Customer reviews are an essential element for an e-commerce site. They act as word-of-mouth to improve your e-reputation and even more so your turnover. 87% of French people consult customer reviews before making a purchase (IFOP, 2020). If you want to sell more, it is therefore essential to take advantage of the enthusiasm of your customers. We explain in detail why customer reviews are so important for the development of your e-commerce site. 

Customer reviews: social proof to convince your prospects

Customer reviews are important for your e-commerce site because they provide social proof, essential to convince your prospects. This term taken from psychology indicates the fact for an individual who does not know which decision to take to adopt the behavior of other people (generally of the majority). 

Before making a purchase, Internet users consult the comments left by other customers rather than the arguments of the brand. Thus, accessing authentic feedback on your products or services, if they are mostly positive, confirms their decision to buy.

Customer reviews are concrete proof that other buyers have already trusted you and have been satisfied. This boosts the credibility of your site. This also goes for mixed or negative reviews: if all your feedback was perfect, it would make the consumer suspicious.

Customer reviews, therefore, act as reassurance elements on your e-commerce site. They are favorable to the acquisition of new customers by contributing to your online notoriety. 

Prove your sense of customer relations 

Collecting permanent reviews are an opportunity for you to prove your sense of customer relations. For this, you must read and above all respond to all the opinions of your customers. This is especially important if you are just launching your online store and looking to grow your business.

Every customer review is an opportunity. They allow you to identify both your strengths to exploit them and your weaknesses to improve the customer experience. It is important to respond to each review individually, avoiding copying and pasting. Potential buyers who read your comments will not like it: it will have a negative impact on your brand image. 

Responding to feedback quickly proves your responsiveness and commitment to your customers. You show that you care for them. It is therefore a powerful means of communication to attract, but also to retain your customers. 

This applies to both positive and negative customer reviews. To respond well to customer reviews, you must also learn how to handle comments from dissatisfied customers. Whatever you do, you won't be able to please everyone: achieving 100% satisfaction would be a utopian goal. That said, negative reviews can be constructive. They help you to challenge yourself and improve yourself. It is also an opportunity to demonstrate your ability to find solutions to ensure the satisfaction of your customers.

Reading the reviews left by your customers can also feed your communication strategy. For example, the most relevant comments can be published on social networks. Thus, your community has direct access to the opinions of satisfied users. It's a virtuous circle that you can cultivate to grow your online store and ultimately your revenue. 

The impact of customer reviews on the SEO of your e-commerce site

To gain visibility on the Internet, the optimization of natural referencing, also called SEO, of your e-commerce site is a priority. This consists of working on the criteria taken into account by search engines to classify your site in their databases. Among these evaluation criteria are customer reviews: they are considered content in their own right. As such, they have an impact on the SEO of your e-commerce site. 

Search engines like Google take into account the number of reviews and your average rating. They also evaluate the number and above all the reliability of the sites that host the comments. All of these elements influence your ranking (your ranking) on ​​the Google search results pages. 

Collecting testimonials from your customers is also useful for natural referencing in many other ways. First of all, positive reviews encourage traffic to your e-commerce site: as social proof, they arouse the interest of Internet users. Once they arrive at the store, they will potentially read the comments posted. This reading time is favorable to the decrease in the bounce rate: an element taken into account by Google during indexing. Finally, having customer reviews on your site adds content to your pages. These are all keywords directly generated by users that Google robots will read. 

How to collect customer reviews?

To develop your online store, you must solicit your satisfied customers and encourage them to share their experiences. 

Naturally, it is dissatisfied customers who will tend to express themselves more on the Internet. It would be tempting to delete these bad ratings and unflattering reviews, or even post false positive reviews. Both of these practices are strongly discouraged, as they are considered fraudulent from a legal standpoint. In France, they are condemned by the General Directorate for Competition, Consumption, and the Repression of Fraud (DGCCRF). It is therefore much better to share authentic and certified customer reviews. 

To collect customer reviews, you can opt for a “push” strategy. Sending an email or an SMS remains essential when it comes to gathering consumer opinion. You can either offer them to answer a satisfaction questionnaire or leave a review on a dedicated platform. Either way, the process should be clear, quick, and easy. 

You can buy Google Reviews. There are some companies online that sell Google reviews such as permanent reviews. Buying google reviews is completely outside of Google's policy. But if your business is new or competitive then you need to buy reviews. So buying Google reviews is another option to get positive reviews.

If you have a Shopify online store, you can integrate an app like TrustPilot. You can also ask your customers to add reviews to your Google My Business listing. This contributes effectively to the referencing of your activity on Google, the main gateway for Internet users to your site. The opinions published by your customers thus appear during queries made on the search engine. They, therefore, become powerful tools to promote traffic on your site and even more so conversion. 

To convince your customers to write a review, you can offer a reward in exchange. This give-and-take process is effective and allows for quick returns. You can, for example, offer a discount on their next order or send them free goodies or samples. It's a modest effort considering the impact on your business that comes from collecting customer reviews. 

Your customer reviews are content in their own right on your e-commerce site. They help to energize it and make it attractive to Internet users. They inspire trust and provide them with the social proof needed to convince them to place an order. They are also powerful assets in the optimization of the natural referencing of your store. Thus, the more opinions you collect, the more it is favorable to the visibility of your site. This assumes that it is well constructed beforehand, both for the user and the SEO. This is why it is wise to call on an experienced web agency: you will save time and benefit from an online store that performs from all points of view.