Shopify and similar sites have made it easier than ever to start your own retail business, leveraging the power of e-commerce. But easier entry into the business of selling online also means more options for consumers to choose from. Now more than ever, sellers have to do more to make their products stand out.
One way to make sure you're winning in a competitive marketplace is to prioritize the reputation of your product and your brand. Yes, we're talking about reviews.
Why Are Reviews Important for Your Shopify Store?
It doesn't take long to figure out that modern consumers rely heavily on their peers' opinions when making a decision about where to spend their money. According to Podium, 93% of customers take reviews into account when buying almost anything.
But the source and quantity are of the reviews you're getting makes more of a difference than you might think.
Sentiment, Freshness, and Quantity of Reviews
Obviously, review sentiment — your overall star rating — matters. It should go without saying that bad reviews are never helpful, and good reviews are what you should strive for.
But customers are looking at more than just whether your reviews are positive or negative. For example, they're looking how recent your reviews are. Approximately 73% of consumers only look at reviews posted in the last month.
Total quantity is also a factor. A study published in Psychological Science found that when comparing two products with a comparable star rating, a prospective buyer will more often choose the one with more total reviews.
This means any strategy you implement to drive reviews needs to be consistently effective. A one-time, short-term solution won't cut it.
Reviews of Your Brand vs. Reviews of a Specific Product
When you're operating an online retail business, what's more important — a review of your brand or a review of a product you sell?
Both are important, but for retailers, product reviews have a much larger impact. They're displayed on the product page, which is typically the point where purchasing decisions are made.
Reviews of a brand are more important for service providers, healthcare practices, and other cases in which the product is less distinguishable from the people providing it.
How to Add Reviews on Shopify
By now, we've talked about how the quantity, freshness, and sentiment of your reviews matter. Here's how to populate your Shopify store with real-time customer feedback:
Adding Reviews of Your Brand/Business
Company reviews aren't as important as product reviews when it comes to your online store. With this being said, it's still critical for customers to see that their peers trust your brand, so while you should prioritize product reviews, pulling general feedback from Google My Business, Yelp, and other online reputation sites should still be part of your overall approach.
Luckily, there's an easy way to do this without paying for any additional add-ons or apps. Follow these simple steps to integrate Google's Merchant Center with your Shopify business profile.
When it comes to product reviews, it's a little less straightforward.
Should You Use Shopify's Native Reviews App or Something Else?
Shopify has its own branded app that allows users to curate and manage product reviews. It includes the basic functionality that you might expect — you can curate and post reviews, manage the way reviews appear on your store pages, and accomplish the core parts of managing the reputations of your products.
If you're not looking to do anything overly sophisticated, Shopify Product Reviews will get the job done. But there are also specialized, third-party apps that put a variety of options at your fingertips with no extra effort.
Benefits of a Specialized App for Product Reviews
There are certain benefits that you can get from apps made especially to help you adopt best practices into your process of gathering and displaying product reviews. Here's just a few of the added benefits these specialized alternatives can provide over the standard solutions:
- A variety of different options for collecting reviews, such as reaching out directly, prompting feedback on the cart confirmation screen, and building an integrated loyalty program that creates an incentive for customers to leave a review after each purchase.
- Integrated and customizable solutions such as pre-built text messages and email outreach, sophisticated display options, and turnkey review generation campaigns powered by smart AI.
- The ability to create and leverage user-generated content by automatically scanning social media sites for mentions of your products and populating custom feeds for immersive social proof.
- Better review management tools and insights about your products, including more control over moderating and posting reviews, keyword tagging for easy navigation and advanced analytics to give you insight to improve your products and meet customer preferences.
Introducing Stamped.io
Stamped is one such specialty app that drives positive reviews early and often to your Shopify site. It's a top-rated reviews app with nearly 5,000 reviews in the Shopify App Store and 4.9/5 rating.
In addition to giving a range of premium capabilities that the Shopify Reviews app can't, Stamped is a leader in developing user-generated content that shows off your products after they're purchased and displays it in ways that gets new customers interested. It ensures that you can you continue to get reviews and track reviews and feedback as they turn into new sales for your online store.
