Do you see sales increase by having reviews on your site?

[Luxoria]

Hiya, another question about reviews here. =)

Does anyone here have had an opportunity to run your site for a while w/out reviews then later implement a review system for your products? If so, did you see an increase in conversions/sales?

I ask because my store is going to sell basically one product with a few hundred variations. Example, a store that only sells vinyl decals but stocks hundreds of designs. Having a review button for each product is silly, yes. But overall I think it would be good to place somewhere on the site a master review section or a place for testimonies. However to keep my site free from excessive clutter to maintain its spirit of minimalism I would rather just skip adding a review system to anyplace on the site.

Anyone thoughts on this?

[dpd1]

I can't tell you the degree of how well it works. But I know that people's opinions are very valuable to others. What I do is take unsolicited positive emails and post them under the products that they bought. Frankly... I do it that way, because many people aren't the greatest writers. Lots of misspelled words and stuff. So I clean it up, then post it. Then I just put the person's first name, last name initial, and town.

The problem is that you've got a lot of incredibly paranoid people out there that simply aren't going to believe anything they see written on any sales site. I've had people ask on forums for opinions about one of my products, which has like 5-6 positive testimonies from people right in the description. So it kind of makes you wonder what they think about those. Do they just think they're all fake, or what. But I think the majority of people believe it.

[dickbaker]

I don't post the reviews on my site. Instead I have at the top five gold stars and a tag that reads "Google Products Five-Star Store" and links to a page in Google products with all of my customer reviews.

I've had customers comment that, based upon those reviews, they felt they could trust my site. I've had other customers say that the reviews were probably written by my employees (I don't have any employees).

I don't think it can hurt.

In the beginning I had reviews on my site from real customers, and I used their real first and last names, city and state. Didn't seem to make a difference.

[Luxoria]

Thanks for the input. I too am kindif hesitant to take reviews seriously. Most the time they sound too well written. On the other hand I have posted some casual reviews for electronic equipment on amazon and newegg and when I read them back it sound like a cheesy sales pitch. Buy, hey if it's a great product I would want people buying it rather than saving five dollars and picking up something that is pure junk.

I am going to try a different approach at a review system. When a customer purchases a product I am going to offer them a coupon of some sort if they take a usable picture after the product is installed. I am going to make a nice customer gallery showing how/where others have placed their product along with comments made by the purchaser (if they choose). My store sells artful decorations.

Amazon allows customers to upload pictures to their product pages. When I bought a camera lens there where hundreds of pictures of photographs customers took using that particular lens. Also most of them commented on the lens features in an open and honest way which was nice to read.