We could all use a little R&R and your brand website is no different. Although when it comes to brand marketing, there’s no time for rest and relaxation but ratings and reviews are a must-have. But…did you know if you have ratings and reviews directly on your brand website that it drives conversion? Well, it does and this amazing little solution could just be your new best friend.
Every ecommerce brand has the same questions when it comes to their website:
- How do you make the strongest case for your products in the shortest time?
- What website content actually moves the needle?
Many brands decide that one of the best ways to drive sales is to show website visitors what actual customers have said about their experience. So they highlight their best product reviews and display ratings on their product pages. Maybe they share some testimonials people shared with the customer service team.
It’s a good instinct. And this content often does help people understand the key benefits of your products and gauge their quality. It certainly plays a role in driving sales.
But there are some big problems with the ratings and reviews most ecommerce brands display on their websites. And if you don’t address them, your website simply won’t convert as it could.
Here are three of the main issues with your ratings and reviews, and how our Ratings & Reviews tool solves them.
1. Consumers have less reason to trust them
Since you control the ratings and reviews on your website, consumers can’t trust them as much as reviews from a third party, like a retailer. Since better ratings and positive feedback make your brand look good, many brands have abused their control and curated the ratings and reviews on their website. And that ruins it for everyone.
Consumers have been trained to look for ratings and reviews from third parties, where brands can’t hide negative feedback and skew their ratings. They turn to forum threads and retailers to see what customers are really saying.
People who already know and trust your brand may simply take your word for it. But for everyone else, you have to earn their trust. And that’s where our Ratings & Reviews tool comes in. Ratings & Reviews scrapes your product pages on retailer’s websites, imports their ratings and reviews, and displays them on your website with a clear indication of where they came from.
So instead of seeing what they assume are carefully curated ratings and reviews, consumers can see how your products are rated on Amazon.com, Target.com, Walmart.com, or other websites–without leaving your website.
2. You don’t have enough ratings and reviews
Ratings and reviews don’t just help consumers learn about a product. They provide social proof. When you have enough positive reviews and ratings, it validates your claims and assures potential customers that your products work and appear as advertised.
But that only happens when you have hundreds or thousands of reviews. With a low number of ratings and reviews, every negative piece of feedback is more problematic.
If you have ten ratings, and one of them comes from a frustrated customer, it doesn’t matter if their bad experience was your fault or not–it’s going to make consumers more wary of your brand. But if that bad review is one out of a hundred, suddenly it carries a lot less weight.
And that’s where most ecommerce brands run into trouble: they don’t get enough ratings and reviews on their own websites.
Some brands are amazing at selling direct-to-consumer. They generate tons of sales through their own storefronts (online and brick-and-mortar) and have a thriving follow-up campaign to acquire ratings and reviews. But that’s not the case for most brands. If you’re like most manufacturers, your products probably have a lot more reviews on a major retailer’s site.
This is another reason brands use our Ratings & Reviews tool. Not only do third-party reviews build more trust, but they also tend to provide a higher degree of social proof. More ratings and reviews means more validation.
3. You can’t track conversions outside of your website
When a customer checks out your website, explores your product pages, and finds your ratings and reviews compelling, they don’t always purchase directly from you. After consumers decide on a product, they often buy from a preferred retailer.
Unfortunately, this means that even when your ratings and reviews make a great case for your product and play a significant role in driving purchases, you can’t always tell. You can obviously track how changes to your website or a sudden increase in reviews impact your own sales, but what happens when someone leaves your site to buy from Amazon, Home Depot, or Best Buy?
With our Ratings & Reviews tool, you can track those sales, too. Whenever someone clicks a link from Ratings & Reviews to see your product page on a retailer’s site, PriceSpider tracks their offsite purchase and reports it back to you. So you can see exactly how your Ratings & Reviews are contributing to sales.
Leverage your retail partners
Major online retailers have millions of customers. They have a level of trust and authority that’s hard for most brands to come by. And you can use that to your advantage. Our Ratings & Reviews tool helps you maximize conversions by importing the social proof your products earn on other websites.
And when consumers want to buy from one of these retailers instead of your own site, they can simply click on your Ratings & Reviews to go directly to your product page on their preferred retailer’s site.
Schedule a demo to see our Ratings & Reviews tool in action.
