More than 60% of Spanish consumers check the reviews of other shoppers before buying online, meaning that as an online merchant it is essential for you to display customer reviews in your store to ensure a high rate of sales and conversions.
In this article you will find out more about the different types of reviews that exist, the benefits they offer to businesses, ways to collect them and how to display them on multiple channels.
Contents
In eCommerce we have two different types of customer reviews:
Store or service reviews: they reflect the quality of the store's service. For example: customer service, deliveries, return process, etc.
Product reviews: refer only to the quality and performance of the products.
Each of these types of reviews provides valuable information for the benefit of both consumers and online merchants, which leads us to our second section.
When it comes to making decisions, most people need confirmation from third parties, which is also what happens with online shopping.
Customer reviews help to guide the shopper through their buying journey while providing important information about the store's reliability, service and product quality. Besides providing social proof to consumers, they also offer many other benefits to businesses:
Before starting to collect reviews with a review system provider, you should consider the following:
Google Partner
As we mentioned in the previous section, reviews can greatly impact your site's SEO and SEA, so choosing a provider that has partnered with Google is essential to attract the attention of potential customers with those eye-catching Google star ratings.
Automated review collection
It is quite likely that if you are not asked to rate a certain store/product, you are not going to rate it on your own initiative, no matter how good the quality is. So, your review system provider should include an automated process for sending out review request emails, once your customers have received and tested the product.
Truthfulness of reviews
With the European Omnibus Directive that came into legal force on May 28, 2022, all online stores that collect reviews are now required to inform consumers about the authenticity of these reviews and the steps that are taken to verify them.
Have we convinced you to start collecting reviews? It' s the moment to play it safe!
With the Trusted Shops review system, you can rest confident that only customers who buy from your store can rate you, since each review is submitted to an authenticity control. Trusted Shops is one of the few Google Partners worldwide, which means that you can also display your review stars on Google in order to drive more traffic to your store.
Last but not least, here are the three main channels where you should display customer reviews to increase traffic and conversions.
We recommend you to display service reviews or store ratings on all the sub-pages of your store as well as on the homepage. Regarding product reviews, these are usually displayed in the product pages.
Store rating stars accompany the user through their shopping journey. Source: RIA Menorca
A social media post combined with the right opinion has more persuasive power than a post without it.
You can display star ratings in both organic results and Google ads. Referring to ads:
We can distinguish between the seller star rating in SERPs and the product star rating in Google Shopping. The requirements for displaying stars are:
Seller star rating
Product star ratings
Showing your customers' reviews will greatly benefit the development of your business. By using customer reviews properly, you will increase your store's trust, visibility and traffic, leading to higher sales and conversion rates.