New service makes it even easier for consumers to find the best local merchants in their community; merchants can now monitor and improve their online perception and local influence
SAN RAMON, CA – Reply.com, the leading marketplace for local advertisers and owner of one of the nation’s largest local directories, MerchantCircle, announced today Merchant Scoring, a new service that empowers consumers to quickly identify the top service providers in their area based on a patent-pending scoring algorithm. Merchant Scoring simplifies a consumer’s search process by eliminating the need to sift through many reviews on multiple sites and helps merchants better understand and improve their presence and local influence on MerchantCircle and across the Internet.
“Until now there hasn’t been a simple and comprehensive platform for consumers to identify the best service providers and merchants in their community,” said Payam Zamani, founder and CEO of Reply.com. “Merchant Scoring will become the universal language for consumers and organizations of all sizes to identify and select the best local merchants. Likewise, the Merchant Scoring solution will act as a tool offering business owners insightful data and simple prompts on ways to improve their online presence.”
How it works
MerchantCircle’s new patent-pending technology dynamically scores merchants based on the quality and quantity of reviews and ratings, awarding a score between zero and 100. It also calculates measures such as local influence, a merchant’s presence and engagement across multiple social and online channels and other social and reputation factors.
Businesses can opt-in their social network accounts to provide additional data points and means for customers to connect with them. Scores are updated in real-time and monitored via a dashboard that also offers merchants feedback, suggestions and prompts to help them improve their scores and increase engagement within their community.
Merchant Scoring features include:
o Merchant Dashboard: MerchantCircle.com users interact with a unique dashboard that features score information, engagement history, and other data.
o Engagement Recommendations: The merchant dashboard offers suggestions for merchants to boost their scores, improve their presence and local reputation.
o Weekly Top 10 List: A list of top 10 merchants is published weekly on MerchantCircle.com highlighting the best merchants by area and category.
o Virtual Badges: Merchants can easily download virtual badges from the dashboard and post their Merchant Score on their company websites, social profiles, and more.
To learn more about Merchant Scoring, visit: merchantcircle.com/corporate/
About Reply.com, Inc.
Reply.com, Inc. operates the leading marketplace for locally-targeted advertisers. Reply.com’s platform provides advertisers of all sizes with a simple and scalable solution for locally-targeted marketing. Reply.com owns and operates many destination sites including iMotors.com, Contractors.com and MerchantCircle.com, which is the largest online network of local business owners in the nation with over 1.4 million member merchants and 17 million monthly local consumer visits. To learn more about Reply.com, please visit www.reply.com
