5 Ways product reviews can accelerate your business

Product reviews are especially helpful when they include user-generated content from real customers, and that’s exactly why we’re happy to offer that capability with our Product Reviews feature. To help you make the most of it, we’ve gathered the five biggest reasons you should be collecting reviews for each of your products.

With 89% of consumers checking reviews online before making purchases, it’s undeniably important for businesses to collect and showcase reviews about their service. But for many businesses selling products, service-level reviews aren’t always enough. Providing consumers with reviews about your business is certainly helpful, but depending on the types of products you offer, a customer may need more information than is typically available in a service-level review. Do you offer a wide range of products? If so, a review from a customer who bought a hairdryer isn’t necessarily relevant to a potential customer shopping for shampoo.

And if you sell something like clothing, where consumers can be particular about things like quality and fit, specific reviews for each product are crucial for sales because customers — even those who have purchased other items from you in the past —need to feel confident in the specific products they’re considering. By showcasing reviews for all of your products, you’re boosting consumer confidence, and credibility for your brand.

Just how effective can product reviews be? British multinational retailer, Ann Summers, found that going from no reviews to even just a 1-star rating increased their conversions by 76%. Product reviews with higher ratings saw even higher conversion rates. Overall their ecommerce store saw up to a 230% increase in conversions by leveraging product reviews throughout their customer journey.

In one of our other case studies danish toy store, Legeakademiet, saw a 4.43% revenue increase from displaying product reviews on their website, which is more than a 200,000 EUR turnover increase for them. This was very impressive as only 20% of their products had any product reviews when they ran the split-test.

“In order to keep the edge in a competitive market, we wanted to add Product Reviews to Legeakademiet’s online store. Instead of just implementing the function, we wanted to identify the potential payoff through a split-test. The split-test clearly showed that implementing the function would help increase conversion rate and increase basket size.”

Jesper P. Tønder

Legeakademiet.dk Client Lead at S360

User-generated content (UGC) is content that is created by consumers, rather than brands. In today’s world, where consumers are inundated with brand messaging and more purchasing options than ever, UGC is particularly useful in building social proof (the concept of people following the actions of the masses), helping consumers feel FOMO around your products once they see that other consumers have enjoyed it.

There are plenty of stats to speak to the power of UGC. Consumers are 2x more likely to say UGC is more authentic compared to branded content. On-site consumer reviews can increase conversions by 74%. And 92% of consumers trust word of mouth more than any type of advertising.

When it comes to product reviews, UGC can be particularly powerful when imagery or videos are included. With so much uncertainty around online shopping, consumers wonder whether a product will end up looking completely different than the promotional product shots they saw at checkout. When customers upload photos along with their product reviews, it gives new shoppers the confidence to purchase that same product and know they’ll receive what they’re expecting. Depending on the product, video can be even more helpful here to showcase the different elements of a product.

Trustpilot’s Product Reviews photo feature makes it super easy to collect and display user-generated photos with your product reviews as it’s seamlessly embedded.

User-generated photos of your products can also be used to create ads for social media as shown above. As Simona highlights below, these can be effective to build that all important transparency between your products and your customers.

Consumers love to engage with short videos, and that’s not just limited to TikTok. 84% of people say they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video and 69% of people said that to learn about a product or service they’d prefer to watch a short video.

Our Video for Product Reviews feature gives your customers a more interactive way to leave you reviews. It can also give you really valuable insights into how your products look when they finally make it to your customers. But the best part of videos with reviews is that it can help you tap into younger markets and give you fresh video content to leverage in throughout your customer journey and marketing channels.

Imagine if instead of generic and produced videos on your site, you could easily integrate videos of your customers talking about how much they liked their purchase right onto your site. These kinds of videos will come across as a lot more authentic and genuine – they’re a lot more cost-effective as well.

SEO is particularly challenging for ecommerce sites. With so many different product pages (and constant churn as new products are added or taken away), it can be much harder to optimize for ecommerce than service-based sites.

Product reviews primarily help your site’s SEO by giving you continuously fresh content, which Google loves. Some product reviews can be quite detailed, which can help expand a given product’s query reach and ultimately rank for longer tail keywords.

SEO is also impacted by the length of time people spend on your site. About 70% of consumers are looking for reviews on products when they enter an ecommerce site. If your site doesn’t have any, a large percent of visitors searching will quickly leave your site. This can affect site metrics like bounce rate and time on site, both of which can negatively impact your SEO. This also means you’re missing out on a large chunk of potential customers.

Last but not least, depending on how you leverage them, product reviews can also help get your star rating to display in search results through review snippets. These little gold stars help your page stand out on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) so much so that some Trustpilot customers have been able to increase click-through rates by up to 35%.

Fresh content and review snippets only need to be set up once when you implement your product review solution. This is a great way to automate some of your SEO efforts for your product pages, saving you both time and money.

Did you know that product reviews can also help you get stars on Google Shopping, as well as increase your CTR up to 15%?

These are displayed both on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), and in Google Shopping.

In 2019, Google found that 50% of digital shoppers admitted that images help them decide what to buy online. To help shoppers feel more confident in their online purchases, Google introduced user-generated images in product reviews on Google Shopping.

Customer photos attached to product reviews on Google Shopping

By collecting product reviews with Trustpilot Product Reviews, your product review photos will automatically be fed to Google so they can appear on your Shopping Ads if they qualify. It’s currently only available in the US, and on mobile devices, but Google has plans to expand across more Google properties and countries.

Collecting product reviews can give your business valuable consumer insights. Understanding which products your customers really love can help you keep up with demand and stock products with similar attributes down the line.

These same insights allow you to identify and remove poorly rated products from your site, lowering the risk that one of your happy customers will become dissatisfied with a future purchase. This, in turn, can drastically improve your customer lifetime value.

And don’t forget about products with mediocre ratings! If you have products that consistently get 3 star ratings, digging into the content of those reviews can help you tweak the product, improve it for future customers, and hopefully turn it into a 5 star product.

This is another thing Legeakademit does with their product reviews. Ann Reimer, Founder & Partner shared that: “Through product reviews, customers tell us which products to get more of and which to remove. help us pick the right products just as much as they help our customers.” In today’s online marketplace this is the kind of mindset all companies should have. Reviews aren’t just a way to help consumers, they also help businesses to know exactly how to satisfy their customers.

If you’re selling something online, product reviews can bring your business great benefits in terms of conversion, SEO, and product development. Collecting and leveraging product reviews doesn’t take a long time either, so if you’re ready to start seeing these benefits today, click the link below.