On a daily basis across the world, online shoppers fill their shopping carts with tons of thousands of products such as groceries, electronics, health & beauty, gaming, phones and tablets. The quality of products purchased online has always been a point of debate among shoppers, especially since the products can’t be inspected before purchase. The trend is the same in Nigeria, even though the country’s ecommerce sector is just 7 years old.
One of the fundamental methods for helping customers make the right choice when shopping online is ‘ratings and reviews’. Ecommerce companies such as Jumia have made a provision on their platforms for customers to rate and review the quality of products purchased on its jumia.com.ng platform.
Product ratings and reviews have become an essential part of eCommerce businesses because they enable customers to rate/review products or services purchased online. These companies do not do this for fun. They understand that product ratings/reviews have a huge role to play when it comes to driving sales, generating leads and attracting customers to their website.
From gaining local organic search rankings to becoming word-of-mouth, online reviews help reinforce your brand and reputation. If you are rarely mentioned anywhere on the web, how will it influence your customers?
The fact is so many consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations and this is where brands like Jumia, Nigeria’s no 1 shopping destination is different from others. The platformhas a rating guide because quality is part of its fundamental values. More so, it allows customers to leave feedback about their service and products which increases their “mentions”, ultimately leading to more exposure and driving more traffic.
There’s no denying the fact that online reviews are very significant today, and not just that, they are part of most marketing campaigns today so that they can create a big impact in the industry and break sales.
Reasons why reviews/ratings are important to your business
Increase sales
People tend to read online reviews and trust them as much as they are recommended by their friends or families. A significant number of people consider online reviews while choosing a product or service of their need. So, if the particular product review is good, there is a good chance that you will purchase that product and vice versa. This will automatically increase sales.
Better local search rankings
Customer reviews play a crucial role today for organic search rankings in search engines. In fact, enabling customer reviews will add credibility to your company while new reviews are also going to add more unique content to your site. The increased amount of content that is relevant and unique will add a better chance to get ranked on search engines while the pages are also frequently crawled by search engine bots compared to others. All in all, reviews are very important to improve search visibility and drive more traffic to the site through search engines today.
Improved communication and customer service
Analysing the reviews people leave for you – both good and bad – helps keep your ear to the ground with regards to overall customer satisfaction and public opinion. Online reviews help give a voice to both happy and unhappy customers and allow you to open up a public channel of conversation, letting you demonstrate your customer service skills. Online reviews can also give you valuable feedback with regards to what your clients actually want. Reviews provide insight into how your average consumer thinks about your service or industry, rather than what you think about what you offer.
Added marketing opportunities
Online reviews are surely worth the deal and they offer a plethora of benefits to your business that most marketing campaigns fail to do. In fact, online reviews act as micro-marketing campaigns that provide a positive benefit to your potential customers, now and in the long run. Having online reviews already is also going to encourage new customers to voice their opinion and leave their own feedback.
Do product reviews/ratings actually influence online purchasing decisions?
If you describe reviews/ratings/testimonials as the word-of-mouth of online shopping, you won’t be wrong. This is as earlier stated, a lot of customers read these reviews before deciding whether they should buy a product or not. This is even more important due to the prevalence of fake products on some online platforms despite painstaking efforts and stringent penalties to put them at bay.
So, if the review of a particular product is positive and is rated 5-star, your customers will be more inclined to buy that product and if there are so many bad reviews, note that they will steer clear.
However, know that in some cases, it does not necessarily mean that the product is bad. A bad review may be as a result of poor customer service, payment challenges and others. This is systemic. Your customers are informing you to make their purchase seamless. Overall, for you to get favourable reviews, simply offer quality products and services as well as a good customer service and you will observe the positive impact it will have on your reviews.