Kiddicare

10 ways to encourage customer reviews online

Customer reviews are a hugely important in ecommerce for improving your conversion rate, and can lead to an uplift of 18% in sales.

Research has shown that 61% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase decision and 63% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site that has user reviews.

Annoyingly though, customers generally can’t be bothered to leave their feedback. As such you need to find ways of encouraging your customers to leave their feedback without coming across as desperate.

It’s a topic we’ve previously touched on in posts looking at how to organise ecommerce product reviews and how to optimise reviews for higher conversion rates.

And here are 10 tips to help you drive up the number of reviews on your site…

Personalisation is key theme in Morrisons’ first foray into ecommerce

When Morrisons bought Kiddicare in 2011 one of the main motivations was to take advantage of the latter’s expertise in ecommerce.

Despite the fact that Morrisons is the UK’s fourth biggest grocery retailer, it still doesn’t sell groceries online.

However Morrisons finally took its first foray into ecommerce towards the end of last year with the launch a new Wine Cellar business.

The main feature of the site is product recommendations based on the customer’s answers to a taste test. There are just three questions that ask what type of hot drinks the user prefers, whether they like salt and their preference for sugary soft drinks.

Mothercare to focus on e-commerce as it shuts 111 stores

Mothercare has announced plans to shutdown 111 UK stores as it moves to become a more streamlined business with a greater focus on e-commerce.

The news comes after the maternity and childrenswear retailer reported that full year like-for-like sales for 2011 dropped 6.2% in the UK.

It estimates that the ‘store reduction’ programme, which includes closing 36 Mothercare stores and 75 Early Learning Centres, will help boost profits by £13m by 2015.

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?

Kiddicare allows shoppers to pay by cash

Baby products retailer Kiddicare, has recently introduced the option of cash payments on its website, by buying a voucher and entering the voucher number during the checkout process.

The vouchers will be available to purchase from more than 21,000 PayPoint outlets which includes many local shops and petrol stations. According to the retailer, this alternative payment method has been introduced as a result of customer demand.