There’s been a lot of convincing research released in the past few months around customer ratings and reviews. Clearly, web site customers find ratings and reviews useful and not only rely on them to make purchase decisions — they also participate and share their own experiences. Here are a number number of recent articles and blog posts that discuss customer ratings and reviews:
Forester: User Ratings Top Consumers’ Online Wish Lists
User reviews and ratings were the most-asked-for web site content and functionality, beating even coupons/special offers and price comparison tools.
Deloitte: Companies Must Learn to Compete in a More Transparent Age
User ratings and reviews are having a “considerable impact on purchase decisions.” Sixty-two percent of shoppers read customer-generated product reviews when shopping, and nearly 80% say the reviews have a direct impact on their purchases.
MarketingCharts.com: User Reviews a Must for Retail Websites
98% of surveyed shoppers read the reviews on e-commerce websites prior to purchasing. Many shoppers spend over 10 minutes reading reviews before making a purchase decision.
PowerReviews: New Study Analyzes the Positive Effect of Online Reviews on E-Commerce
Internet merchants say that customer ratings and reviews:
- enhance the customer experience
- ease the burden on customer service by answering many basic product questions
- improve trust and loyalty because of their unbiased nature
- are mostly positive
- are best utilized on the product page
eMarketer: Customer Reviews Increase Web Sales
Customer ratings and reviews increase site traffic, conversion rate and average order size. They also improve customer loyalty/retention and improve search engine optimization.
As you can see, adding customer reviews and ratings to your e-commerce site is not just a helpful tool for customers to interact with your site — they lead to purchase decisions.
March 14th, 2008 at 5:07 am
Soeren Sprogoe says:
Nice to see some hard data on this subject!
Good work putting it together, Rick
I have a serious problem with the Forester survey though: It looks like they’ve directly asked the consumers, “Do you want reviews & ratings?”.
Haven’t they ever heard of “User Says, User Does”?
It’s like asking “Do you want the chance to win a 10.000$ vacation?”. 99% of all people would answer yes to that question, but when it’s competition time only 10% of all your visitors will actually enter it.
March 14th, 2008 at 7:58 am
Rick Whittington says:
Agreed, but I let that slide by because as I’ve conducted usability tests for e-commerce sites, customer ratings and reviews get seen and read without prompting… good point, though.
April 4th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Bill says:
We integrated them into our e-commerce site yumdrop.com and have done fairly well with them. While they haven’t upped our conversion rate as we had hoped, they’re at least providing us with valuable information about the quality of the products we carry and what our customers think of our service. Not to mention the influx of unique content that comes to us without any work on our part with each review is great too!