How to Respond to Customer Reviews on Your PDPs

Your product detail page (PDP) is your most valuable selling space online. From the image gallery to below-the-fold rich content, most of the content in your PDP comes straight from your brand, giving you great control of what’s published. The exception to this is customer reviews. 

Since reviews come directly from your customers, it’s crucial to monitor them and respond appropriately. Managing PDP reviews is essential for maintaining customer loyalty, protecting your brand, increasing sales, and winning market share. This article explores how to respond to customer reviews on your PDPs and why it matters. 

PDP Reviews and Brand Reputation 

PDP reviews drive your brand perception, sales, and, ultimately, success. 

The retail market is omnichannel. That means your target consumer is online –– right now –– looking for solutions to their needs and conducting their own research to determine the best purchase option. 

And within that research, they’re evaluating your PDP reviews to learn about other customers’ experiences with your products, services, and brand. Research shows that 77 percent of consumers regularly read online product reviews when evaluating purchase decisions –– up from 60 percent in 2020. 

Your PDP reviews shape how potential consumers perceive your brand. In fact, it’s one of the most significant factors that determine brand or product perception. Online reviews carry more weight even than personal recommendations. Your customers know that your PDP reviews are honest; the reviewer has nothing to lose and no incentive to bend the truth. 

As a result, your brand’s marketing efforts must include a PDP review and response management strategy. Positive reviews persuade consumers to take the next step in their buying journey. Conversely, negative reviews can terminate a sale on the spot. 

Managing online reviews is a central component of maintaining your brand reputation. And a crucial aspect of review management lies in responding to positive and negative customer reviews. 

Below we explore five best practices in responding to customer reviews on your PDPs. 

How to Respond to Customer Reviews 

1. House a Single Source of Truth for PDPs

E-commerce businesses operate in omnichannel. Your products are listed on multiple sites across various platforms, and so are your customer reviews. Managing your PDP reviews is not as simple as responding to a single review on one retailer site. 

One product could be listed on your brand’s site, Amazon, Walmart, and a vast selection of other retail partners. Individually addressing and responding to customer reviews isn’t feasible, nor is it a practical use of your resources. 

Housing your product content in a single source of truth allows for immediate content activation across all channels. With content disbursement tools, your review response published to one platform will appear across all other pages that display product reviews. 

A centralized management platform makes the best use of your team’s time and energy in responding to customer testimonials and critiques, allowing you to improve the consumer experience and perception no matter where they’re reading your reviews. 

2. Equip Your Teams with Monitoring Tools 

Manually filtering through customer reviews on your PDPs wastes time and money. Equipping your team with the proper review monitoring tools empowers them to address problems as they arise instead of searching for complaints across multiple platforms. 

Review management programs enable your teams to solicit, respond to, and amplify reviews, streamlining the review response workflows. Most tools allow you to assign negative reviews to specific team members trained in this area of customer care.  

The right review monitoring tools not only save time, but they allow you to address customer satisfaction issues with care and intentionality. And when you can do that, you’re more likely to end the interaction with a happy customer and a positive review. 

3. Enable Faster Review Responses 

Customers leave feedback because they want to communicate directly with your brand. This is true for both glowing testimonials and critical reviews. Your brand should strive to provide fast, thoughtful responses to these reviews. 

Provide your review management team with the tools they need to ensure every review is addressed as soon as possible. Customer review research shows that businesses that respond to at least 25 percent of their online reviews bring in 35 percent more revenue. Responding to your reviews will shape your profits. But those responses need to happen fast. 

A 2022 study found that more than half of customers who leave a review expect the business to respond within a week. Roughly thirty-three percent of reviewers shorten that window to three days or less. Slow response times signal that you don’t care about customer reviews and therefore don’t care about your customers. 

Prove to your audience that you care with fast responses to all your PDP reviews, both good and bad. 

4. Monitor Brand Perception and Quickly Spot Issues 

As you’re structuring your PDP review response strategy, remember that your reviews serve a purpose. They give insight into your customers’ experiences with your brand and product. PDP reviews allow you to spot trends in brand perception and customer satisfaction. 

Positive reviews that consistently praise a specific product or feature can inform your marketing focus for that product. Negative reviews for a product might signal poor design, low-quality manufacturing, or other issues that might cause you to rethink a product or remove it from your inventory. 

Monitoring and responding to customer reviews on your PDPs lets you know what is working and what you need to adjust to deliver the best products on the market and optimize your digital shelf strategy. 

5. Ask for a Change 

How you respond to a negative PDP review can mean the difference between losing a customer forever or gaining a customer for life. Negative reviews can be disheartening, frustrating, and even infuriating. Most customers who leave negative reviews have had a bad experience and simply want a representative from your brand to listen and work to make things right. 

When you inevitably must respond to a harsh or negative review, remember to humanize the reviewer. Your review management team should address the issue, work to remedy any problems on your end, and then ask the customer to consider changing their review once all issues are resolved. 

Asking for a review change accomplishes two things: 

Endear Potential Customers to Your Brand  

Potential customers see the compassion and care displayed by your team. Consumers want to buy from humanized brands. Individuals reading your reviews will know that you care for your customers, incentivizing them to purchase from you. Recent research shows that roughly 45 percent of consumers will consider a business that has responded to negative reviews. 

Improve Google Rankings 

Your reviews can help your pages rise in Google Search results. Google deems negative reviews as negative ranking factors. Asking your customers to edit negative reviews can help you earn better rankings and more traffic to your PDPs. 

Conclusion 

PDP reviews drive your marketing strategy. Understand that reviews, and your responses, inform purchase decisions. Optimizing your PDP review response strategy empowers you to make the most of your digital presence and increase product page conversions.