Because of the B2B nature of the online marketplaces hosted by CompareNetworks inc. (CN), the need for enabling user reviews for products had remained a lower-priority item in the product roadmap. However, CN recently called Calcey into action to help develop this important feature addition, and the functionality was made available to all business verticals serviced by the CN Marketplace platform in the beginning of June-2013.
CN hosts B2B product marketplaces for leading product vendors that operate in the biotechnology space, such as Biocompare, dental compare and American Laboratory.
Site administrators can now design custom user review forms and make them available in the public website. Users can complete a review against a product of his or her choice. A user can support his or her review comments with a gallery of attached images, related to the products that are being reviewed. Site administrators can also define multiple parameters for rating a product, such as its durability and efficiency. Users can star rate the product (range 1~5) for such pre-defined parameters, as well as provide an overall rating. These ratings are displayed against the respective products in various sections of the public website such as in search results.
All submitted user reviews are automatically converted into a neat article format and published alongside the products. Interestingly, site administers can choose to reward product reviewers with online gift vouchers at their discretion, thus encouraging a healthy dialogue between the target users of these B2B marketplaces and the vendors of these products.
This mini-project was a .NET Framework-based development effort, which ran for about three months duration in total inclusive of extensive functional and performance testing prior to release.