A product review shared in the world wide web’s air by a consumer beats any marketing campaign, any paid influencer’s work, any artsy ad by a top globally renowned agency. No matter how simple or elaborated a product review is, when put next to the product review average ranking, it influences the consumers’ decisions in stores. Therefore, brands’ sales are impacted.
Imagine this product review multiplied by hundreds and thousands of consumers. Imagine this multiplied by tens of your online retail partners through their eCommerce platforms in your markets.
Product reviews reside in a place where consumers wander every single day and night at every minute, across the globe. Whether they’re in Europe, Asia, Australia or the US, consumers research deeply on why they should buy your product, when your product would meet their demands and expectations and when they should give a try to your competition.
Product Reviews never sleep!
They’re guidance to potential new customers on every single moment, everywhere e-Commerce platforms are open for their shoppers.
And if you think that we are pushing too hard on this fact then let’s take a look at Amazon or other online stores that pro-actively welcome their customers to share their product experiences. You’ll see that your consumers never take a break from that. They are working on promoting your brand and products or advising their peers when they should keep their hands off your product and reorient themselves towards other alternatives. And they do that even on Christmas’ or New Year’s Eve.
This is a 24/7/365 product discovery, marketing and promotion service done by real consumers. And they even pay for your products to be able to do that.
What does that tell you?
Having that in mind, how do you feel knowing that your brand’s 2019 sales success depends upon the content of your product reviews and how your consumers touch every single aspect of it that was relevant to them in a few lines story and broadcast it to the world?
Product reviews are a new data source for your sales and business analytics that inform you about where your products stand in the marketplace and in the mind of consumers. Brands can’t ignore this data any longer and here are 5 reasons why:
#1 – Product reviews are the supreme voice of your customers
There’s no other place more relevant than the eCommerce platforms where your consumer’s voice is so powerful.
Imagine yourself entering a store, seeing and hearing people telling others around them about their experience using your product. Based on that, people interested in buying a product in your brand’s category would pick your or a competitor product from the shelf, put it into their shopping basket and head towards the checkout.
That is exactly how things happen in web-stores today.
#2 – Product reviews influence not only online acquisitions but brick&mortars’ too
Whether people buy a product online or go to the brick&mortar retail store to get it does not make any difference: product reviews remain nowadays the key source of information regardless of how the product is purchased.
People have doubts, questions and want to know how others had found a product before them and based on other people’s experiences decide which model they should buy or maybe buy a different brand. People read reviews regardless of purchasing the product from the store where they consulted the reviews, other web-stores or street retailers.
#3 – Product reviews do not lie but present the real experience situation
While some people may argue that in some cases reviews are fake, well this is true indeed – in some cases only. And those cases are guaranteed of being discovered and sellers being penalized by Amazon. With other platforms, these things tend to take a similar route. In addition, generating fake reviews requires a lot of work behind and getting positive reviews only will not make a product become a top preference for consumers. They know exactly what they’re looking for and what reviews they should read and take into account in order to get what they need from others’ product experiences.
#4 – Product reviews are fast to access by potential customers
Before people get to your sales support service, they’ll first get to product reviews on eCommerce platforms! You can’t outrank their importance and change your consumer decision route. If many brands have the challenge to differentiate themselves, so have their consumers too, in differentiating their products. Therefore, where to go first?
The eCommerce platforms, with Amazon leading the way, have become real digital publishing places with their content followed by their new and returning customers. For example, Amazon product reviews are consulted by people from everywhere in the world although most of them will end up by purchasing the goods from local brick & mortar stores eventually.
With FeedCheck review monitoring platform, we are making product reviews fast and easily accessible by consumer goods brands too, helping them stay on top of what is being talked about their products or their competitors’. All parties involved need to get access to this valuable content and consumer brands need to keep their eyes on this space on a frequent basis.
#5 – Product reviews can be found not only on Amazon but other web-stores too
Many companies have had the tendency in the past to limit their product review monitoring mainly to Amazon marketplaces. But global consumer brands are sold online across the globe on many eCommerce platforms that offer a product review feature to their shoppers in relevant markets. They’re all over the world from Europe, Russia, China, India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US. Everywhere consumers share their product experiences while the way they emphasize the problems and rank a product might be different depending on everyone’s culture. Therefore, all voices are important and useful to learn from in order to understand how to engage in conversations in each place around the globe.
You too can start making steps towards complementing your business data with your product reviews and build the best foundation for solutions to grow your sales in 2019!
At FeedCheck we’re developing the tool that helps consumer brands achieve that wherever their products are in the eCommerce space, on Amazon and beyond.
You can easily test how product review aggregation and monitoring works here or bring your own reviews into FeedCheck either by selecting one of our plans or contact us for a personalized setup.