Online Customer Reviews Are Important: Read Why and How
Enabling reviews on your web site can be an important tool towards helping customers shop, shop more and shop confidently.
Andy Chen, CEO and Founder of PowerReviews shares his insight about reviews on web sites.
Explain how customer reviews work? I suppose that for each product a company sells, customers can rank it and talk about it? Like a customized epinions or something?
In a nutshell, PowerReviews provides a white-label Customer Reviews solution (in addition to Q&A and SEO) to retailers and brands to enable their customers to read and write reviews, including a star-rating, comments, pros, cons, uses, images, videos) on their website….just like you can do on Amazon or Epinions. The difference is that we have a tag-based review system that produces a much more relevant and rich review, that is more valuable to the shopping process.
How important are customer reviews vs having a good product description, good photographs and other features?
I’d say that the customer reviews are *almost* as important as good descriptions / product images. The first need, of course, is to know WHAT you are buying (description, images help), the next need is to know IF it’s a good purchase and will suit your needs (reviews fill this need). Both are essential to the shopping process.
Here are some stats that demonstrate the ESSENTIAL nature of customer reviews:
- Nearly 9 of 10 US online buyers read customer reviews at least “Some of the Time” before making a purchase9
- Reviews were the most-desired web functions for US Internet users questions in the third quarter of 200710
- More than one-half of those US online shoppers surveyed, read user reviews as part of their product research11
- Customer satisfaction was 11% higher among visitors who said they had seen customer reviews on a site12
- 70% of online shoppers actively seek out customer reviews before they buy13
What about negative customer reviews. Should they be allowed?
Absolutely. First of all, the majority of reviews are positive, so it’s not a major issue (~87% or 4 or 5 star, average rating is 4.2 stars). Secondly, we have done repeated studies that clearly show that customer LOSE TRUST in reviews if they are all positive, and believe that the negative reviews are being filtered. This results in a lower conversion rate, because shoppers will leave the site to find unbiased reviews elsewhere. Lastly, negative reviews are not always bad…most of the time, they point out specific use cases that actually help the shopper figure out the RIGHT PRODUCT.
What are the technical steps to implementing reviews? I assume there is the ecommerce database of products and somehow Power Reviews integrates with it?
For our PowerReviews Express, the implementation is dead-simple. We have had clients launch within 30 minutes of signing up. The effort required is comparable to adding Google Adsense to your site….set some configurations on our dashboard, design a template and drop some Javascript onto your site. We work with the retailers’ existing assets of have created partnerships to minimize the effort/integration. For product feeds, we use the Google base or Affiliate feeds, and for email integration, we provide an integrated wizard with Vertical Reponse, and the content hosting is provided by Akamai.
Recent Comments