72% of Customers Won’t Take Any Buying Actions Until They’ve Read Reviews

If you’re running an e-commerce business or managing one, you’ve already had a sales pitch via e-mail about a service pitching you product reviews software. If you don’t know understand why there is such heavy emphasis on the importance of product reviews on your page, or third party platforms where you sell your products, this post will help you know why. Sourcing product reviews from customers should be a TOP priority into your marketing strategy.

Studies have proven that customer reviews increase sales because shoppers seek out the reviews before they are willing to make a purchase with a company. This goes for companies that they have not or even have done business with before.

Reviews not only have the power to influence consumer decisions but can strengthen a company’s credibility. Reviews have the power to gain customer trust, and they encourage people to interact with the company. Customer interaction ultimately leads to improved profits for businesses.

Let’s start with some stats that are staggering into the power of customer reviews on products.

1. About 95% of customers read reviews before making a purchase. (Spiegel)
   
2. 93% of customers will read reviews of local businesses to determine its quality. (BrightLocal)
   
3. 72% of customers won’t take any buying actions until they’ve read reviews. (Testimonial Engine) 
   
4. For every one star increase that a business gets on Yelp, they see a 5-9% increase in revenue. (Harvard Business Review)
   
5. When a product gets five reviews, the likelihood of it being purchased increases by 270%. (Spiegel)
   
6. When higher-priced items display reviews, the conversion rate increases by 380%. (Spiegel)
   
7. Purchase likelihood increases by 15% when buyers read verified reviews over anonymous reviews. (Spiegel)
   
8. Customers spend 31% more when a business has positive reviews. (Broadly)
   
9. 91% of customers from the ages of 18 to 34 trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations. (BrightLocal)
   
10. Customers require a business to have at least 40 online reviews before they believe its average star rating. (BrightLocal)
    
11. About 85% of consumers consider any review older than three months to be irrelevant. (BrightLocal)
    
12. Reputation makes up over 25% of a brand’s market value. (Deloitte)
    
13. Saurage Research showed that 84% of Americans rely on online customer reviews.
    
14. The MyCommerce.com research also showed that consumers trust reviews from other customers 12 times more than the product descriptions.

HOW & WHY CUSTOMER REVIEWS DRIVE SALES FOR YOUR E-COMMERCE STORE

1. Drive Sales: Have you heard of social proof? Social proof is the concept that people will follow the actions of the masses. The idea is that since so many other people behave in a certain way, it must be the correct behavior. With positive reviews comes a positive mindset on the attitude of the consumer toward buying that product. Reviews are a very powerful social proof feature on your product pages.
   
2. Builds Trust: Customer reviews help build trust with consumers as from the go, consumers can already see that other consumers are buying from the business. Reading dozens of reviews that indicate good quality and services create an online reputation that customers can trust. In fact, customers are 63% more likely to trust and buy from a company with reviews.
   
3. Pushes Customer Decisions: Going back to point #1, when a customer is on the fence about purchasing a product, consumer reviews really do help drive that decision process forward from reading the experience of other consumers facing the same issues to see how the product served that customer.

THE BENEFITS OF REVIEWS?

Reviews not only have the power to influence consumer decisions but can strengthen a company’s credibility. Reviews have the power to gain customer trust, and they encourage people to interact with the company. Customer interaction ultimately leads to improved profits for businesses.

DO CUSTOMERS LEAVE REVIEWS?

70 percent of consumers have been asked by a business to leave a review. 50 percent of consumers have been asked to leave a review about a business and actually left a review.

HOW WILL NEGATIVE REVIEWS AFFECT SALES?

While no one wants to see or read negative reviews on a website, the truth is that some negative reviews can help the consumer with some realistic expectations and also know the authenticity of the page they are looking. No matter how incredible or awesome a product is, there is always a customer that will have something negative to say about it. It’s part of business and part of life. Many consumers actually understand this. Unless a product or service is filled with negative feedback, more positive reviews will outweigh the negative providing more accurate and authentic voice of the customer on the page.

CAN YOU REMOVE A NEGATIVE REVIEW FROM GOOGLE?

Google aggregates reviews from around the web and then provides this snippet of reviews for customers from around the web.

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t offer a simple “delete” option for its reviews. The person who posted the review can delete it or your business can “flag the review as inappropriate.” Flagging the review alerts Google that the review is fake or that it doesn’t comply with Google’s review policies.

IN CONCLUSION

Customer reviews are essential to your e-commerce business. Without reviews and a system to keep generating reviews for your products, consumers will likely flock to other products that they can have more trust in purchasing, as the voice of the customer is often more powerful than that of anything else, as we see from data and statistics.