Product Reviews

help sales?

[sleepy_eye]

Hi there.
I've searched to see if there are other threads on this topic but didn't find any good ones, maybe I'm blind.
Was wondering if any of you had experience with customer reviews of products and if they hurt, helped, or made no difference in sales.
Thanks

[jwolthuis]

The answer is Yes. Positive reviews obviously help drive sales. Negative reviews tell you (the webmaster) reasons why you shouldn't be carrying the product.

However, I always edit recent reviews, and remove negative one that are due to customer ignorance (a few of my widgets are machine tools that require very basic understanding of machine shop skills).

[dpd1]

I always post good feedback from customers on the site. But I think the best is when somebody posts something on their own. Some people are just never going to trust anything that is actually on the same site as the product. I think if people are fair it's good. But you get some people that are basically just disgruntled, and simply make negative comments, because they do that for everything. Unfortunately, people tend to focus on that stuff, whether it's fair or not. It's like when you have a seller with a few negs and hundreds of positives, and somebody asks people if it's safe to buy something from them, because they have a couple negs. For whatever reason, some people ignore the positive.

[sleepy_eye]

Thanks for the replies

Perhaps instead of reviews next to each product I could have a link says something like 'see what our customers say about us or the item etc..'. This way also I wouldn't have to worry about comments messing up search engines.

[digitalv]

There was a shopping cart I saw once that I thought handled this well. Customers could write reviews but only for products they had purchased and the reviews themselves were displayed using ajax. Blended right into the page but wasn't indexed by the search engines.

[MisterT]

Product reviews definitely help sales - and if you have them on your website you should encourage customers to leave reviews. You definitely need to edit/delete spam reviews and reviews that are just offensive or ridiculous etc.

[Super_Chunk]

We publish reviews, both good and bad because then visitors know that you are honest. We publish them with warts-n-all just as the customers write them. They certainly drive sales and also, when I purchase items myself on the internet I always look for reviews and one product with better reviews than another would always get my sale. I also think that having indexable reviews on a page helps distinguish your content from others, particularly when you have generic product descriptions; your content then has the uniqueness that the search engines like.

[sleepy_eye]

Great replies. Thanks.
@digitalv Thats a clever way to render the comments in ajax. Thanks

[lorax]

That is a good idea digitalv.

I believe product reviews are a good thing if you allow honesty and can accept criticisms. There's nothing wrong with a follow up post to address the criticism but it's a tricky thing to do. It all depends upon the tone you set.

I don't see product reviews as a short term gain. I see them as long term investments. They add content that will take time to accumulate to a significant level, they add credibility (if honesty and openness are allowed), and they help establish a depth and meaning to the SEs and potential buyers - a sign that you're not just an island but a part of the online community.