70% of Online Shoppers Read Multiple Product Reviews
An e-tailing group study commissioned by PowerReviews has further revealed the necessity for customer-generated product reviews on e-commerce sites.
It seems the majority of online shoppers want to hear what people like them have to say about the product they’re researching. Almost 70% of customers looked at more than 4 reviews before making a purchase.
The study also gives a sense of how long visitors spend reading reviews before their purchase (50% spend over 10 minutes) and found that most people read reviews once they’ve narrowed down their search to 2 or 3 products.
Just having reviews isn’t going to cut it, though. E-tailers must give the would-be customer something more if they want them to come back to their sites — not just to research, but to buy. If more than 50% of customers spend over ten minutes looking at reviews, that shows they’re looking for more than just an overall “star rating.” For instance, one way of boosting your reviews’ credibility is having a “pros and a cons” field for visitors to fill out. This will show visitors that you welcome criticism and are confident in your products, while making the reviews that much more valuable to other visitors.
Here are some tips and a screencast from Bryan to help plan and optimize your review system.
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Written by:Daniel McGuigan
Interesting… I find myself wondering a lot lately about what e-commerce sites can do to improve the usefulness of reviews. The big problem I have, especially on hotel sites, is that you seem to be able to find a group of people who love and hate just about everything, and so often the reviews (as much as I think I want them) leave me more confused than when I started. Structured feedback like your pros-and-cons idea is definitely a direction I think we’ll see more of.
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Merchants all seem to know that reviews are effective. What they don’t know is how to encourage customers to leave them. Perhaps deploying some of the techniques seen in Bry-an’s video, particularly putting the reviews above the fold, would make the whole process more visible.
Michelle’s comment is dead-on. At Bazaarvoice, our Marketing Services team works closely with every client to deploy tailored strategies from our library of best practices to encourage customers to leave as many reviews, questions, answers, and Stories as possible!
We’ve seen a ton of articles on this exact subject recently. The consumers are definitely gaining more control despite the fact that business could skew some reviews by posting positive ones of their own but like Michelle said, more businesses should encourage their customers to leave positive feedback. It may certainly help their overall sales!
I think it’s also important for a company to have an action plan for bad reviews–if a site just has good reviews, it looks suspicious. However, if management responds to negative reviews in a timely and compassionate manner, it’s like bonus points.
I passed this on to my boss and we are evaluating options for better placed reviews for Volusion’s shopping cart. Thank you.