by Tom Shackleton
It’s easy to be wary of adding product reviews to your eCommerce store. Everyone has a vision of unfair or biased negative reviews ruining their sales volume, but in reality, product reviews are a great way to drive sales for your store and improving your online reputation.
Here’s why you should be using product reviews for eCommerce:
Build Customer Trust
70% of people consult product ratings or reviews before purchasing, so visitors may be wary of purchasing from a site that doesn’t offer reviews. What are they hiding? Allowing customers to leave reviews of your products and have their voices heard is a great way to build trust among your existing customers and gain the trust of new ones.
Your reviews don’t necessarily have to be all positive. In fact visitors often tend to distrust a product page that has all positive reviews. After all, no product or company is perfect and a 100% positive rating can just look staged. In reality, reviews should take the shape of many differing views and opinions. A good range of reviews is what you’d find on any reputable site.
Improve Your Site's Credibility
Reviews are a great way of improving your site’s standing across the web. There are plenty of external product review sites such as Trustpilot that potential customers may use to search for a credible site on which to make a purchase they’ve already decided on. Appearing credible on these sites is a fantastic way of driving high quality traffic to your eCommerce store.
Using product reviews is a very powerful way of changing perceptions of your brand online. Peer reviews hold great authority amongst customers and simply allowing them on your site can do a lot of good.
Great for Search Engines
Product reviews are a great tool for improving your search ranking and helping your website to stand out in search results. For one thing, they provide a steady stream of fresh content to your site, which can have a big impact on how relevant and credible Google judges your site to be.
Google may also take your online reputation into account when ranking your pages, so having strong review scores could result in you ranking higher in search results.
People are likely to be searching for your product name with the word review when looking for information on your product or a reputable source to purchase from. Implementing product reviews on your site should get you a slice of this search traffic and bring customers who are seriously interested in purchasing to your eCommerce site.
Google even has product reviews show up in search results. This can be done through Google Plus reviews or by adding code provided by Google to your site and is an excellent way to stand out from other eCommerce stores in search results.
Higher Conversion Rate
As mentioned before, customers are more likely to buy from your eCommerce store after reading reviews. This means using reviews can have a positive impact on your website’s conversion rate. Of course, the more visitors you can convert into paying customers, the less you’re spending per purchase to get them there.
Not only that, but customers who come to your site seeking reviews are more likely to be ready to make a purchase as they’ll usually be more serious about your product if they’re looking into details and discussions on the product.
Future Proofing
Customer reviews are already an important part of most eCommerce stores, and they’re only going to become a more significant factor in purchasing decisions. There are many different review platforms such as Feefo and Yotpo that are becoming ever more popular, useful and innovative so online shoppers are beginning to expect reviews when they visit a site. Not having them available is no longer an option.
The form that reviews take is also changing and drawing more and more consumers. The popularity of video reviews is skyrocketing - with retailers beginning to implement them into sites, looking to improve the review experience for both reviewers and shoppers. There’s likely to be a huge community of social media influencers, bloggers, vloggers and other content creators surrounding your industry nowadays. Using the reach and authority of their reviews is a must if you want to position your eCommerce store as a market leader.
How to Use Reviews
The next question is how do you implement them into your site?
Start by taking a look through the different review platforms available (some of them are mentioned above) and pick the one that best suits your needs. It’s then a good idea to incentivise happy customers to leave reviews. You could do this by emailing customers a certain time period after delivery to ask them for their experience or by offering discounts to customers for leaving reviews.
Encouraging reviews is very important because people are generally more inclined to leave reviews if they’ve had a bad experience and not to bother if they’re happy with the product - but by politely asking, most will be more than happy to leave one.
In Summary
It’s understandable that you may feel wary of opening up your products and service to public scrutiny, but reviews are a fantastic way of improving your sales if used correctly.
Have you recently started using product reviews on your eCommerce site? Get in touch with us on Facebook or Twitter and let us know how it’s going.
