Customer Reviews

[corbing]

We start actively soliciting customer product reviews about 18 months ago and now have almost 10,000 reviews submitted. We are *very* pleased with the results. It's been positive in so many ways. But, it seems that most of the reviews are short (1-4 sentences). Some details but not a lot. Certainly nothing like you see on so many products at Amazon where someone writes a very comprehensive 4-5 paragraph review about a product.

We've tried different ways of getting more in-depth feedback but nothing has been successful. We've tried making the review edit box bigger (wider, taller and then both), changed the wording for the review instructions, etc.

Has anyone been successful at getting really "meaty" reviews? Or, is this just an Amazon (and maybe epinions) phenomena?

Suggestions?

[jsinger]

Many are closet book, movie or restaurant critics. I've dones a few. Not many aspire to review socks. I reviewed a nifty cleaning chemical once for Epinion.

Wow 10,000! You must sell things people get passionate about. Always find it silly when I see, "be the first to review our 5/8" zink washers."

[pageoneresults]

Consumer Reviews are a very powerful part of the equation in ecommerce. But, I think many are aware that those reviews can be and are influenced by various factors so what you are reading may be a paid review, an actual employee posing as a consumer and writing a review, etc.

How you use those reviews in the overall generation of content is also important. Separating them and making them their own entity is imperative. Those reviews can be your bread and butter if formatted properly.

[gotgame45]

We do follow up emails on every order, and I sort of bait our customers into giving us reviews. It has generated a nice response (but again we are in a niche area, and people are passionate about the certain product we sell). Obviously we are much smaller, and aren't getting 10,000 submissions. Pageoneresults - do you mean a separate reviews page?
I find it much more helpful as a consumer when the reviews come underneath the product - like amazon or zappos. This could also help with SEO + keywords.

What are everyone's thoughts on negative comments as opposed to keeping it all positive?