Offering a ratings and review system on your e-commerce site can be an effective way to get your customers to champion your brand. It also offers you the opportunity to actively engage those customers in dialogue about what they like, and what they dislike, about your products and services. For SEO purposes, ratings and reviews also keep your web content fresh and can help generate conversions.
Over on SmashingMagazine.com, Rung András discusses (with some great examples) how adding user feedback to your e-commerce site is an effective way to facilitate customer engagement, build brand loyalty and ultimately, drive sales.
The impact peer recommendations have on purchasing decisions is well cited. András points to the “Amazon effect”, a phrase coined by Joshua Porter in his book Designing for the Social Web. It describes the tendency for people to commence their online shopping or research on Amazon.com first, not because it’s the best place to buy products online, but because people find the site to be a comprehensive, useful and trusted source of product information.
It should go without saying that negative reviews and ratings are actually a good thing and not something to try and prevent other customers from seeing. Unless the reviews are untruthful or abusive, you should not delete them from your site. Says András:
In the absence of negative reviews, visitors will assume that all of your reviews are fake. No service or product is perfect. Potential customers want to know what could go wrong with it. But if they cannot sympathize with a negative reviewer, they may be inclined to purchase your product...if you have a substantial group of enthusiastic reviewers, the good reviews and positive effects will drown out the negative reviews.
With our CommerceLive solution, we’ve incorporated the best practices in terms of how to implement ratings and reviews.
Ratings – Customers can easily add product ratings without interrupting their main reason for visiting your site. Ratings are also an easy way to collect valuable product opinions from customers. The ratings are always shown in the section where the product description is listed.
Reviews – Time is of the essence when soliciting reviews from your customers. CommerceLive enables customers to easily submit and preview reviews before publishing.
CommerceLive also further facilitates customer engagement by making product reviews sharable. That means providing the ability for customers to publish and share reviews on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and/or providing the ability to “email to a friend”.
Read more on how easy it is for business users to manage Ratings & Reviews in the CommerceLive Admin Menu (screenshots included).
To engage customers online - whether it’s via your e-commerce site, social network or other online community - the guidelines are always the same: be transparent, open-minded, authentic and responsive. If you invite your customers to leave reviews and to rate your products while visiting your e-commerce site, let them know you are aware of their feedback - positive and negative - and that you appreciate their willingness to share their brand experiences with you and other customers.