Make Your Product Reviews Credible

Amazon.com is 15 years old today. How far they’ve come from that two-car garage in Bellevue, Washington. Among the most important retailing tools pioneered by Amazon is the use of purchaser-generated Internet-available reviews to help sell products. And those products offered by Amazon now extend well beyond Amazon’s 1995 inventory of only books.
     Today, then, is a good opportunity to recall the value to you of putting your shoppers in touch with credible online reviews of all types of products and services in your store and on your ecommerce site.

• Reviews are not the same as testimonials. Having a customer give credit for their personal success or pleasure to a product you’re selling does carry weight. But survey research by the e-tailing group and PowerReviews indicates that these days it is not as trustworthy to the shopper as is a more balanced statement of what worked and what didn’t. And trust comes up repeatedly as a prime consideration in whether a person will purchase a product. According to Advertising Age/ARC, trust trumps for in-store purchases. And Get Elastic blog reports that OneUpWeb finds trust also counts a lot with ecommerce purchases. So make it tempting for your customers to post product reviews on your store’s website and in the prompt, say something like, “Your review will be most useful for shoppers reading it if you comment on both the positives and the negatives. What did you like? In what ways did the product fall short?”
• Research at Stanford University finds that a product review is especially effective when the person qualifies themselves as an expert and then presents their conclusions with a bit of uncertainty. One way for a reviewer to qualify themselves as an expert is to give specific points of comparison of the product with alternatives that would fulfill an equivalent function. Therefore, say something like, “In your product review, please describe some of the ways this product compares favorably and unfavorably to alternatives a shopper might consider.”
• A review is more influential with a shopper if the shopper feels a similarity to the reviewer. So encourage reviewers—even those who choose to stay anonymous—to also post a profile of themselves. Then link the real or fictitious name in the review to the profile.

Click below for more:
Encourage Balanced Customer Reviews
Encourage Specifics & Criticism in Word-of-Mouth