In an era where purchase decisions are heavily influenced by online reviews, having a strong online reputation and lots of positive customer testimonials is essential for any ecommerce store.
Studies have shown that 87% of consumers say online reviews impact their purchase decisions, and 84% trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends or family.
With this in mind, it is crucial for you, as a store owner, to be able to collect and display customer reviews effectively.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll discuss how to get customers to leave reviews and share our recommendations for the best customer review sites and tools at your disposal.
Why Use a Customer Review Tool for Your Online Store
Do you ever wonder what percentage of customers leave reviews? 52% of global internet users aged 25-34 leave reviews online. So, it’s only natural that customer reviews have become an essential part of the online shopping experience.
By reading reviews, customers gather valuable insights, allowing them to make informed decisions about the products they wish to purchase.
Customer reviews not only help your potential buyers in making decisions, but they’re also instrumental in building trust and confidence in your store, which ultimately results in higher sales and conversions.
Percentage of global internet users who post reviews online (Source: Statista)
Plus, as an online store owner, reviews are helpful for you, too. You can implement customers’ feedback to optimize your products and services and improve the overall shopping experience.
Moreover, your ability to reply to negative consumer feedback would imply that you can be trusted, and ultimately, providing solutions to numerous customer concerns will give you extra positive reviews.
Many store owners wonder how to ask a customer for a review. Well, many consumers are willing to provide feedback after they have been asked to do so via email or after they have purchased your product. Thus, it is a great idea to strive to increase the number of reviews on your products.
However, collecting customer reviews manually can be a time-consuming and tedious task. This is where customer review tools come in – to make your life easier and help you take control of your online reputation.
You’ll need ecommerce review software or tools in order to maximize the reviews for your online store. Specifically, what these tools do is that they help you stay organized and manage your reviews effectively. After all, you are very likely to find tracking and responding to reviews more challenging as your store grows.
So, using review software or tools offers various benefits for your online store. These include:
- Efficient review collection: Automate the process of collecting reviews via email, SMS, or other channels, allowing you to gather more customer feedback effectively.
- Streamlined review management: Easily respond to customer feedback and address any negative reviews, enhancing your store’s reputation and demonstrating excellent customer service.
- Customizable display options: Showcase your customer reviews attractively on your website or product pages, boosting your store’s credibility and overall appeal.
- Insightful analytics: Track the performance of your product ratings, testimonials, and overall review trends to help optimize your marketing strategy and product offerings.
You can ensure that nothing slips between the cracks and maintain your credibility by investing in a reliable ecommerce review tool.
Essential Features of Ecommerce Review Tools
So, what should you look for in a good customer review tool? Here are the essential features to consider:
The most important part of these tools is that they simplify the collection and management of reviews. They offer automated reviews, so you can avoid having to reach out to each customer manually.
Some tools offer rewards or incentives for customers who leave reviews, making it more likely for them to do so. If you’re not sure how to get customers to leave reviews, incentives like discounts on the next purchase might help a lot.
By the way, if you use Ecwid by Lightspeed for your online store, you can enable automated review requests via email in a single click — and offer a discount as an incentive if you want to.
An example of an automated review request you can set up in your Ecwid store
Additionally, Ecwid users can beautifully display collected reviews on their sites with Customer Testimonials blocks for Instant Site.
There are different types of customer review blocks for your Ecwid store
Since customers can leave reviews on different online platforms, you might want to try a tool that integrates with platforms like Google, Facebook, and Yelp, allowing you to collect reviews from various sources.
Ecommerce review tools can also provide advanced features, including Google SEO-rich snippets, multilingual support, the ability to showcase video and photo reviews, and multiple publishing options.
Best Customer Review and Rating Tools for Online Stores
To help you enhance your online store’s reputation and leverage these benefits mentioned, we’ve rounded up some of the top customer review tools available:
HelpfulCrowd
HelpfulCrowd is an all-in-one customer review and loyalty platform designed for online stores. With features like automated review collection, customizable display options, and insightful analytics, it’s a comprehensive solution for collecting, managing, and leveraging customer reviews.
HelpfulCrowd offers a range of features to enhance your product reviews. With Google-friendly SEO snippets, Q&A sections, video reviews, and automatic translation in over 27 languages, they’ve got you covered. It also connects with Facebook and Google reviews.
HelpfulCrowd seamlessly integrates with your Ecwid store, so you can easily set up and manage customer reviews without any hassle.
TargetBay
TargetBay is a customer engagement platform that offers reviews, ratings, and testimonial solutions for online stores. With features like automated review requests, customizable templates, forums, and QA sections, it’s an excellent tool to manage your reviews effectively and boost your store’s reputation.
TargetBay also offers a visual product reviews feature where customers can upload photos of their purchased products alongside their feedback. It also lets you moderate reviews to stop spammers and showcase only genuine user-generated content.
All content generated is indexable by Google; it helps improve your organic ranking and customer engagement.
TargetBay also integrates with Ecwid stores, so you can easily set it up and start collecting customer reviews.
Automated Customer Reviews
Automated Customer Reviews sends a post-purchase survey email to every customer, allowing customization of the email template and offering discount coupons. Satisfied customers are redirected to a review site of choice, while unsatisfied shoppers are directed to a custom feedback form. This way, they can contact you directly for quick issue resolution and to avoid negative site reviews.
Apart from the most common review sites like Facebook, Google Reviews, or Yelp, the Automated Customer Reviews app enables you to integrate additional review sites where your satisfied customers can be directed.
The app also integrates with Ecwid stores and automates the review management process. It’s a simple and effective way to collect customer reviews and improve your store’s reputation.
Trustami
Trustami provides an innovative service that consolidates all ratings and reviews in one place, showcasing your trustworthiness and boosting sales.
Trustami collects, analyzes, and presents users’ distributed social media/web data in a standardized and user-friendly format. This way, shoppers can easily see all of your great ratings from various platforms in one place, making it easier to trust and make a purchase.
Trustami also integrates with Ecwid stores, allowing you to showcase collected ratings on your website.
Yotpo
Yotpo is a review tool specifically for generating reviews. With Yotpo, you can send your customers automated emails after they make a purchase. And this can be for review purposes as well as to upsell your products.
In addition, Yotpo has customizable widgets that you can include anywhere on the website. The widgets comprise trustable and profound information about the reviewer, with which you can ask the buyers important questions that can help them make a decision.
Originally designed as a review app, it now offers users a variety of features for loyalty rewards, user-generated content, and SMS marketing. With artificial intelligence, the app can collect reviews seamlessly and display them on your website and other social media sites such as Google and Facebook.
Trustpilot
Trustpilot is a popular review software that can foster customers’ trust. Trustpilot helps users take certain actions, such as uploading mailing lists and sending out email invites for review, among others. These reviews are sent to Bing or Google. With Trustpilot, you can check or track the progress of customers’ reviews and respond to their assessments.
Trustpilot’s free tier offers review management and reporting, while the paid plans include additional features such as customized review requests, Google seller ratings, and on-site widgets.
Stamped.io
Stamped.io is a versatile tool to collect and showcase user-generated content ranging from photos to video reviews.
If you seek to integrate your reviews with a loyalty program, this software is for you. It offers a points and rewards system, referral program functionality, and a VIP program. The tool is vastly responsive, offering a wide range of features that both small-sized and large-sized stores can use.
Stamped.io features custom review forms, localization with more than 20 languages, product review incentives, Google SEO-rich snippets, creation of ads or push reviews to social media, and collection of reviews by messenger, SMS, or email. Stamped.io offers Basic and Business plans whose prices vary based on the number of orders. Established stores can contact them for custom pricing.
Junip
Junip is a review tool for ecommerce, precisely a scalable review platform that allows ecommerce stores to collect limitless text, video, and photo requests. The app is user-friendly and simple to set up, and it can be used on the website within review request forms to reflect your branding as an online store.
Another fascinating thing about Junip is that it integrates with Google Shopping and marketing apps, including Omnisend, Postscript, Drip, and Klaviyo.
eDesk Feedback
This is a multichannel review tool. You can use eDesk Feedback to ask customers for feedback on your Amazon or eBay stores, on Trustpilot, Google, and many more. It primarily helps to conduct emailing and request product reviews conveniently. This can be triggered by events carried out by the customers, ranging from leaving a positive order review to receiving the product, among others.
Users also have full control of why, what, and when to email the customer. It is among the best review tools for ecommerce because it makes it easy to automate your customer review requests.
Bazaarvoice
Bazaarvoice is a popular customer review and rating software. It allows brands and retailers to collect and display several types of user-generated content on their ecommerce websites.
Apart from showing and displaying ratings, consumer reviews, questions, and answers, Bazaarvoice also helps manage other types of user-generated content, such as social content, sampling, creator, and influencer marketing.
Best Practices for Managing Customer Reviews
Now that we’ve discussed some of the most popular customer review tools, let’s go over some best practices for using them effectively.
If you’re not sure how to respond to customer reviews, the first step is to establish a process for responding to both positive and negative reviews. This shows that you value customer feedback and are actively engaged in improving your business.
Additionally, make sure to monitor and track your reviews regularly. This will help you identify any recurring issues or areas where you can improve.
It’s also important to cover a variety of review sites, as customers may have different preferences for where they leave reviews. By using a review management tool, you can make sure to cover all the major platforms and collect reviews from multiple sources.
Finally, don’t be afraid to ask for reviews! After all, happy customers are more likely to leave positive reviews if they are asked to. Use email marketing or social media to reach out and request feedback from your customers.
Choose Your Customer Review Tool
Ecommerce reviews and ratings have continuously helped Amazon and other ecommerce stores build a great shopping empire through factors such as social proof, brand experience, and consumer trust.
Now that you know the essential features of customer review tools and have an overview of the top options available, let’s sum it up for some easier decision-making.
A good ecommerce review software or tool should be able to do some or all of the following:
- automatically request reviews from customers via email or other channels
- filter reviews and messages by type
- manage reviews across different platforms
- support scheduling of post-purchase messages
- integrate with your ecommerce platform.
For a review tool that integrates with Ecwid and showcases ratings from different platforms, go for HelpfulCrowd, TargetBay, Trustami, or Automated Customer Reviews.
If you’ve ever wondered how to ask customers for reviews, the featured tools in this article are designed to ease that concern for good. Choose any of them to elevate your business and build customer trust.
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- Source: https://www.ecwid.com/blog/rating-testimonials-reviews-tools.html
