Ratings, reviews, and product popularity influence the buyer’s decision. No one likes to take risks, especially when it comes to buying consumer goods or new items. Therefore, before adding a product to the cart, the average user will pay attention product’s rating in the product card or go to Google to search for reviews.
In this article, we will share some useful statistics that will demonstrate the relationship between reviews and sales. Also we will tell you why it is worth checking, how things are with competitors’ reviews and how automation simplifies the review monitoring.
Rating and your sales: is there a connection?
E-commerce analysts often cite reviews as the second most important factor influencing the purchase decisions after price.
Small Business Trends found out that 50 or more reviews can increase your conversion rate by 4,6%.
According to data published by Voyado Group, only 12% of online shoppers do not look at reviews before buying a product and 85% of respondents read at least 10 reviews about a product that interested them.
Researchers from the Spiegel Research Centre add: products with reviews are purchased 270% more often than those without reviews. If we are talking about the more expensive segment, this indicator increases to 380%.That is why some online stores and marketplaces put the rating and review count on the most prominent place in the product card.
Source: Amazon.com
How the review counthelps to increase sales
1. Reviews are perceived as personal recommendations. If we are talking about reliable reviews from real users, and not about so obviously paid “reviews”, they can build costomer’s confidence in the product . For example, 49% of BrightLocal online shopping customers said that they trust reviews as much as advice from a friend or relative, and 28% — as an article written by an expert.
And how to recognize fake reviews? Not so easy, considering that even a real customer could write only “Terrible” or “Excellent”. However, first of all if the reviews aretoo long, purely positive or negative, vague worded and lack a description of specific product features, it does not build confidence.LinkedIn advises to pay attention to the large number of reviews with very similar wording, as well as the overwhelming amount of reviews on the product that have just appeared on the site.
2. No reviews — no sales.
Everything is simple here: not all buyers are inclined to take a risk and choose a new product that no one has used before, and the higher the price segment, the higher the probability that sales will be low. And vice versa, as soon as a new product receives a rating and positive customer reviews, the number of completed orders begins to increase.
By the way, if you plan to start selling a new product on the Ukrainian market, you may encounter an interesting feature: while this product has no rating on Rozetka.com.ua, there are no sales. The fact is that buyers quite often use the leading sites, where a large amount of traffic is collected, as a “search engine” for reviews to make a purchase decision. And as soon as reviews appear on such marketplaces, sales throughout the market increase.
Why a product with reviews becomes more visible
If users do not just rate the purchased product but write a short review in which they share their experience of using the purchase, they create additional content for your site. This content is immediately taken into account by search engines — here’s why:
Everyone loves something fresh, and search engines are no exception. For Google, reviews on your site are unique and fresh content, which also appears regularly.
Unintentionally, the buyers are working on the SEO optimization of your web resource, because very often in their reviews they use the same keywords while looking for your product.
In addition to highly competitive short queries, reviews often contain long-tail phrases that will help your target audience find your product more quickly and easily.
Not all reviews are equally useful. What to do with the negative ones
The more reviews, the better the sales and visibility of the product are. But there is a nuance: not only quantity is important, but also quality. Negative reviews and low ratings have a bad effect on the popularity of the product. Thus, Small Business Trends found out in 2017: just one negative review can lead to the loss of almost 22% of potential customers.
However, there is also good news: users do not really trust products that receive “5 out of 5 stars” from hundreds and thousands of customers. Therefore, buyers sometimes specifically look for negative or neutral ratings and perceive them as evidence of the reliability of the information on the site. Analysts are sure that the product will be purchased with the greatest probability when its rating is in the range of 4.0-4.7 points. A lower and a higher rating leads to a decrease in the probability of purchasing the product.
Negative and neutral evaluations have the right to exist, but it is worth making sure that they do not become too multiple. And be sure to respond to them as quickly as possible.For the manufacturer, negative reviews also provide feedback, which can be useful for improving the product or analyzing the feasibility of a further release.
How to work with reviews?
The response to the review is an additional plus to the reputation of both the store and the vendor.
Show your customers that you value them by making sure to process all the questions and feedback you receive. People like to have their comments noticed, so don’t ignore positive feedback thinking only problems and negativity are worth considering — thank buyers for their feedback.
For multi-brand shopping platforms, it is important to ensure that vendors have the opportunity to respond to user comments and questions as this will increase brand trust and loyalty to the online store.
Avoid templates — they annoy users. Develop scripts to respond to different types of feedback, but try to personalize your messages rather than sending everyone the same response.
If a negative review is received or a customer asks for advice, offer a solution to the problem as this will reduce the negative impact of the information in the review on other users.
Was the customer dissatisfied? Sometimes a thorough analysis of the user’s problem is enough to find out that, for example, the problem is not the product or service, but the incorrect use of the product.
Working with reviews in Pricer24
Automation makes it possible to get up-to-date data and assess the situation as often as you need it. Knowing the average rating and the number of reviews that products receive on various trading platforms, you can:
1. Analyze how interested the buyers are in your product line. If the product receives a lot of feedback or questions, then the interest of the target audience is quite high, and vice versa.
2. Identify negativity that your team or partner is not working through.
All this makes it possible to create a more balanced strategy for working with a certain product or category.
Let’s consider examples.
Use case 1. Stimulation of new product sales by the vendor
The situation is as follows: the task is to increase the sales of new products that have been presented on the sites of your partners for a month. You open the “Market Analysis” report in Pricer24 and see the number of reviews and ratings for these products.
By comparing with competitors’ alternatives on the largest trading platforms, you understand what KPIs you need to achieve according to feedback, so that your new products are able to compete with competitors’ products with similar performance characteristics. You decide:
● to increase the rating and encourage customers to write reviews (for example, through communication with customers after purchase: according to Podium, 77% of your customers will easily review a product if they are simply asked to do so);
● to expand and improve the quality of content on partners’ sites, because perhaps buyers do not receive complete information about the product and all its features.
Use case 2. Entering the market with a new category (for an online store or distributor)
You want to market a new category. Thanks to data from Pricer24 based on reviews, you can understand which competitor’s products attract more interest from users and, for example, stock such popular items.
Resume
Tracking ratings and reviews for products you work with or plan to work with will give you the opportunity to adjust and optimize your sales strategies. Monitoring quantitative indicators, such as the number of reviews or the average rating, will help increase your sales, because it will provide the necessary data for the further work with the product and customers. It is also useful to regularly monitor the competitors and large platforms in order to stay abreast of the main trends. And, of course, to increase product ratings to increase sales and, as a bonus, to get better visibility of products in search networks.
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