Product reviews have revolutionized the way consumers make purchase decisions with nearly 95% of shoppers reading online reviews (Power Reviews Internal Data) before making a purchase. Reviews are not just a way for consumers to gather information. They have become a key form of shopper engagement. In a recent study Northwestern University partnered with Power Reviews, to understand how reviews impact buyers’ behavior. Their research provide some very compelling insights to the powerful effects that reviews have on customer’s purchase decisions.
Given the incredible importance of product reviews, it’s imperative that merchants choose a review solution that meets your business needs and provides the functionality required to thrill your shoppers and give them every reason to purchase from your site. Given our support of many different online merchants, we at InteractOne have been afforded the great opportunity to work with a wide variety of reviews technologies currently offered in the eCommerce space. These are our three favorite recommended review solutions.
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Yotpo
Yotpo provides a great many features and pre-built integrations at a reasonable price. Here are some of the great features provided by Yotpo:
- Reviews
- Question & Answer Functionality
- Multi-Channel Content Generation
- On-Site Widgets & Galleries
- Google & Facebook Integration
- Advanced Content Management
- Widgets & Emails Customization
- Multiple Domains Support
Some of the key features that we love about Yotpo are the widgets and automation tools they offer for post purchase follow-up. Using these tools, you can setup Yotpo to email customers that have purchased a product and offer them an incentive (coupon, rewards points or gift card) for leaving a review. We’ve personally seen how these incentives prove to be invaluable for encouraging buyer participation and building a robust database of product reviews. In addition to the great features for post-purchase followup, Yotpo also offers many other valuable marketing tools such as Question & Answer software, designed to help merchants increase customer engagement and grow their brands.
Power Reviews
Founded in 2005 Power Reviews is a veteran stalwart in the product review space. Aimed more at the Enterprise market, Power Review offers a feature rich toolset including:
- Rates & Reviews
- Questions & Answers
- Influencer & Sampling
- Visual & Social
- Intelligence Suite
- Customer Experience
While having many, if not all of the features of Yotpo, Power Reviews is not as focused on strictly providing feature value. Being a little more costly, they typically serve larger enterprises as they help leverage customer data to gain business insights and mine value from their current customer base. For example, Power Reviews is able to help merchants identify and work with influencers to create buzz, with the ultimate goal of turning customers into mystery shoppers who then are in a position to uncover valuable product insights.
TrustPilot
Focused more on business-level reviews than on product reviews, TrustPilot is a great tool for gathering overall purchase experience feedback and displaying that feedback to shoppers. Niche sites that sell a very specific type of product (ie. trade show display media) can be better served by a reviews software like TrustPilot. This is because their shoppers are not as concerned with product reviews as they are with overall reviews of the company that is actually selling the product. TrustPilot excels in this area by offering merchants the ability to reach out and gather post purchase business reviews, manage those reviews and display them onsite. For example TrustPilot allows you to filter the reviews shown on-site, per interest area or star rating.
Another key feature of TrustPilot is that it allows online users to browse reviews for all of its customers on its website portal at https://www.trustpilot.com/. Being a TrustPilot customer therefore comes with the added benefit of being featured on their public facing website where many shoppers go to review businesses by category before making a purchasing decision.
In addition to offering the business-level reviews and the public portal, TrustPilot can also power product level reviews by allowing you to use their service to cover all your business’s reviews & ratings needs.
Summary
With this blog we’ve covered just a few of our favorite tools for powering reviews, however there are many other customer reviews tools and options not listed here that might be a perfect fit for your business. What’s important is that you understand the key role reviews play in the online purchasing decisions of your shoppers and choose the right tools to empower reviews. At InteractOne we’ve had the privilege of working with many online merchants to choose the right reviews tools, improve conversion and grow their business. Give us a call or fill out our contact form and let us help you grow your business by improving customer reviews.