What benefits do we have thanks to comment monitoring in e-commerce?

I’ve been connected to e-commerce for many years, however I never read reviews (comments) before shopping online. What’s more I thought that nobody does it.  According to me writing reviews is only useful in the case of Ceneo or Allegro, where the number of reviews can tell us how popular and reliable a particular store is. According to Whitepress survey, 70 % of users rate a store on the basis of reviews.

It lasted until one of customers ordered us to analyse the impact of number and quality of reviews on product conversion at the store. We’ve conducted an analysis in the group of about 20 000 products from 11 product categories.

The analysis consisted of two stages:

1. The analysis of historical data
2. The research study of impact of increasing the number of reviews on conversion

And one more thing – the analysis covered the quality of reviews, without getting into details. The review had to be of a proper length and had to contain keywords referring to a particular category. We assumed that the review, which gives no information about the product (for example ‘It’s a nice product’) has a low impact on conversion.

The results surprised me. The products with more good quality reviews had actually a higher conversion than those which didn’t have reviews or whose reviews were of a poor quality. The increase in conversion depended of course on product group, the highest increase was noticed among household articles.

In the second part of our study, we added good quality reviews to about 100 products. What’s more, we divided this group into subgroups, because several different types of reviews were added (for example: those concerning the uniqueness of a product or those concerning competition and so on). As a result, conversion increased in the case of 83 % of products, and in the case of 11 % it increased significantly.

So what does comment /review monitoring give us ?

• The increase in conversion – better sales and better product positioning at the store
• The possibility of a quick reaction (writing an answer) to negative reviews
• Quick information from the market concerning possible problems with products
• Information about quality of service in a given store (if reviews aren’t moderated)
• Market trends and information about that which products are popular at your competition
• Positive impact on Google positioning

So it’s worth motivating customers to leave reviews of products at our store, because it gives us a lot of benefits. If you don’t have such a module at your store, you can always use for example Opineo.

 

Benefits of having more reviews on your website:

• The increase in time of being at our online store – users are interested in reviews, they read them to see what others wrote about a given product
• More unique content – it supports all SEO actions
• The possibility of rating integration with Google

We will write about that how to get good quality reviews soon. However if you want to analyse new reviews you can use our tool -Price Expert. It enables you to analyse reviews in different online stores, price comparison websites and so on. Thanks to that we have a full market view in one place and we don’t have to do it manually.