eCommerce negative reviews
Do not panic if you get eCommerce negative reviews on your website. Magento offers eCommerce retailers the ability to moderate reviews. What should you do?
The first thing is to see if the customer has a legitimate complaint that you can fix. In other words are the eCommerce negative reviews constructive criticism. If so these are great information and you can respond on the comment thread with how you have fixed your product or made an improvement.
When first given this power, the person in charge of moderating the site may be inclined to either water down or completely eliminate any bad reviews from the products that they sell. You may be surprised to find out that this is not necessarily the best strategy for increasing sales.
To understand why, let’s start by taking a look at reviews in general and how they can help to improve your sales.
The Power of eCommerce Negative Reviews
There is convincing evidence out there that customer reviews can do a lot to increase sales. For example, data has shown that more than 60% of customers will be more likely to go through with a purchase if a site has user reviews. When you take a look at the real eCommerce giants out there – Amazon, etc. – you’ll see that customer reviews are not only featured on their sites, but that the sites actually make it easy for you to find reviews based on specific criteria. For example, if you want to know what people who really liked the product had to say, you can sort your reviews by the most positive.
Customers trust what other customers have to say about a product more than they trust the product descriptions themselves. This is not particularly surprising, given that most product descriptions are, to some extent, designed to actually move the product as much as they are designed to give a description of the product.
Allowing customer reviews means that, at some point, you’re going to get some eCommerce negative reviews. Some of these will be intelligent, well considered reviews written by people who are simply disappointed with the product. Others will be written by people who are perpetually disappointed but, either way, you will have negative reviews.
Don’t Delete Any eCommerce Negative Reviews
Panagiotis Ipeirotis, who researches eCommerce, found some rather surprising information when analyzing customer reviews. For starters, those positive reviews that you might be so happy to see may not actually do as much as you think for sales. In fact, he found that some types of positive reviews can actually drive sales for products downward. This has to do with the quality of the information included, which is particularly significant when reviews are very short and somebody says something along the lines of “I really liked it” or simply refers to a product as the best of its kind.
Conversely, product reviews that were actually negative overall could prove to be useful for selling products. This effect is primarily seen in eCommerce negative reviews that have substantive information about the product. The customer is able to get an honest assessment from another customer and, if the negatives specified about the product aren’t particularly concerning to the potential buyer, they may be more likely to buy it.
When you’re managing your reviews in Magento, remember that the eCommerce negative reviews may contain some of the most accurate and comprehensive information about your products. They can be assets in this regard, so don’t get rid of them simply because they don’t portray your products in the most flattering light.
Finestshops.com offers managed e-commerce for medium and large stores based on Magento or X-Cart Shopping Carts. Find out more at www.finestshops.com
