20 ways to get reviews from customers
The first step in getting a product or service reviewed is to realise that people don’t actually want to review it.
Instead you need to give them a reason to write about you. Once you look at reviews in this way it’ll become easier to identify opportunities.
This post highlights how to do this with customers.
Yelp and OpenTable: is a dinner date inappropriate?
Last week, popular reviews site Yelp announced that it had teamed up
with OpenTable to offer Yelp users the ability to book restaurant
reservations through OpenTable directly on the Yelp site.
A Yelp-OpenTable relationship is one that some have speculated about for some time now, and given that 29% of the businesses reviewed on Yelp are restaurants, the integration between the two services seems like a no-brainer.
Site review: Kiddicare.com relaunch
Baby products retailer Kiddicare.com has just relaunched its e-commerce site, with an emphasis on improving the site's merchandising tools and product images.
Kiddicare is a retailer that does a lot of things well online, such as offering as many payment options as possible, and organising product reviews effectively, so I've been seeing how well the new version of the website shapes up...
How to organise e-commerce product reviews
User reviews are a well proven sales tool; there are plenty of surveys that show how important they are to customers when making a purchase decision, but what is the best way to help customers make sense of reviews?
Amazon uses the 'was this review helpful?' option to great effect, which helped users to make sense of large numbers of reviews and, according to Jared Spool, added $2.7bn to the online retail giant's bottom line.
When retailers get to a certain number of reviews on product pages (perhaps 15-20) some organisation is required to make them more meaningful to other shoppers, so how are other e-tailers handling this?
How Amazon made $2.7bn with one small tweak
User reviews have proven to be an effective sales driver, but there is more to it than just adding them to product pages. Once you start to get large amounts of reviews you need be able to sort them in a meaningful way for customers.
Usability expert Jared Spool has a great example of how Amazon managed to solve this problem for its customers and add $2.7bn to its bottom line.
How to attract more product reviews
Consumer product reviews are a proven sales driver, and are a must have for online retailers, and more and more have been adding reviews to their product pages recently.
It depends on which study you read, but up to 90% of online shoppers use reviews before buying, and they can cause an uplift in conversion rates.
Having the functionality that allows users to write reviews on your website is one thing, but you need to have enough of them on your product pages to make it a more useful resource for shoppers, so how can you persuade more people to review your products?
