If you are managing an online brand or have in the past, you probably know how important it is to have product reviews on your site.

Why? 

Because product reviews increase conversion rates, boost sales, improve SEO, increase customer retention, and enhance product performance analysis. 

How? 

Here’s a breakdown. 

Why Product Reviews Are Vital for eCommerce Growth

1. Increase Conversion Rates and Sales: Product reviews are an essential tactic within a store’s conversion rate optimization strategy. Reviews create social proof for your brand and build trust among your customers. Therefore, a fair number of good reviews could be the deciding factor that will convert a customer and make them purchase a specific product.
2. Improve SEO: Reviews are content. Specifically, content that helps your brand be more visible and could assist your SEO efforts. You can look at it as customer-curated content working for you: the customers are sharing their experience, and you’re leveraging relevant, product-focused content for your SEO and marketing efforts.
3. Increase Customer Retention: Reviews and comments are an invaluable opportunity to communicate with your customer base. They increase their engagement with the brand, create a two-way street relationship, and improve retention.
4. Improve Product Performance Analysis: Product reviews are essentially feedback from your customers on your products. This is an important parameter that can help you analyze your product performance, explain its conversion rate (good or bad), and help you understand what to emphasize or correct in the product description and marketing message (for example, if people really liked a particular feature, talk about it in the message).

Furthermore, using reviews to make merchandising and marketing decisions could boost your conversion rate by up to 15%. 

Here’s how! 

How to Use Product Reviews to Make Smart Merchandising Decisions

Product reviews, as mentioned above, help with analyzing products performance, improving conversion rates, and boosting sales. 

This makes them an important parameter to take into consideration when making merchandising decisions. This includes your brand’s collection sorting strategies and deciding which products to promote on marketing channels.

Working with our customers, we have seen an improvement of 5%–15% in a store’s conversion rate when using the product reviews smartly.  

Here are two main ways successful eCommerce managers should use them  to get the same results:

1. Fine-Tune Collection Sorting 

When forming a sorting strategy, it is recommended to take multiple parameters into consideration, such as sales, conversion rate, inventory, days to finish inventory, margin, and more.

The product review ratings and the number of reviews are highly important parameters as they will help boost conversion rates and sales. 

Why? 

As high-rated products have a better chance of converting, pushing them to the top of strategic collections and across the site will improve your store’s conversion rate in a big way.

In addition to that, you can also make sure that products with low ratings don’t end up at the top of the collection pages, which reduces your conversion rate chances.

2. Boosting Facebook or Google Ads 

When creating dynamic Facebook or Google Shopping ads, you can filter feeds to ensure only well-reviewed products appear. Products with better and/or more reviews have a higher chance of converting. 

Of course, there are more parameters to consider, such as the current conversion rate, inventory, and more. However, starting off with products with better reviews creates more of a solid foundation for conversion success. 

Final Thoughts: Driving Smart Merchandising Decisions with Product Reviews 

Advanced merchandising is the key to long-term eCommerce success. To make smart merchandising decisions, retailers need to consider several key parameters in terms of retail and marketing KPIs. Reviews are one such important parameter. 

Not only will reviews build growth and boost sales long term, but when they are combined into a multi-parameter sorting and merchandising strategy, they can be incredibly powerful. 

Have advanced merchandising questions?  

Our eCommerce merchandising experts are standing by. 

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