September 18, 2018 Industry news
eBay buyers can now shop with greater confidence as product reviews are starting to be rolled out in the UK.
Now that sellers have added unique product identifier’s to their listings, eBay is able to aggregate product data from across listings that share the same GTIN. A key benefit of this is a new product review feature.
More trust
No one just buys a product any more, with a wealth of products and vendors available 24/7, we want to know that the things we buy are worth our hard earned cash. Which is why product reviews are an essential part of today’s shopper journey.
Research from Ofcom has found that 89% of UK adults read reviews when considering to buy a product online.
An unbiased review can help move someone from a watcher to a buyer. Bazaarvoice have found that products with reviews have a 12.5% higher conversion rate than those without. Interestingly this jumps to nearly 84% higher for products with 20+ reviews.
The reason for this huge spike in conversion can be brought down to trust. 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. With consumer confidence in manufacturer’s and brand’s own descriptions of their products at a low, consumers are 12 times more likely to trust the say so of a stranger than a product description.
More traffic
User generated content is also great for SEO. Offering fresh, keyword rich content to pages that might not be updated all that often.
Shoppers think about what’s important to them, so when reviewing a product they’ll include terms that they themselves are likely to be searching for. Even the best copywriters and SEOs cannot account for every term, so having this content added to your product listing will help it show up in more search results – particularly long tail searches.
So adding reviews to a product not only helps to convert traffic that reaches your product pages, they drive traffic to the pages also. Evans cycles found that after adding reviews, traffic to their site increased by some 23% - with one product getting 361% more search visits than before.
Negatives are a positive
The obvious issue with allowing users to comment on a product freely and displaying it on your product page, is that you could come in for some criticism. This is amplified when you consider that eBay are aggregating reviews from other sellers also.
However, negative reviews are vital to gaining consumer’s trust. Revoo have found that the presence of bad reviews actually improve conversion by 67%.
Consumers know, nothing in life only comes with positives – and let’s face it there’s plenty of people ready to complain on the internet. Which is why 30% of people expect censorship or even fake reviews if they don’t see a negative opinion on a page – leading to a 68% increase in trust when there is a mix of good and bad reviews.
Reviews are also a great source of information for you as a seller. You can see that a product you’re sourcing is having some problems, or isn’t living up to expectation. You can use this information to better plan the products that you’re buying – with clear insight into your customers tastes and preferences.
Make sure you’re ready
This new feature will aggregate reviews based on the product identifiers you’ve inserted into your listings. So first things first, make sure you’ve input the correct GTIN for your products.
If you are a retailer of a branded product if you don’t have the correct GTIN on your listings they won’t have the reviews included.
If you manufacture or sell products that are unique to your eBay storeyou’ll want to encourage your buyers to leave reviews of your products when they’re available. Check you’ve correctly added GTINs to your listings, then keep an eye out for when the option to write a review is available.
It will be interesting to see how product reviews take off on eBay. They‘ll be driving buyers to leave reviews via post purchase emails. As well as allowing users to leave reviews from the view item page.
