Over 90% of customers get acknowledged with online reviews before making a purchasing decision.

When done right―for example, with the help of a Magento extension like reviews and ratings from Mageworx that makes reviews sharing and collecting a pleasure―other customers' feedback helps potential buyers get rid of any doubts about an offering and convert.

Here are more reasons why it's a must for businesses to collect customer feedback continually and ensure buyers get to share extended reviews, including images, star ratings, etc.

Benefits Product Reviews and Ratings Bring

This write-up shares six reasons why product reviews and their collection are advantageous for your eCommerce business. Let's get right into them.

Increase Brand Credibility

Often, other consumers' feedback is one of the first things that shoppers explore when landing on a page.

While customers may feel suspicious about new product pages with no testimonials of an offering, well-rated items help build its trust and credibility, especially when reviews contain pros and cons, star rating, 'I recommend' badges, and attached real-life images. This way, potential buyers get to find out about those details of an offering that might be missing in the product description and make the final decision.

Generally, it's considered a best practice to display the average star rating of a product right at the top of the page while providing detailed reviews at its bottom. Amazon, Walmart, Target, and other eCommerce behemoths do it that way, so you also might want to display testimonials similarly. It allows building product and brand credibility right after prospects come to your pages.

Image credit: Amazon

Boost Sales

Yes, reviews drive sales

If a customer finds a brand trustworthy and reviews faithful, site visitors are more likely to add an offering to their carts and proceed to the checkout.

A plenty number of statistics and research prove the point, just as the fact that more than 80% of customer purchase decisions are influenced by the information they read in testimonials.

They say the shoppers trust other people's feedback as much as they would trust a recommendation from a family member or a friend.

Importantly, as the number of customer feedback increases, even negative testimonials are valuable for a brand. It makes all sorts to make the world, and it's totally okay if some customer is not as satisfied with a deal as the majority.

Improve Customer Loyalty

No person wants to be perceived just as a means to make a sale and bring profit.

People love when brands ask, listen to and hear their opinions.

It makes them feel they make a difference by opting specifically for your offering, not a competitor.

Similarly, it's also a must to invest your time and reply to each and every opinion across all of your marketing channels. This way, you can thank a shopper for investing their time to share their voices and build a more positive relationship with your consumers, even those who are unsatisfied.

Offer Social Proof

It's a common practice for a brand to highlight customer feedback on dedicated site pages, on social media, and even as a part of email marketing.

Social proof can do wonders for a brand and an offering.

As it comes directly from real-life people and their experience from interaction with various points of contact with your site (and with the tendency of declining trust in paid ads), those opinions tend to bring even more value and weight compared to branded messages and press releases.

Improve SEO

User-generated content (UGC) is an important part of any SEM strategy.

Besides helping brands update content on site pages instantly, star ratings often get displayed in search results and influence rankings positively.

SEO strategists always focus on improving how data about a product or brand is highlighted in rich snippets, and star ratings that contain the number of product reviews are a vital part that must be covered.

Additionally, reviewers often mention product names in their content and insert keywords that they use to refer to an offering. Meaning, these are the words shoppers use to search for a product, and they help enhance the relevance of your page for Google.

Help Improve Product/Service

To compete, it's a must to improve a product or service instantly. Marketers keep searching for new creative means to make products stand out from the crowd, make them memorable and desirable.

Product reviews are another way to achieve that.

Buyers often share what they are missing in your services or products. Thus, it's the primary source of data to polish your goods to perfection.

Thus, besides helping prospects understand if an offering meets their expectations, honest opinions of real-life consumers bring priceless feedback about how a brand is doing. Meaning, if the same issue gets pointed out by various buyers, it is for you to detect and fix the issue as soon as possible and inform your shoppers about your taking full care of that problem.

It's like coherent teamwork that should be an irreplaceable part of your product marketing and development strategy.

Wrap Up

We hope this article has provided you with a clear understanding of what role customer feedback plays in eCommerce and why reviews collection is a must for any site.

As customers and their attitude towards your products are the kings, they are the ones who can easily take your business to a whole new level or bring it down significantly.

Get equipped with a proven strategy of feedback collection, keep your customer care and products improved, and an increase in sales won't be long in coming.