Ratings and reviews are among the top factors influencing customer decisions and driving sales across e-commerce platforms. Leveraging user-generated content (UGC) like product reviews helps businesses build trust, boost credibility and sell more, all while delivering the content shoppers want most.
Ratings, reviews and related UGC impact e-commerce sales today to deliver profits that businesses will see for years. Let’s jump in to learn how UGC affects online sales and what it takes to implement a conversion-driving ratings and reviews management program.
Doing More with User-Generated Content
Reviews are essential for online sales. According to the 2024 Product Content Benchmark, 65% of customers often or always read reviews. Consumers rely on UGC to guide not only their purchase decisions but also their perception of the product and brand in question.
Reviews are a valuable source of detailed product information, helping consumers assess features, benefits and potential drawbacks. They validate customers’ thoughts or feelings about a product and help them determine if it will meet their needs and expectations. Collective ratings and brand reputation heavily influence consumer choices; positive feedback signals quality and reliability to shoppers relying on real-world experiences from verified customers. When a potential customer compares products and brands, reviews provide insight into how a product stacks up, preemptively answering the questions shoppers frequently ask before a purchase.
The most impactful reviews are detailed and honest, include product features, and explain the user’s experience with the product. Eliciting quality ratings and reviews from verified customers is the key to increased e-commerce sales; according to research by PowerReviews, brands see a 108.3% lift in conversion when a shopper interacts with ratings and reviews on a product page.
Embracing Reviews for E-Commerce Success
Positive, public customer feedback impacts e-commerce sales in a few specific ways:
1. Boost Credibility
Social proof is among the most influential factors influencing online purchases. Shoppers want to understand how a product will work for them in their everyday lives, and they know customer reviews will provide honest insight.
Product reviews build trust with prospective customers who aren’t familiar with a brand or who might be on the fence about their purchase. Reviews help shoppers better understand product quality and value, customer service and particular product details from customers they can relate to and identify with.
Today’s consumers are savvy and don’t always take product descriptions at face value. Every online retailer needs product reviews to boost credibility with new customers. The bottom line is that reading product reviews helps shoppers determine whether your brand and products can be trusted and if they will shop with you or someone else.
2. Gain Valuable Insights into Your Products
Reviews are critical to engaging shoppers throughout the buyer’s journey, from the early stages of research through product comparisons and to the point of purchase. UGC helps brands gain valuable insights that shape product offerings to engage consumers from the first touchpoint onward.
Product reviews give brands an honest look into how customers feel about both the product and the business. Negative reviews can uncover blind spots, helping brands and retailers see how they can improve their products to better meet shoppers’ needs, wants and expectations.
Positive reviews reinforce where brands are getting it right. If an overwhelming number of customers leave positive reviews concerning a specific product or product feature, brands know not to make changes that impact the customer experience. At the same time, they can better promote that particular product or feature to new customers and engage them early in their journey.
3. Enhance SEO
Because e-commerce happens online, ranking high in search engine result pages (SERPs) is vital. When shoppers explore items without a brand preference, organic search is the primary avenue by which brands engage new audiences. Customer reviews on product detail pages (PDPs) can have a significant, positive impact on your position on an increasingly competitive digital shelf.
Customer reviews contain keywords and phrases your target audience searches for when they’re looking for or researching products. Including reviews on PDPs allows you to boost SEO efforts with the keywords that are most relevant and useful to potential customers.
The more reviews and higher ratings your products receive, the more authority and higher rankings your PDPs will gain. Moreover, Google displays star ratings on SERPs based on customer reviews, giving your product a star rating that can increase web traffic and help you stand out online.
4. Deliver Positive Customer Experiences
Reviews help potential customers know what to expect when they purchase your products. Rich product content helps set expectations that contribute to positive customer experiences. UGC, including ratings, reviews, images and video, gives shoppers a transparent, straightforward product evaluation that informs their choice to buy or move on.
The more quality reviews you can garner, the better shoppers can understand your product:
- How it works
- What customers like or dislike about it
- Size and color
- Shipping and delivery
When soliciting reviews, brands can customize their review collection form to ask shoppers for their thoughts on specific details or features to provide a complete picture of the product, helping potential customers determine if it will meet their expectations.
Ratings and reviews help paint a complete picture of a product and set customer expectations. And upon delivery, when those expectations are met, the customer has a positive experience that leads to brand loyalty, a high customer lifetime value and even more positive reviews for the next shopper.
Maximize Conversions with an Optimized Ratings and Reviews Program
UGC is a key player in your e-commerce product content strategy. More and better UGC leads to more conversions and growth, regardless of what you sell or the market conditions. PowerReviews, a 1WorldSync company, is the ratings and reviews specialist you want on your side when building your review management program. Let us help you do more with UGC to grow your business.
1. Collect More & Better UGC
The PowerReviews platform helps you build a conversion-focused UGC collection strategy. We offer the most innovative, flexible and varied collection options and provide UGC collection analytics that prove we’re delivering solutions that work.
2. UGC Displays Built for Conversion
Your UGC display should provide shoppers with all the information they need to make a confident purchase – in the right format for your customers and brand. PowerReviews allows you to build impactful UGC displays with a multitude of display options. Brands can make decisions based on critical display performance analytics data highlighting what actually drives conversions. With PowerReviews, you can precisely size the impact of each component of your specific UGC displays and build yours accordingly.
3. Share More and Better Content
Whether you’re a brand looking to distribute more content or a retailer looking to bring more content in, PowerReviews is the only enterprise UGC provider with a truly open-network for UGC syndication. PowerReviews goes above and beyond the industry standard, maximizing the volume of UGC you syndicate rather than relying on UPC match alone.
4. Analyze, Optimize and Grow.
User-Generated Content is a treasure trove of information and a largely untapped resource of context-rich customer feedback. Considerably cheaper than focus groups and more precise than surveys, our analytics capabilities enable you to do more with your UGC.
Here’s how PowerReviews differentiates itself from other UGC analytical platforms:
- Sophisticated Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Trained on UGC
- Enterprise-level analytics without the enterprise price tag
- Optimized product experience
- Optimized marketing messaging
- An affordable, representative alternative to focus groups
- Precise, targeted feedback
PowerReviews is a conversion-driving UGC vendor obsessed with helping brands and retailers grow their businesses. Whether your business is e-commerce-only or you operate across the omnichannel, your content is invaluable. User-generated content is among the most impactful, influential and essential content you can implement on your PDPs. Get it right, and your revenue will show it.
Contact our team or request a demo to learn more about how PowerReviews can modernize and optimize your ratings and reviews strategy and help increase e-commerce sales starting now.
