5 Reasons to Use Shopify Product Reviews September 14, 2014 20:00

One of my favorite things about Amazon is being able to read customer reviews before I make purchases. I buy everything from TVs to hair conditioner on Amazon, and I love hearing from other customers that have purchased the products I’m checking out.

Even if your store isn’t Amazon (and it probably shouldn’t be) you can still benefit greatly from including product reviews in your Shopify store. You shouldn’t be worried about potential negative reviews, and there’s even a free Shopify Product Reviews app available!

The free Shopify Product Reviews app has some really cool features aside from the awesome benefit of adding customer reviews to your shop. There are bulk actions for you to manage reviews: you can publish, unpublish, and filter reviews quickly and easily. The app also includes CSV import and exports for reviews so that you can import reviews from other review services, or export existing reviews. The styling is also flexible and can be customized by you (if you’re comfortable with CSS) a Shopify expert.

Here are 5 reasons you should use Shopify Product Reviews with links to further research if you’re interested.

Shopify Product Reviews Increase Sales

Yes, all reviews increase sales – even negative reviews. You shouldn’t worry about having the occasional negative review in your shop. However, if several reviews are negative, you may want to re-evaluate your product wink .

74% of customers say reviews are important or very important when purchasing, as they like to hear about the product before spending their money.

Customers also like to hear from people just like them – 57 percent of online respondents consider reviews prior to buying! Just adding reviews can yield an 18% increase in sales. Customers who read reviews and ask questions are 105% more likely to make a purchase than those that don’t!

Reviews Decrease Risk and Increase Trust

Product reviews, even negative ones, also help to increase trust. When customers see “real” reviews, including a mix of reviews, they tend to trust all reviews as a whole. Since product reviews are from “peers” or other customers, potential buyers trust them as much as personal recommendations.

Negative reviews are also risk mitigators for potential purchasers. They read negative reviews and think, “Okay, this is the worst it could be. I’m okay with that.” These reviews eliminate the unknown from the purchasing process and overcome customer objections before buying so that your sales copy doesn’t have to.

Just be sure to encourage a review policy that asks for politeness. Polite negative reviews actually boost your sales as readers associate the feeling of liking a polite reviewer with liking the product.

Product Reviews Teach You about Customers

Shopify Product Reviews also give you a chance to interact with your customers. They teach you about customer expectations, desires, and questions so that you can improve your products or sell them more effectively. They also give you a chance to talk with customers and bring them closer to your brand – these interactions humanize your store, and people like other humans smile .

This also gives you an opportunity to answer reviews and shows potential customers that you’re involved with your store and care about their thoughts.

Review Info is Added to Google Search Results

The Shopify Product Reviews app adds SEO-friendly review scores. When you search for reviews, you’ll sometimes see a rich snippet with star ratings right in the search results itself. These are generated from schema.org tags, and the app adds these to your reviews automatically. This adds review scores to your Google search results for products with no effort on your part.

Product Reviews Drive SEO

When customers review your products, they do so in their own words. The phrasing they use tends to be great for SEO, as many other users search for the same things. In fact, reviews drive traffic due to long-tail keywords, and you get extra indexible content on your site for each reviewed product. Let you customers help you with your SEO efforts!

Bonus: What to do with Negative Reviews

Still nervous about negative reviews? It’s okay, the Shopify Product Reviews app lets you moderate reviews so that you can approve them or unpublish them. This will give you a chance to ensure that negative reviews are polite and follow your guidelines, and you can delete something if it’s really egregious.

However, I’d recommend publishing what you can, even if it makes you uncomfortable. It legitimizes your reviews and products, and gives you a chance to publicly respond.

Ready to get started? The app is free, so you just need to install!

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