I came across a great article recently posted by eMarketer talking about the importance of online reviews to today’s shoppers. Here is one of the charts they published together with Opinion Research Corporation to illustrate how popular reading online reviews is, broken down by category:
Question: How healthy are your sites online reviews?
To answer that question, please see the chart immediately below:
As you can see most of the shoppers they interviewed like to read 4 -7 reviews on a product before purchasing! Do all your products have at least that many independent reviews attached to them? Many of our top performing online stores literally have thousands of reviews to offer potential purchasers!
In terms of reviews and Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE’s) like ours, these findings really point-up something that we’ve known at Smarter for quite some time! Mainly that online reviews are critical for your sites success when it comes to the competitive landscape of eCommerce marketing! Imagine the product you are offering listing on Smarter.com right next to the same or similar product of a competitor. If all other factors were equal and your site offers no reviews and their site offers plenty – which click do you expect the shopper will make? Getting that click is the first step to getting that conversion!
Time and again, we see the merchants that are offering reviews receiving the traffic for their products over those sites that do not offer reviews.
Smarter offers two ways for you to incorporate reviews into your product listings with us. First, we do aggregate reviews from all over the web for your site. So, if you have online reviews posted, even in a variety of places, Smarter will do the work of going out and finding them, and bringing them for display on Smarter once your account is open with us. We update our reviews approximately once a month.
Secondly, Smarter offers 5 basic ways to increase your Merchant Reviews on Smarter.com. The tools that we offer for collecting reviews are all available once you open an account with Smarter. They are listed in your backend SAM (Smarter Account Management) account. Just sign-in to your account and then click on the tab marked, “Feedback Survey Info” for more information!
BTW – here’s the link to the full article I’ve mentioned above: Click here to see full eMarketer article!
Questions? Give me a ring or email at the info provided! Also, if you do not have your account set up with Smarter.com yet, please let me know and I can help you get that started as well!
Happy Reviewing!!
Image Source: eMarketer
