Why Online Reviews matter
Many shoppers have been relying on online product or service-related reviews that help them decide if the product is a good buy. Just as important it is for eCommerce storefronts to provide this critical information to online shoppers, it’s as important to a merchant to be able to analyze this data to improve their product line at various levels of supply chain in a B2C, B2B or B2B2C eCommerce-driven world.
Merchants can now propagate each of the product reviews from their storefront to various online review sites such as Amazon, Google My Business, Facebook or Yelp! or be able to pull the comments from Instagram to the storefront, making it easy to find product reviews, resulting in increased online revenue.
Effective Online Reviews
Online shoppers rely on reviews to gain a better understanding of a product or a service, so the more positive reviews you have, the better. These positive reviews will help instill trust for the merchant, increase the reputation of the product and the business as a whole.
Online reviews are as effective as word of mouth. More reviews means more robust the brand or service looks, more online traffic, more sales, increased revenue.
You may be thinking only positive reviews carry weight, hence, as a merchant you may be tempted to suppress the negative reviews. Note that negative reviews can be as effective as the positive ones as there are shoppers who look for specific negative reviews of a product or service. Negative reviews do get the same weight as the positive ones, with shoppers spending longer time on negative reviews and also having an increased conversion rate, as the study shows.
Responding to negative reviews or handling them in an effective manner is another way of reassuring the online shoppers that you care for their feedback and you are there to provide them a better experience next time they come back, at the same time fixing the issue they faced in real time. 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated.
Turn on Online Reviews for Your Storefront
Responding to positive or negative reviews increase customer advocacy. It’s a good measure of impactful sales and the efficiency of your after-sales-service. An online store with no reviews is not going to be as effective as the one with reviews. The following key points provides an idea on the advantages of turning on online reviews for your storefront.
- Increased sales
It’s a pretty well-known fact shoppers make decisions based on reviews posted by other shoppers. Reading positive reviews increases confidence and sale of similar products or services, ensuring they are not swayed by advertisers or marketing.
Keep in mind not all reviews could help increased sales especially if a report such as this suggest that 61% of the Amazon reviews are fake.
- Increased Confidence
Building consumer or customer confidence is imperative in a highly competitive eCommerce world. Based on a survey by Forbes, 88% of online shoppers trust reviews as much as personal recommendation. The global ecommerce market reached nearly $3.5 trillion in 2019. There are trillions of global brands in millions of categories, and a consumer finds it very difficult to choose between products without validated reviews.
Increasing customer confidence increases the trust factor, thus increasing the chance of purchasing the product that has positive reviews, by nearly 98%. Two-thirds of them read more than six reviews to make up their mind. And 14% of them read more than 20 reviews.
- Decision-making model
Reviews provide information about your business while improving the SEO of your online store as well. Come up with an effective decision-making model to go over the impact of online reviews and strategies, that you could implement encouraging customers to choose your products.
It’s very important to read the reviews in detail, that helps understand customer needs. If the customers are searching for information, help them find it. When customers are shopping around, and the review sites are riddled with bad reviews, rest assured customers will be looking for alternatives. Encourage customers to write reviews after every purchase by offering incentives through special offers, discounts on next purchase or for telling their friends about the purchase.
- Enable problem-solving
Respond to all complaints, ensuring customers do not feel they are talking to a wall. No one is perfect and customers understand problems cannot be solved immediately, however these are important to be taken care so that you do not lose your valuable customer.
Use the opportunity to solve a problem with the product or service to build rapport with your customers. Responding to good or bad reviews definitely connects with your customers. User reviews can be used to generate FAQ’s. And these can be used to discuss how to use the product purchased or how to choose different products based on the needs.
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