The company is focusing on three areas to drive growth. First is syndication of its reviews data to third parties such as Google Products, Bing Shopping, TheFind, and ShopWiki (all current deals). Syndication increases the influence of the brand, increases traffic, and increases the importance of the company’s Merchant Member reputation management subscription program for online retailers. Second is social media: ResellerRatings has begun to add various social features to the site to make it easy for reviewers to share their reviews with their social network and to see which online retailers are trusted by their friends. Last is referral partnerships: The company will partner with any other company that already claims substantial online retailers as customers, with the rationale that their customers need ReselleRatings’s reputation management tools, and ResellerRatings can share in subscription revenue, offering the partner an incremental revenue source.

Wainner, who is the CEO, is also expanding the management team. Until now he has been the entire team, managing a virtual company of seven to ten people on his own. This year, he is making strides to shift the company into a functional structure to enable accelerated growth. He has hired people in areas such as Web development, design/UX, project management, and social media marketing and has identified a candidate CTO.

With the two developments discussed above, Wainner believes that it can now be said that ResellerRatings has a substantial impact on the click-through rates and overall performance of every online retail Google AdWords, Google Products, Bing Shopping advertiser. Wielding this influence has significant financial value to any number of large brands (e.g., Yahoo! Store, Yahoo! Shopping, Microsoft, Nextag, Pricegrabber, Shopping.com, eBay), via acquisition. The acquirer would obtain 450,000 high-quality customer reviews of which 80% are positive, a robust reputation management customer interaction platform, 600 online retail monthly subscribers with associated recurring revenues, and the ability to drive substantial performance and CTR increases for every AdWords, Google Products, and Bing Shopping advertiser. Or, for similar brands that don’t yet have their hand in online retail (e.g., Yelp), an acquisition would enable their entry into the market.