand to a wall. Most people will immediately think Uber, or Lyft. However, the experts (who are few and far between) would probably not qualify these companies as ride-sharing, but rather “ride-sourcing.” The likes of these companies, Haxi and Sidecar included, are primarily commercial. The driver and the passenger do not share a destination and the relationship is an instantaneous, primarily commercial one. We are not arguing they are not part of the sharing economy, afterall, people are getting the most out of their car and their wallet - but they are not ride-sharing.

So if it’s not uber or lyft, what is ride-sharing? Think carpooling. Most of us have parents or friends who arranged to travel to work together, probably from the suburbs, into the city. In all likelihood it was coworkers or people from the same neighbourhood sharing an origin and destination. What’s changed is that the advent of social media and online marketplaces have allowed people who don’t know each or to share rides. They are sharing long distance drives, from Paris to Berlin for a concert. As more and more people are working from home and going to cities once or twice a week for work, they’re sharing one-offs in and out of town. They’re of course carpooling - because fewer people are choosing to, or are unable to, own cars.

Pioneers in the ride-sharing space are united by a similar mission: That the journey is as important as the destination. In the United States, Tripda is making ride-sharing accessible for everyone by reducing barriers and ensuring drivers and passengers trust one another. With 20 million users, BlaBlaCar in Europe is famous for doing its best to make sure everyone under the same roof gets along, pairing chatterboxes with chatterboxes and the silent types with the, not so chatty. In the UK, GoCarShare and Carpooling are cracking a tougher British market (it just ain’t that big) by focusing on a younger demographic and niche markets, such as students and football fans.

Ride-sharing is a policy area being taken seriously by governments interested in increasing incomes, reducing congestion and combating greenhouse gas emissions. However, the space continues to face challenges by legislators and users alike. Insurance providers are only now beginning to grasp the potential of this new market, whilst governments are still dithering about possible new taxation avenues and managing disruption to conventional services. There’s also that pesky issue of trust between drivers and passengers.

Ride-sourcing is a touchy subject for governments and businesses - it’s future in some cities is still a matter of debate at the moment. Ride-sharing, on the other hand, appears to be taking the quiet, back road to success as more and more like-minded travellers opt to save money, meet friends and cut down on carbon.

Start ride-sharing and stop singing alone (if you dare).

The Universe of Performance Dashboards: Let Us Do the Juggling

Is juggling a skill or a pastime? For freelancers, SMEs, and boutique online sellers, it often ends up being more the former than the latter. Why is that? Because most of us are the CEO, CFO, COO, and the guy that cleans the washroom – all rolled up into one. Most of us won’t end up having a boardroom behind us – it will likely end up being a handful of staff (at best), a supportive network, friends, and probably your kids fixing the tech problems. And that’s just fine.

However, where can we get help to keep all the balls in the air? That’s why new, multi-platform maps offer incredible value to today’s independent entrepreneurs. We may not be able to afford staff, let alone high-priced researchers, but we can set aside enough to get the support we need to gain insights, gather trends, and get more out of what we put into our online strategy.

Whether you call them dashboards, multi-channel maps, or just a bird’s-eye-view to your operations, there are many ways you can streamline your operations through using a multi-platform data aggregator providing insights, trends, and a more comprehensive understanding of your business flow. So what’s out there?

Blogging Metrics: What are your most popular posts? Do people prefer your top ten lists or your morning rants? Where does your traffic come from and who’s sharing your material. Having a better idea of your blog trends will allow you to target your message to your most receptive audience and focus your attention on the most responsive channels. Cultivate a relationship with your biggest fans and get them working for you!

Social Media: This is the most obvious and probably the most necessary one. Unlike other distribution channels, you simply can’t afford to only exist in one social media world. Having a perspective on the universe of social media channels is essential to cross-pollinating through your own channels and through other’s. Are people clicking through to your site? Are you building the right type of audience in the right places? Is your content interesting to more than just you?

Ecommerce: The days of eBay and Amazon being the only ecommerce platforms sellers are operating in are long over. There are now over 1000 marketplaces with over 100 million sellers operating within them – and 90% are selling across platforms. Get an ecommerce platform to track your sales through all verticals; find out which platform is best suited to your products; keep track of and manage your reputation to increase sales; and compare yourself against other sellers.

SEO: You don’t need to be a crafty wordsmith to get more people to view your content or make purchases, but you do need to know what people are looking for, how they’re searching, and what trends you can feed into to advance your landing page in search engines. Speaking of landing pages, is your blog where people find you, or is it through a partner’s site? An SEO dashboard can provide a real-time solution to let you keep track.

Email Insights: Do you know which subject lines are most successful for you? Are you sending from the right username? How often are you ending up in trash and non-primary inboxes? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, you probably need a dashboard to manage the content going to your lists.

Most of struggle with two balls in the air, so why are we trying to keep dozens going at one time? SumAll and eRated are just two solutions available to help freelancers, SMEs, and online sellers keep track of their performance and get the most out of online efforts.

Read more: http://blog.sumall.com/journal/universe-performance-dashboards-let-us-juggling.html#ixzz3ZY8b7f2m

Announcing eRated Profile Pages: The HootSuite for eCommerce

Unless you’ve been an online seller for a long time and have gotten to know the players, experts and gurus, you probably don’t know how well you’re selling compared with others selling similar products or services. What’s even less likely is that you know how well competitors are doing in other marketplaces. One thing’s for sure, you’re looking to become a better seller, but you’ve read all the top ten lists and don’t know where to go. That’s why eRated has created Profile Pages.

eRated’s Profile Pages are the world’s first multi-platform channel providing sellers a comprehensive dashboard to track performance. What does performance mean? The Profile pages let you view your rolling reviews from all of your platforms together. Spot a problem or bad review - innoculate immediately and get your reputation back to where you want it. Track your reputation across time and across platforms - where are selling best and where do you need to improve?

eRated Profile Pages are the Hootsuite for online sellers.

eRated’s Profile Pages make it easier to manage your reputation. How are you perceived across multiple platforms and in ecommerce generally? eRated is the first company to aggregate all your behavioural and social data to give you your eWorth. This is important because it demonstrates your capacity - and how much more room you have to grow.

The Profile Pages aren’t just a calculator or schedule to keep track of things - the Profile Pages improve your reputation. You can contact your clients and friends to request vouches and recommendations regarding your sales history, reliability and even your friendliness and demeanor. In a social world, people want to buy from friendly sellers.

You can connect all your online identities, from your social media accounts to your marketplace profiles. Best of all, you can search for other sellers! Visit other profiles to start building valuable networks and communities, and of course to keep track of your competition.

As always, you can export your reputation data to all of our partner marketplaces. Improve your sales in eBay by aggregating your reputation data in one place through the eRated widget. It’s also easy for online sellers to use eRated to carry their reputation to their own storefront. Keep track of your sales in your shop, as well as in your shop identities elsewhere. Get the most out of your reputation.

eRated profile pages are fun, easy and convenient. As hundreds more shops and marketplaces pop up online, eRated makes it easy for sellers to keep track, improve and reduce stress.

EU Consumer Day: eRated at the European Economic and Social Commission

eRated’s VP Partnerships, Matt Godwin spoke at the Commission’s annual Consumer Day conference on 16th March in Brussels on the topic of ‘New Trends in Consumption’.

Alongside Members of the European Parliament, industry leaders and academics, participants discussed the sharing economy’s disruption to established businesses, government policy-making making and trust in the sharing economy.

The discussion ranged from how to conceptualize the sharing economy to how to insure it. Are platforms where users are making money really the sharing economy, or are they being wrongly included in this rubric? Is this just a case of a rose by any other name?

EU policymakers are currently working on an EU-wide approach to the sharing economy, with EESC staff working towards a report on the sharing economy for 2015. As with the UK, policymakers are not only making the sharing economy a priority, but are putting it at the forefront of packed and dynamic economic and social agendas.

eRated was delighted to be joined by Marco Torregrossa, Managing Director of the European Sharing Economy Coalition. The Coalition was launched in 2013 at a public hearing of the EESC and is the first pan-European coalition of sharing economy organizations bringing together sector stakeholders to present one voice to EU legislators and policymakers.

Governments around the world are seeking a constructive relationship with sharing economy marketplaces and partners. As government’s attempt to find a way to chart a regulatory and legislative course, eRated welcomes the opportunity to play a positive role.

Marco and Matt both emphasized go-forward recommendations, with Matt highlighting recent progress in the UK. Drawing directly from the UK government’s ‘Unlocking the Sharing Economy: An Independent Review,’ Matt echoed the need for governments to make identity data available for sharing economy actors, which will help ensure a safer and more trusted space.

eRated’s mission is to build trust in the sharing economy as it continues to appear on European agendas in the future.

F&%k it with the Sharing Economy

A cubicle is a doorless padded cell with post-it notes and pins, but even padded cells have windows. I spent four years and two months in one and I can honestly say I have almost no memory of it - I papered over it with the last six months of travel like wrapping an empty box with a map of the world. I did what millions of people dream of everyday - I said “F*&% it”. Before you roll your eyes - I’m no superhero and I have no mobile talent whatsoever. I can’t even play the spoons. Also, I don’t have rich parents or a trust fund. So read on, fellow plebs.

Everyone gets through a cubicle day by dreaming of being somewhere else. For years I read all about the guy who quit his City job to start a pub in the countryside, or start cooking at their own restaurant or somehow survive through writing a travelblog. My bitter ass had no idea how to cook and no balls to make the move.

I literally spent four years changing my desktop wallpaper to all the places I wanted to go. Jumping out the window, while often considered, was not an option without a parachute. Six months ago I pulled the usual afterwork chute and retreated to the Carpenter’s Arms to fill the growing chasm where my soul used to be with beer. I had a belly to show for it. On that night I wasn’t alone. My friend Sarah who I’d gone to uni with joined me. It started with the usual gripeing - British pub therapy at its best on a rainy night. She had just come back from a four-day holiday in Barcelona. I asked her where she’d stayed and she said it was the apartment of some retired Brit who was back in London. She found it on AirBnB. The hell?

You stayed in a stranger’s house? Yup, and it was brilliant, she told me. I spent the next hour giving her shit. I wasn’t an adventurous person by nature. Eight months ago, the only spice I had ever tried was pepper and spaghetti bolognaise was an exotic meal.

The next day was a rainy hangover lie-in kind of day. The kind of day where the toilet and the kitchen are the only destination. After four hours on Netflix - I had a look at AirBnB and a bunch of articles on what they call ‘sharing economy’ marketplaces. Where at first I saw pinko-communist socialist nonsense, I began to see an opportunity. I started to see a parachute.

By the end of the day, the sky had cleared and I had a plan. The next day I told my boss I was leaving for six months. With only £826.00 in my bank account - I was going to give online marketplaces a go. With no small amount of anxiety and excitement, I gave family-friendly Half Baked farewells to mates at the office. I’ll never forget their faces.

So how did it happen?

Swap your stuff. Before I hit the road with a oneway ticket to Barcelona, I posted by apartment on Trampolinn, which lets you swap your place with places you’re visiting. I was able to find people to swap with for almost the whole period. In total, I saved about £7300.00 by not having to rent in hotels or hostels. I also got some great advice from the folks I was in touch with about what to see and where to go. I had some stuff I didn’t want to fall into the wrong hands, including my Mum’s. Rather than pay for storage, I found a Shoreditch record store on Storemates with loads of extra space. I saved £86.00 doing this instead of using a storage company. I wasn’t taking much in the way of clothes, so I swapped most of my suits for jeans and tshirts I never thought I was cool enough to wear on SnobSwap. I probably saved £208.00 this way.

Don’t buy anything. The sharing economy didn’t just help me get on the road, it also helped me save money and meet people on the road. Apart from all the drunk Brits and Aussies, Spain was a brilliant last stop out of Europe and an introduction to the Arab World. While I was there, Relendo came to the rescue when I met a Canadian girl who wanted to go camping. I rented a tent, gear and cooking equipment for less than £50.00. Along with some maple syrup.

Don’t ride alone. I ended up using Blablacar a lot on the road in central and Eastern Europe. When you ride with someone instead of renting a car the journey becomes about the conversation. You stop being a tourist and start being a local. When you leave a country you’re leaving your story behind as well as taking stories with you.

Don’t eat alone. WithLocals was another great platform I tried. It was mostly expats that I ended up eating with, but it’s often just as interesting to hear their stories about how they wound up there. Found out that others were catching on was well, including one woman selling homemade crafts on NotontheHighStreet. I learned how to cook on the road and by the last few months I never ate a meal alone - or in a restaurant.

Don’t live alone. A cubicle is designed to make you as alone as possible in a room full of people. The sharing economy is designed to let you connect in a place full of individuals. I used marketplaces to start doing things together with strangers. I met a woman using DateMyWardrobe to find clothes and eDivv to trade cosmetics, as well as a mate who sold cricket bats on SidelineSwap. At the end of the day, people my age are just surviving broke and these marketplaces make things easier.

I also earned credit in these marketplaces by using eRated, which let me build up my reputation across all the marketplaces I visited. It was like getting stamped in another passport. Unlike my real passport, I haven’t lost my eRated score.

It was actually sunnyand warm when I finally got back to London. Weighing in at 145lbs and with the standard scraggy beard no one recognized me. I felt like I was still travelling. I went on to eventually quit my job. I’m not sitting on a mountain of travel debt either. Not everything was perfect, I got robbed and my stuff was stolen, but that might have happened anyway. I wouldn’t trade the friendships I made for the stuff I had stolen anyway.