Fifteen of the top twenty French websites (in terms of visitor numbers) allow customers to provide feedback about their stock. A shop can boost its conversion rate by 40% through customer feedback (Olimeo study). These figures should be enough to convince you to put a customer review on your product pages! Read our 4 tips and make the most of your customer reviews to increase sales and look after your reputation.
1-Customer Reviews for Selected Products
Before setting up a customer review tab on your product pages, ask yourself the following question: Do I need to publish customer reviews for the products I sell? Sometimes a product review will be based on personal opinion. What your website visitor thinks about an item of clothing, an accessory or piece of furniture is of no informative value (unless it is about the quality of the fabric or equipment for example) and therefore will not help buyers to make a decision about placing an order.
Adding Facebook Like and/or Suggest to Friends button may be more suitable for this type of product as they allow users to express their personal opinion.
Customer reviews are useful when buying services and certain products (high tech ones for example) as they help the internet user choose between several options.
2-Instil Customer Confidence By Showing How Honest You Are
If you are going to add customer reviews to your product pages then you must publish them exactly as the internet user wrote them even if they are negative. This honesty demonstrates your professionalism and will instil customer confidence thus making them more inclined to buy from your website.
3-The Advantage of Having a Testimonials Page
Allowing internet users to publish customer reviews on your product pages can be risky especially if your shop doesn’t get much traffic. Why? Customer reviews can only benefit your online shop if they are on the majority of your product pages. A shop whose product pages have no reviews creates distrust as visitors question purchasing from your website.
Contact your customers and ask them to post their reviews on your website. You can motivate them by sending them promotional offers (free delivery, promotional code). Provide your customers with a checklist to score with some criteria (value for money, performance etc.) so they can mark your products quickly.
If you have a small business and your website does not have much traffic then we advise you not to add reviews to your product pages. Instead you could have a page for customer testimonials. Contact your customers and ask them to provide feedback (3-4 lines) about the quality of your product and service. Beneath each comment you should write the customer’s full name and the date that you received their testimonial.
We should warn you that some types of positive feedback from customers, such as “the jumper is nice” or “it’s a good product”, can reduce your sales. Customers find this sort of feedback unhelpful and tend to stop shopping as much on the website in question. According to a study by NYU Stern School of Business, there is a 0.2% reduction in sales! This study also shows that a well-written and well-argued negative comment can increase sales. The customer can assess the risk thus feeling confident and more likely to make an order.
4-Use Social Networking Sites
Add the Facebook comment box to your product page so your shop and your customers interact more. The comments that your customers post will appear on both your product pages and your customers’ profiles. This function increases your shop’s visibility and your presence on social networking sites.
Facebook Comments
So what have we learnt from this? In most cases customer reviews give your website a good reputation. Apart from the extra profit it can give you, you also get feedback about your products, your customers and the quality of your service. Follow these 4 rules to use customer reviews wisely and reap the rewards.
We would love to hear what you think!
Write to Paul: http://www.prestashop.com/forums/user/288634-ppetchot/