With customers buying more products online without seeing them in real life, customer reviews of products and services are now becoming more and more important to any ecommerce website. Its been shown that before buying a product or service, over 60% of all customers will read online reviews before making a decision. That figure alone just shows the importance of utilising a good quality reviewing service.
Bad vs. Good ecommerce Reviews
- Good Reviews – Obviously good reviews are worth their weight in gold, but be weary. Too many good reviews not balanced out with bad reviews can often make the product seem to good to be true! It’s surprising but if a product has nothing but, WOW 5 stars some customers can be put off by the lack of realism. You must also be aware of one-word positive reviews as many customers feel that these are simply robots designed to boost sales. Realistic 1-2 paragraph reviews are the best.
- Bad Reviews – A bad review no matter how you look at it is bad, but it gives you the opportunity to make something good out of it, try and resolve the issue that caused the bad review. Often by doing so customers will then leave another good review or if given the option, amend their bad review saying how great customer service is. Also use bad reviews to keep balance and realism between your good & bad reviews. Ideally have 80% positive and 20% negative.
How to get customers to review on you ecommerce website
Getting a customer to review a product is often the bane of any ecommerce website. Try using incentives such as competitions e.g. “review your recent purchase to be in for a chance to win a new TV”. Emailing the customer after they have made a purchase asking them to rate or review the service is another effective way to gather those precious reviews. A final method is to ask them to rate or review a product or service on the page itself. Either by giving the product a star rating or the option to write a quick review.
Presenting your ecommerce reviews
After collecting all of these reviews you need an effective way of displaying the information to the other customers who will be using the reviews. Ideally a self-managing service where the customers themselves decide which reviews are most helpful is the best solution, an example of this is used by amazon. Alternatively graphs and diagrams showing the amount of reviews and their usefulness can be implemented. Keep with tradition, star ratings work across all cultures, the more stars the better the product! Try and show the customer either a average star rating or be clear which start rating is most popular. The last thing you want to do is create a confusing way of displaying your ratings, after all good ratings will increase conversion so are worth investing time in.
Want any more information about ecommerce solutions Contact StoreExpress on, Telephone: 0845 050 3500, Fax: 0845 838 2701, Email:sales@storeexpress.com.