Online Reviews, Stars And Sales

Online reviews, when broken down, are to do with trust.

How do you figure out who to trust online? Where do you buy from? Where do you give your email address to? What sites do you give your credit card details to?

When you can go around online anonymously, you can create a webpage to look like a big business but be a 1 person outfit. Trust is a major issue that we subconsciously think about when we go online- especially to buy something.

But how do businesses help you trust them? If you trust them then you will probably listen to what they say, what they write and what they promote and sell.

Business therefore has to align with our ideals of what trust is. This is very difficult because one persons trust factors might be different to someone elses. So they try and do something that all business do (if they all do it then a standardised trust factor is preferred). This works on the flip side. If you don’t have these “standardised trust factors” then your business won’t be trusted. So what are these subconscious trust factors?

• Confirmation emails- emails upon sign up or receipts
• Faces of the owners
• Business standards/ policy/ goals/ values
• FAQ
• A dot com email address or website address that has the same/ similar name as the business or one that promotes their values
• A guarantee of some sort
• Contact details
• How strong their brand is
• How secure their payment processor is
• They know you- like, previously bought/ seen. “Welcome Back!”
• They advertise elsewhere
• Other websites know them
• Other people/ business that like them/ do business with
• You know your friends also use them

And these are just the obvious ones. It can be summed up here (from Analysing the role of e-crm in managing customer relations: A critical review of the literature. Nidhi Kampani, Deepika Jhamb (2020)

When you read through them, they make sense don’t they?

The company/ person is trying their best to tell you that they are real and what they have to offer is real.

But what happens when more websites look the same and more websites offer the same type of trust factors?

Then you have to rely on social standings.

A website can be made but generally social signals are difficult/ expensive to recreate because they have to be:

• Nurtured
• Given some respect
• Be noticed and acted upon

But how do you use social to help your business?

The easiest way is to allow people to comment on your products. Time and time again it has been noted that comments increase sales. When we talk about comments we are also talking about testimonials and ratings.

So, if you walk away from this book with any information, it is this. If your selling platform doesn’t have ratings, comments or even a place to share these comments then you will lose sales. It is very clear on the usefulness and effectiveness of comments.

Amazon pioneered the online review process to a point where people now look for reviews when products are being sold. You go to buy a product you check for reviews. There are even websites just set up solely to review XY and Z product. One of the most popular Youtube topics are review videos. In his cool book Ecommerce Evolved, Tanner Larsson stated this from Jeff Bezos: “We don’t make money when we sell things, we make money when we help customers make purchase decisions”.

This is also noticed by BigCommerce “Amazon is a reviews-driven ecosystem. It’s vitally important for any potential seller to solicit reviews effectively and reward customers post-purchase for contributing”.

Most businesses will just place a comments box on their sales pages and hope for the best. But what we have found out is that sometimes this can hinder sales.

So you don’t just create online reviews. The comments also need:

• To be very specific
• Good and bad
• Offer information
• Be verified or created at least by someone who knows what they are talking about
• Have a belief system by it (promote or disagree with, stars)
• Have the comment be able to be shared

All these add up to an endorsement. It is people who you don’t know (or in some cases, do actually indirectly know) saying what they think about the product. But you know that people online are also anonymous, so those comments must be able to be verified or brought out of the online anonymous darkness.

Online reviews are highly trusted, with 70 percent of global consumers in one AC Neilsen (2012) survey indicating they trust this form of communication. In the absence of first-hand experience, “potential consumers tend to believe that others' evaluations provide a reliable basis upon which to make future purchase decisions.”

According to Phan et al (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=918083), reviews that the community finds helpful have a stronger influence on consumers' purchase decisions than other reviews do. So a community group (like minded people who instill trust) is a stronger force than a random reviewer. They also found that strong good comments have a large impact on lesser known products. The audience was able to “trust” the strong reviews and then make a purchase on a product they might not have known about. This what then increases the “long tail” and get lesser known products bought. It has also been noted that if a comment is written then that comment generates more comments. The more comments left the more that can be left.

For further reading, you can check this out here on Amazon.

Are reviews treated the same. Does something need to be in them to get a review to the top? Are reviews ranked?

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