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GoRated Gets Users to Rate Websites in the Philippines
So you’re an online entrepreneur. You’ve got your products and services, high quality and in demand. You’ve got your cool, well designed website in place, complete with email support and PayPal integration. You even have a discount program and free delivery service, all the more to entice buyers to take a bite. So how come nobody’s biting? Unfortunately, in this day and age, having an online presence alone isn’t enough to guarantee sales. Online competition can be even more rabid than traditional businesses, so customer trust has to be built. You could go the old fashioned way, email a couple of customers, ask for a flattering testimonial, and apic, which you can post on your site for all the world to see. But this can take some time, waiting for a reply, to format the testimonial, and load it onto your site. To put it simply, their product is a small widget that appears on your website allowing your users to rate and give testimonial to your website, it’s simple and free. GoRated.Ph, which recently won in Echelon 2013 Philippines Satellite, aims to make this process easier, near instantaneous, and hassle free.
Back in June of 2012, founders Ragde Falcis and Manly Candelaria first came up with the idea of creating a rating platform, very much like Yelp.com. Though the duo attempted to push new features left and right, like interacting with users on how to improve the service, and simple marketing via social networks. By February of this year however, things were not proceeding as expected, and the pair decided to try other ideas. One option they did not attempt however, was throwing cash at the problem, by sponsoring posts on Facebook and Google Ads. What they finally settled on was a widget, specifically a rating widget. According to Ragde:
GoRated.Ph is a call-to-action for our target customers and our URL at the same time. What we do is we provide rating widget for websites that helps them collect customer testimonials.
Any site, be it e-commerce, blog or forum, can sign up for the widget, all you need is a Facebook account. You create an account with your FB login, specify your business category, name and URL. From your GoRated account page, you can copy your widget’s code for embedding. Embedding itself can be done from several platforms, Blogger, tumblr, intuit, WordPress, yola, WiX, Jimdo and webs. Embed your code, and presto, instant GoRated widget on your site. Customers can then instantly post a rating, from 1 to 5 stars, as well as a testimonial, which is automatically linked to their FB account, complete with profile pic. And you’re not even limited to one widget per account! You can create as many as you want, for as many sites as you want, all accessible from your account. Note however, that GoRated is currently finalizing rates and payments methods for the use of their widget. Ragde Falcis elaborates:
For the local market, we will charge Php 99/month (US$ 2.39) for premium version of the rating widget. We are in the process of finalizing the details on our payment gateway, once we get our payment gateway ID then we are good to go.
There are already several popular websites using the GoRated widget, amongst them Galleon, Philmusic, The Technoclast, Devcon, and Stream Engine Studios.com. GoRated also counts Philmusic and Xend as its distribution partners. But is GoRated the way to go for your business? After all, there are other rating services on the net. The aforementioned Yelp and RateLobby offer similar services, and have the benefit of experience on their side as well. But Falcis still thinks they’ve got the right model:
There are a couple of startups that help websites in collecting testimonials from their customers but all of them are based from Australia, the UK and the US. Here at GoRated we use our own Social-Reputation algorithm that makes the testimonials social-proof and it identifies who are the fake raters. To monitor rating widget engagement, we have analysts that will tell website owners on how engaging the rating widget is.
Having only been active for a few months, it’s probably too early to tell if GoRated is really all it’s cracked up to be. A quick peek at their recently rated page shows a huge list of establishments, 99.9 percent of which appear to have gotten 5 star ratings. I’d like to think that these places are really fine establishments, but I expect to find an average or bad rating every now and then too. I even tried creating my own account, for my personal site, and giving myself a rating. Of course, I gave myself five stars. Nice concept and implementation, let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into just another local Facebook fad.
The post GoRated Gets Users to Rate Websites in the Philippines appeared first on Tech in Asia.
