You don’t need much time working in retail to understand how and why customer trust is essential for the success of eCommerce businesses - it certainly isn't a trend. Without the option to see or touch products in person, shoppers rely heavily on social proof to help them make purchasing decisions – which for many customers, means reading reviews. Authentic feedback from other buyers helps to reassure, and can lead to enhanced brand credibility and increased conversions.
For eCommerce brands, using customer reviews effectively can be a game-changer, since customer feedback provides the business with much more than trust. Customer insights in eCommerce can help businesses understand their customers on a deeper level, which can inform decisions that build customer loyalty, and drive long-term sales growth.
Businesses that collect, showcase, analyse, and use feedback to make strategic decisions are the ones that will succeed in the long term. With the right strategies and tools, eCommerce professionals can turn reviews into a powerful asset for their brand. Let’s take a look.
While it might feel like common sense that reviews are important – most of us use them as consumers ourselves – let’s take a more detailed look at why reviews are so important for eCommerce businesses.
Building trust and credibility
Even with eCommerce’s rise, buyers remain cautious without the ability to see products firsthand, especially when shopping with a new brand. Reviews help build trust by showcasing your reliability, product quality, and service. Genuine feedback reassures customers that the item meets their needs and the business will handle issues responsibly. With 96% of consumers reading reviews before purchasing, they’re a critical factor in establishing credibility and confidence.
Influencing purchase decisions
Authentic experiences shared by other customers highlight product benefits that they might not have considered and can address common concerns. Displaying reviews that include visual elements – that is, user-generated content such as photos or videos – can be even more persuasive.
Providing valuable feedback
Customer reviews provide actionable insights, highlighting what works well and where improvements are needed. Positive reviews reinforce what’s going well, while negative ones uncover what needs to be addressed. By using this feedback to refine products and services, businesses can boost customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. Reviews should be more than just a website feature; they can enable continuous improvement, contributing to long-term success.
Customer reviews boost sales by offering social proof that helps shoppers make confident purchase decisions. Ways that successful businesses do it include:
Reviews help reduce customer concerns and hesitation, encourage conversions, reduce cart abandonment, and build long-term sales growth.
Gathering customer reviews is essential for building trust and driving sales, but many eCommerce brands struggle to boost review response rates. To collect more reviews effectively, you need effortless and engaging opportunities for customers to share their feedback.
Request reviews post-purchase
Our Personalisation and Privacy report showed customers prefer personalisation. So making sure that the review request arrives after they've received the product, as well as including details such as their name, are beneficial to increasing response rate.
Simplify the review process
Customers don’t want to spend ages writing a review, so make it easy for them to leave feedback by using mobile-friendly forms and minimising the steps required. Signing into an account is an unnecessary step that is likely to deter customers from leaving their feedback.
Incentivise participation
Providing incentives in return for leaving a review is generally considered ethically unsound as it tends to mean customers don’t give an accurate representation of their experience. Amazon banned incentivised reviews in 2016, and now penalises retailers found to be using incentives when selling on their marketplace. Not only that, but the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCC) states that reviews need to be labelled appropriately.
You shouldn’t be offering incentives like discounts, loyalty points, or monetary rewards to encourage reviews. However, programmes like Treefo, which contributes funds to tree planting projects for each review collected, can lead to customers being more likely to reply to review requests. This doesn’t benefit the customer directly, but it does mean that they can feel good about the few seconds it takes to leave their review. It can also help to demonstrate your sustainability efforts.
Get the most from automation
Collecting authentic customer feedback should be built into automated processes. The best review platforms offer tools to help you increase response rates through integrations, making the experience effortless for customers. Equally as important though is that your review platform allows you to dig into the data provided by customers, so you can see trends and opportunities contained within sentiment, and act on them quickly.
With these strategies, eCommerce brands can build a steady stream of genuine feedback, improving credibility and customer satisfaction.
Negative reviews are an inevitable part of doing business, but when managed effectively, they can help strengthen your brand's reputation and increase customer loyalty. Here’s how to deal with not-so-great feedback so that your business looks positive.
Respond promptly and professionally
A swift, professional response shows customers that you value their feedback and are committed to resolving issues. Apologise where appropriate, address the concern directly, and offer a positive solution – don’t be tempted to get into an argument. Public responses demonstrate accountability, which can reassure other shoppers that you want to do the right thing by them.
Use feedback to improve
No business runs perfectly 100% of the time. Negative reviews provide valuable insights into areas for improvement. By identifying recurring themes in complaints, you can address underlying issues with your products, services, or processes. Taking action based on feedback helps enhance customer satisfaction, and helps to reduce the chances of you receiving similar complaints in the future.
For example, after a wave of negative feedback around their courier service, Discount Coffee opted to change provider to prevent further issues. Complaints about delivery swiftly dropped.
Turn challenges into opportunities
Customers expect a response to their reviews – and even more so when they’re unhappy. If they know you handle criticism constructively, customers are more likely to share their experience in a positive way. And it is important if you want them to return to your business - 44% of people who said they had left negative feedback for a business, would use the business again if they received a satisfactory response.
Ignoring negative feedback won’t make it go away – what you need is a platform that makes it easy to manage and analyse negative reviews, so you can respond quickly and glean actionable insights. With the right approach, negative reviews can become a powerful tool for building trust and driving long-term growth.
If all you’re doing with reviews is displaying them, you’re missing out. Making best use of customer insights in eCommerce can drive strategic decisions and improve business performance.
Identify trends and patterns
Analysing review data allows you to spot recurring themes, such as frequently praised product features or common pain points. This data can help you prioritise improvements that matter most to customers, ensuring your efforts align with their needs. These might be as simple as updating product listings and FAQs, through to bigger issues such as understanding that you need to review and resolve issues with suppliers.
Make data-driven decisions
Insights from reviews can help you to refine pricing strategies, enhance product quality, and improve the customer experience. For example, repeated feedback about slow response times could prompt investments in live chat support or AI chatbots for quicker resolutions.
Use analytics from eCommerce review software
Platforms like Feefo provide powerful tools to help you get to the heart of review data. Functionality such as sentiment analysis and trend reports provide a deeper understanding of customer perceptions, helping you respond proactively to market demands.
Find out how Feefo clients use insights to improve their businesses.
Customer reviews are an essential part of building a successful eCommerce business. They build trust, influence purchase decisions, and provide invaluable insights that help businesses improve and grow. By using reviews strategically – that is, by collecting them, displaying them, addressing positive and negative feedback, and analysing the data – they become more than just testimonials; they’re a tool to drive sales and enhance the customer experience.
Want to get more from your customer feedback? We help hundreds of retailers like Marks and Spencer, Currys, EE Store, and Halfords to collect, display, and analyse their reviews so they can make better decisions and optimise their customer experience.
You can find retail case studies here - or, if you’re interested in hearing how we could help your business, get in touch.