Insights into how consumers see reviews when making purchase decisions

In this digital world, so many factors on the internet influence consumer’s purchasing decisions when they visit your webshop. Reviews are one of the factors that influence their purchasing decisions. Here, an interesting survey about how consumers see reviews was published by Yotpo. Let’s explore the data to understand how they refer to your product reviews!!

Survey information

In this research, 551 subjects were investigated in total, which consists of 66.24% Female and 33.76% Male. The age groups were shown below. The target countries are the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Are reviews important for the customers?

Before analyzing the data, let’s check if the reviews are really important for the customers.

Do they read product reviews before making an online purchase?

Firstly, almost all people read product reviews before making an online purchase. The answers for “Rarely” and “Never” were 0% for this question. You can assume all of your potential customer look at your product or service reviews before making an online purchase.

But do they have influence?

Do they really influence their purchasing decisions? Look at the graph below. According to this data, 99.64% of purchasing decisions are influenced by reviews. Customer contents are google reviews, Instagram posts, or YouTube videos for example.

How many reviews do they read?

Surprisingly, the customers refer to multiple reviews before making a purchase. They try to compare some reviews to know your product better. In other words, the more reviews you have, the more likely you are to gain the trust of your customers.

Most customers read multiple reviews before making an online purchase and the reviews influence their purchasing decisions significantly. Therefore, what kind of reviews you have is crucial for your brand and your online sales.

What kind of reviews influence positively the customers’ purchasing decisions?

Should it be with photos?

Your product reviews should have photos. The majority of the customer trusts product reviews more when photos are included. Therefore, if you ask someone to leave reviews on your product, it is better to ask for photos together with their reviews.

Whose reviews are more important for them?

Second, you should have positive product reviews from someone who has similar characteristics to your potential customers. (height, skin type, body shape, etc.) Taking a purchase decision for clothing, for example, if your customer sees a positive review from someone who looks similar and the clothes look good on you, the reviews positively influence the customer’s purchasing decision.

Are negative reviews always bad?

Negative reviews do not always influence badly customers’ purchasing decisions. Review pages with only positive reviews conversely are considered by customers to be unreliable. The suspicion that someone is manipulating reviews out of sight arises, so the existence of negative reviews can also create a sense of security for this problem.

Even if you have many reviews…

Review recency is also important. The more recent reviews are, the more credit the reviews can get from the customers. Hence, as a business owner, you need to be aware of the review recency on each platform.

So many reviews but low star ratings

Average star ratings affect the customer’s purchasing decision significantly. Now, most platforms have this average rating system and you can find this rating everywhere. The star rating system is a quick and easy way to see how well a product or service is liked by others. More than half find the average star ratings very important.

To sum up, recent reviews written by target customers with photos are the best for your brand. Of course, it should be positive reviews though. Your business should keep collecting reviews from your customer regularly and ideally, the review has photos and other potential customers can understand the reviews are written by similar people to them.

How to send review requests

Email vs SMS

When you ask for review requests, the majority of customers prefer to receive them via Email. Given that few people prefer SMS, perhaps review requests could be made by email only.

Is it worth giving discounts?

If you want to get more reviews from your customers, discounts/coupons can be good ways to incentivize them to leave a review. In fact, more than 3/4 of the subjects answered they are likely to be incentivized by discounts/coupons to leave a review.

To conclude, the review request should be collected by email with some discounts/coupons according to this survey.

Conclusion

Because so much information is available on the Internet nowadays, product reviews by people who have already purchased the product are more and more valuable. As you can tell as a customer, you feel uneasy to buy a product without seeing the reviews, and if the reviews are good, you feel more confident about buying the product. For your business to be successful, we recommend that you start review management.

If you are interested in improving your online eCommerce, we can help you. Click here to contact us!!