A lot of people have been waiting a long time for a product review system that has all the bells and whistles. Currently there is nothing out that that is supported that works well as a review system. Dragon-byte may be the only one that can pull this off properly and I hope this is seriously taken into consideration.
Here's a general overview of what a product review system should be:
Here's a general overview of what a product review system should be:
- Flexible enough to accommodate a variety of data types, including physical products, movies, and businesses, or a combination of data types at the same time.
- An import system that can easily take data from other platforms, like GARS, vba Dynamics, a CMS section, or a plain old XML import. Field mappings should be available in some form.
- Import/sync data with popular product API's such as Google and Amazon.
- Allow import of individual products via name or ISBN
- Ability to display current pricing if product is available via API with buy links. Affiliate ID included.
- Listings pages should be in a structured form, similar to forums - product/business display should have a picture next to the entry, much like this.
- Ability to set fields to display on listing pages
- Custom fields that are searchable and allow different field types & required fields when submitting a product
- Picture attachment ability
- A rating system a la advanced thread ratings, but display the users ratings in the top of their written review
- Rich snippet integration
- CMS/Forum block for new reviews & products
- Option to include user reviews in postbit
- Allow users to select products that they own by category in profile settings & on product display page link ("I own this"), and display in their profile and postbit. Admin controls what fields display in postbit. For example, "Camera" is a category, and user owns camera a. "Lenses" is another category and user owns lens a, lens b, lens c. Only "Camera" is displayed in postbit and links to that camera's page.
- Product compare feature that puts a thumbnail picture of each product at the top and puts fields, custom included, next to eachother
- Product pages have a section to show users who own that product that links to their profile with avatar and username.
- Permissions to allow usergroups to post new products or reviews.
- Permissions to set moderators who are allowed to edit/delete products or reviews.
- Allow linking to a specific discussion forum from product pages and vise versa. Link to product from forum should be a type of widget at the top of the forum. Link to forum from product should display 5 latest topics.
- Allow dynamic linking to product pages based on thread titles and/or thread text and link back to those threads from product pages. Link to product in thread text. Display product widget at the bottom of thread under "Products discussed" which includes a thumbnail picture and latest pricing if available. If more than one product, link to up to x products. Example here and here
- Section for 'related products' on the product pages that automatically links products in the same category based on fields and how similar they are. This should be flexible to allow the admin to set what fields are matched upon. For example, product name - If the name is similar, but different by one number, or color, those products are similar (this could also work for movies). Or if field a is similar to field b, the products are similar, etc. Allow manual updates of similar products.
