BUILDING A USEFUL REVIEW SYSTEM
IN SIMPLE ENGLISH
We all know that having reviews on our website will increase sales. We see reviews on many eCommerce websites, and I personally use reviews myself every time I shop online. In fact, when I shop on Amazon, I wont even consider buying a product that doesnt have at least 4 star average reviews. Usually my first step when shopping on Amazon is to select Prime Shipping so I can get free 2nd day air, then my second step is to click on the 4 star review filter, and only then do I start shopping.
Since you must have reviews on your ecommerce website, the logical thing to do is go get a Shopping Cart that has a review system, right? Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Reviews are only valuable when they are trusted by the shopper. For example, I recently purchased a new HP laptop directly from HPs website. As I was browsing the reviews on the HPs website, I was surprised that every laptop had five star ratings. It seemed odd that there was not even one negative review. When I checked for the same laptop model on Amazon, Amazon had a lot of negative reviews for certain models. Amazon reviews are unbiased because they include every review regardless if its negative or positive. It works for Amazon because Amazon is more of a marketplace than a reseller, so they act as a third party critic. You cant justify having your own review system like Amazon because you are not Amazon. If you have basic reviews on your website, all your reviews will be treated with a very big BS filter. HP invested money to add reviews feature on their website, but what is the point of having reviews if no one will care to read them?
Reviews were meant to be social and transparent. It is even more crucial to be transparent with eCommerce because shoppers know that the store owners have an incentive to remove negative reviews, and create fake positive ones. Think about it, a few bad reviews can gradually decrease your sales for a certain product, and hurt your bottom line. Can you imagine HP posting a bunch of negative reviews on their website for a certain laptop? They would lose millions of dollars in sales, so you cant blame them for filtering the negative reviews. Sometimes negative reviews will be removed because a certain product doesnt have enough positive reviews to make it a fair analysis for the shopper. If you sell on eBay, you know exactly what I am talking about, if you had the power to remove a negative feedback without justification, you would do so immediately. Shoppers know this, and that is why having a useful review system is tricky and not as simple as just having a random one on your website.
ACID TEST I wrote a whole set of case studies about customer behavior. ACID is a short way of describing buyer behavior. A is for analytical, C is for caring, I is for impulsive, and D is for driver. The reason I point these factors out because the only people that truly care about reviews is the Caring behavior type. If you have no reviews about your product, you will rarely get any business from the caring customer. The reason why you are still selling products on your website without reviews is because of the other buyers, specifically impulsive buyers who make up the majority of the purchases online.
ACID Quick Guide ACID Detailed Guide Creating a Persona Designing a Sales Copy REVIEW PLATFORMS Two companies, PowerReviews, and Bazaarvoice offer a great social reviews platform. They did an excellent job of integrating social media with eCommerce. They allowed real people to use their real identities to leave real reviews. The problem with those two companies is they are very expensive, they have an ugly user interface, and they dont do a great job of validating the history of the reviewers profile.
Some of our core values at Shopping Cart Elite include not to integrate partner tools that are overpriced, not to integrate vaporware (crap products), and not to build tools that we wouldnt use ourselves if we had an eCommerce B2C business. So we had a review platform on the back burner up until we found a company that developed a tool that beats PowerReviews and Bazaarvoice hands down. Yotpo is that company, and they have an amazing feature rich product that is free to all small businesses.
Let me repeat that, you dont have to pay for the Yotpo Reviews Platform if you are a small business. They did this because they want to become the unbiased authority reviews platform that shoppers will trust. Michael bought an HP laptop on Newegg and left a positive review using Yotpo. After using the Laptop Michael loved it so much that he figured he will go on HPs website and leave them a positive review as well without buying the laptop. How do we know that Michael is leaving a real positive review? If you click on Michaels review on HPs website, you will be able to see his Yotpo profile which will clearly indicate that Michael is a verified buyer of an HP laptop on Newegg, automatically giving him credibility that his review is real.
Yotpo is Yelp for eCommerce, and it is important that the whole eCommerce community supports them. The more websites that use Yotpo, the more likely your reviews will be trusted because an active reviewer will have a verified reviewers profile that was built between all the websites where he shopped. As a result his review on your website will be trusted by shoppers after they review his verified buyer profile.
We loved what Yotpo was creating, so Shopping Cart Elite integrated Yotpo as a native application into Shopping Cart Elite software and you can turn it on with one click of a button. Simply go to Products > Reviews and press activate. Thats it.
Yotpo is for online retailers who are dissatisfied with their customer review system. Yotpo is a free, beautiful and sophisticated reviews platform that uses social media to drive traffic and create trust with your customers. Unlike PowerReviews and Bazaarvoice, Yotpo uses a complex algorithm that combines social signals and crowdsourcing to detect real reviews, and then sorts the real reviews to the top of the list automatically.
YOTPO BENEFITS
10.3% conversion from shoppers to reviewers
Automatically syndicates reviews across multiple websites
Aggregates reviewer content into one true reviewer profile so shoppers can judge for themselves if the reviewer is real
Increase immediate SEO traffic by creating custom SEO review landing page automatically
Automatically sends an Email After Purchase to encourage the customer to leave a review
Customers can leave a review right from their email without jumping to your webpage
Detects Fake Reviews using a complex algorithm that combines social signals and crowdsourcing
Automatically sorts real and relevant reviews to the top of the review list
Reviews on the website will be tagged with Verified buyer, Verified reviewer, Socially connected
20% increase in social engagement when the reviews are automatically syndicated to your Facebook company fan page
Increase Social media engagement by positioning your website as an authority in your niche
Reviewers can share their reviews on Facebook and Twitter automatically right after they post their review to your website
Email reviewers to thank them or to resolve a problem they may have experienced
Auto approve all reviews, or moderate them before they go online
Monitor in depth analytics to see how many emails were delivered, reviews posted, etc.
Easily reply to reviewers that left feedback on Facebook and Twitter
Last but not least its Beautiful and customizable
SHOPPING CART ELITE INTEGRATION
One click of a button will create the following integration with Yotpo:
A new Yotpo account will be created using your primary email in Shopping Cart Elite
Product page will get a reviews tab where your visitors can post reviews
Product page will get review stars for every product
Product page will get a rich snippet meta data so reviews will show up under your title in Google
Search results will get review filter to sort, review stars, and the amount of reviews per product
Daily API integration for synchronizing reviews into Shopping Cart Elite will be created
SEO review mini site will be created located on http://reviews.yourdomainname.com/
DNS record for SEO review mini site will be created
CSS styles will be configured to your theme
Your Product database will be uploaded to Yotpo
Email After Purchase will be automatically triggered and emailed to your customer when a purchase is made
All you have to do is activate the reviews, login to your Social Media, and customize a friendlier email purchase message. Thats it! Total integration time is exactly 20 seconds, and then 5 minutes to customize it. This is a great example of Shopping Cart Elite going above and beyond to integrate an app partner into our platform. This is true art!
Finally, this is a feature that everyone can enjoy at absolutely no additional charge. I repeat you can enable this on your store right now, and it is included apart of monthly software updates.
MORE RESOURCES Interview with Yotpo CEO Online Review Statistics Peer to Peer Statistics Reviews Impacting Hotels
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