Do you read the customer reviews of a specific product before purchasing it? Do negative reviews affect your purchasing decision? Negative customer reviews is a widely discussed topic for e-commerce, let’s take a look at how we can create some great value from negative customer reviews.
Amazon is the e-commerce leader for a reason. When Amazon started promoting customer reviews heavily, many e-commerce authorities started discussing the topic back in the years. Main discussion was about the negative customer reviews.
Amazon has been doing usability tests to its customer reviews section to make it useful for prospective customers.
Many small online retailers still don’t think like Amazon. In some specific cases, they are right. What if you are a small online retailer, and one of your best seller products only has 1 review and it is negative? Would you approve it or not?
Fake customer reviews are another issue in e-commerce world. Even some big names still encourage fake customer reviews, even pay for them. And there are authors hiring an army of freelancers to write positive reviews for their books at Amazon.
Who should the consumers trust?
Let’s put aside the negative factors of customer reviews, and talk about how we can create a value from even negative customer reviews.
How to Create Great Value from Negative Customer Reviews
- Lower Your Return Rates: Let the negative reviews show up and lower your return rates. Many e-retailers are lowering their return rates by offering the negative customer reviews.
- Correct Your Mistakes: Maybe your product picture isn’t accurate enough, or it doesn’t show the real color. Let the customer complain, and correct your mistakes. E-commerce giant Oriental Trading Company’s CEO Sam Taylor has some great case studies about how they have corrected their mistakes after some negative customer reviews.
- Sell An Alternative Product: Let your customer write negative reviews, and offer alternatives to the product. Amazon is doing this successfully. Look at these negative reviews. Amazon has a section called “Items mentioned in these reviews” on the right hand side. If somebody writes negative, and offers another item, Amazon shows it to the readers. What a great cross-sell opportunity.
- Gain SEO Value: Many people search online with adding negative keywords to the product name such as “Horrible Product Name”, “Terrible Experience Product Name”, etc. First of all, customer reviews already add SEO value to your product pages (more unique content, more fresh content, and Google loves it). But now, your product page has a chance to show up on search engines with negative keywords also. That’s absolutely fine, don’t worry. You might have 90 positive and 2 negative reviews on a product, and a prospective customer might search with a negative keyword, come to your product page from a search engine, and purchase the product after reading all the reviews. This is a proven method tested on my clients’ sites. It works, trust me.
Some Research About Value of Customer Reviews
Here’s a recent article from Lightspeed Research “The Value of Online Reviews for Shoppers“. Some highlights from Lightspeed Research’s article:
- According to the results of the online survey of 1000 people carried out in August, 72 per cent of British consumers read a review for a product or service on the Internet in the last 30 days.
- 37 per cent had read a review in the last week.
- At 75 per cent men were slightly more likely than women (69 per cent) to read online reviews.
- Perhaps surprisingly, the youngest people in our survey, 18-24 year olds, refer to them less than others at only 63 per cent compared to 71-76 per cent for the respondents aged 25+.
- 75 percent of respondents would be deterred from buying after reading three bad reviews
More recently, Forrester Research‘s recently released report called ‘Myths and Truths About Online Customer Reviews’ asked consumers how they would react after reading negative customer ratings and reviews on a retailer’s site.
Their findings were as follows:
- 47% search for an alternative product
- 37% read professional/editor-written reviews of the product
- 26% continue to shop for the product regardless of the negative ratings/reviews
- 18% look for a retailer/manufacturer that offers a money-back guarantee
- 7% contact the retailer for clarification of the issues raised in the negative review
- 7% contact the manufacturer for clarification of the issues raised in the negative review
- 6% post a follow-up question for the author of the negative review
Let’s take a look at this result closely: 37% of shoppers turn to professional/editor-written reviews after reading a negative entry. Reviewer’s credentials and reputation are strongly taken into consideration when reading reviews.
Consumers want to hear from somebody they can trust, has inside industry knowledge, is reliable or has a professionally trained eye.
So, my recommendation is; You should have professionally written reviews by industry experts on your site as well as customer reviews. You want unbiased and honest reviews.
Let all the negative reviews about the product show up and take this as an opportunity to connect with your customers and solve the problems with your product or service.
Add Product Specific Criteria to Increase Conversions and Lower Return Rates
This is not related to negative customer reviews, but since we are talking about customer reviews, I’d like to present a great usage of customer reviews.
Macy’s (and many other retailers) are adding product specific criteria to the customer reviews to be rated. Let’s take a close look at this product page first:
You can see where I am going with this, right? Such a great information for the prospective customer. After checking out product specific criteria, I know that this shoe runs large. If my shoe size is somewhere between 8 and 8.5, now I know I should get the 8. Lower chance of returning the item. I will be happy as a consumer to receive a pair of shoes that fits, and Macy’s will be happy that I’m satisfied with my purchase.
Whether it is negative or positive, unbiased and honest customers help the consumer to make a decision. Most important take for online retailers is to help the consumers make the right decision by letting them read both sides of the story.
If you have enough resources, you would even think about starting a customer video reviews section. Online video is the future, and don’t miss this opportunity by letting your competition taking the lead.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Since a lot of people are attracted by negative comments (either because they are always worried, love to blame and for many other reaosns) it should help a (good) company in the long run. More people will find out about the company, and many of these people will be smart enough to see through the negative comments, or won’t care about the particular negative issue being raised, but will instead see all the valuable stuff about the company–and this was possible thanks to the attraction to the negative. It’s better to have positive and negative comments than no comments at all. As someone said: the opposite of love is not hate–it’s indifference.
Online customer reviews are also a great source of ideas for improvements of products and services. Many successful companies, such as Pure Digital (acquired recently by Cisco) and Bose, use them to monitor, measure and manage their products reputation and improvements processes. Check the service at http://amplifiedanalytics.com for aggregation of customer reviews and measurement of product reputation specialized in Consumer Electronics products.
However there is another, often overlooked, benefit of customer reviews to a savvy retailer. Low reputation products only defuse your customer’s attention, waste your advertising dollars, create an unnecessary cost to handle returns, and negative customer experience that retailer would likely share blame for. The cost of caring an inventory of the low reputation products is not even taken to consideration as many online retailers do not practice it.
I experimented with reviews briefly a few years ago, but the main comments i got were things like “you can buy this product cheaper at website X,” which in all honesty were probably fueled by competitors.