Ecommerce: Why More Customer Reviews Mean More Product Sales

Ecommerce is a hot topic these days. Over the last few years, we’ve seen more and more requests for ecommerce functionality on websites. A question that often comes up of course is “how do we get more customers on the site purchasing more products?”

One finding is that ecommerce is closely tied in with social media. Amazon is a great example of a site that allows customers to leave both positive and negative experiences or by posting reviews, and as a result, they receive millions and millions of site hits everyday. According to an infographic provided by Bazaarvoice, here’s how reviews impact sales and what marketers can gain from this type of engagement.

While the sample data was limited to 57 million reviews on 35 billion product pages collected from the Bazaarvoice network, it’s still interesting insight to take a closer look at. Here’s a look at the key findings:

Syndicated Customer Content

User generated content was found to be the most effective tools for increasing feedback on a site. Featuring user-generated content such as customer reviews and testimonials on the site proved to encourage others to share their experiences. This in turn created way more product coverage on the site than native content alone.

For example, placing opportunities to make customer reviews resulted in a 324% increase in reviews, which then resulted in a 26% increase in product coverage for consumer electronic products.

For hardware products, reviews resulted in a 259% increase with 18% in product coverage.

The Takeaway: As reviews increase, so does the product profile on the website itself.

Increase Volume of Reviews & ROI

The study found several levels of ROI manifest at different levels of review volume. Increase in conversions is the sharpest at the early stages of volume growth. After eight or more reviews, businesses began seeing an increase in organic search traffic. After 100+ reviews, marketers could definitely see trends in product preferences and overall sentiments towards products.

The Takeaway: The more reviews a product page gets, the more the business is likely to benefit for conversions, search traffic, and ROI.

More Reviews, More Reward

No matter what industry, it was found that an increase in review volume correlated with an increase in product order. A single customer review resulted in a 10% increase in product purchase. At 50 reviews, a 30% increase; at 100 reviews, a 37% increase, and so on.

The Takeaway: The more reviews a product has, the more purchase orders it gets.

Dynamic Content Boosts SEO

Customer-written content keeps pages fresh which helps boost search engine optimization and site traffic. Volume of customer reviews plays a factor into this dynamic content by offering five different indicators for Google’s search algorithm:

1. Content
2. Markup
3. Reputation
4. Freshness
5. User Experience

The Takeaway: Reviews offer a consistent level of fresh content for pages. Search engines reward sites with fresh content with higher search results.

Get the full report here or take a look at the full infographic from Bazaarvoice below: