I’ve been meaning to comment on this for awhile now, so please excuse the delay.

Keep in mind, these are self-reported increases in conversion — according to what I could find, anyway — and it may be confusing based on the graphics that eMarketer came up with to illustrate it in back and white (er, red) terms. The graphic distorts the findings by displaying them as hard fact. So, in my opinion, this research is correlational and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Furthermore, I think it’s pretty obvious that Bazaarvoice has an agenda here. Of course, that’s not to say they’re wrong; just that they seem to have had a third-party (e-consultancy) attempt to verify what they’ve been hearing from clients.

Surveys tend to be flawed in this way to begin with — “believe what they do, not what they say” — but I think it’s interesting that so many B2C’s who’ve implemented customer reviews are this adamant about their value. Still, it would be nice to have some hard numbers to hang our collective hats on.

I track the email marketing campaigns of more than 100 of the top online retailers through my blog, RetailEmail.Blogspot (http://retailemail.blogspot.com), and I regularly see them leverage and promote their product reviews in their emails. Backcountry has a cool feature in their monthly newsletter where they plug a customer review of the month. That’s a nice way to promote excellent reviews.