• Reviews increase the buy rate. Seventy-six percent of customers use online reviews when making purchases.

• Leverage with suppliers. eBags knows more about the products it sells than the people who manufacture them.

Additionally the following benefits of product reviews were listed:

• Search engine optimization

• Reviews increase the amount of original content on the site. If that content is topically-relevant, it stands to reason it will help increase SERPs.

• Increased user-engagement

• Visitors will return more often to read recently updated reviews. It is even better if RSS feeds can be tied to product reviews so updated information is delivered to subscribers.

• Increased traffic from return visits. If your ecommerce site offers a rating/review system and your competitor does not, it stands to reason the customer will visit you and not them. You gain competitive advantage.

• Increased trust. If word of mouth is a highly-trusted source (and it is), the fact you offer a rating/review system will lend itself to increased trust in your site.

• Word of mouth marketing.

• Some rating/review systems also include a recommendation component, which allows site visitors to notify a friend about a product via email.

Personally I would add another bullet point to this list, although it is related to the second:

• Quality Control. Your purchasers will quickly let you know through review feedback if the product is of poor quality. There will be a percentage of purchasers who will email and call immediately, but there is also a high percentage who won't they be quiet, but will be loathe to buy from you again. These people will, however, tell you honestly in a product review. If a product consistently elicits poor feedback you may consider taking it 'off the shelves'.

It is very important though how you garner product reviews. Many eCommerce platforms that have built-in product review functionality will allow for anyone on the product page to post a review (either with or without registration). This will definately get more product review data, but the quality of such reviews will be diminished because it is open to abuse competitors, suppliers and malcontents can post bogus reviews (positive and negative) which will skew the results. Many eCommerce shoppers are savvy enough these days to sense these bogus reviews, typically through obvious phrasing, and this will actually hinder the sale rather than promote it. If the consumer doesn't trust your reviews they will lose trust in your store and move on elsewhere.

A second alternative is to use a third party review service. The advantage of this approach is that customers are contacted by a well known, reputable company and will get a good conversion rate of product reviews. They can, however, be very expensive, which is fine if you want to outsource this task rather than expend time (= money) of your staff to do the filtering, reviewing etc. Be careful though how the service provider provides your product reviews for display on your page, if they use 'frames' to their site then all that good text will not help your SEO or SERPS because to all intents and purposes the content is invisible to crawlers.

The third alternative (and this is what is used in our My EZ Store platform) is a proactive automatic follow up where your customers are sent an email by the system, a set time after their order has shipped, which contains a summary of the order along with a link to a secure review page on your store site. This makes it as simple as possible for the customer to provide their views on each product in the order. Upon submission the merchant has to possibility of accepting or rejecting the comments made. For authenticity the merchant is not able to edit the text. The review rate will be lower, but the quality of the product reviews will be exceptionally high. When this was rolled out into one of customers sites sales lept by 20% which made it obvious to the merchant that future customers really trust these reviews.

In conclusion the eMerchant needs to be aware that simply providing product reviews will not automatically get the benefits listed above, but rather emphasis should be placed on quality, follow up and good old customer service ... if a customer has complained in a review but not demanded a refund, maybe you contact that customer proactively and replace it. Such an act will turn someone with a negative view of your store to someone who is treated well and may become a cherished, and profitable, repeat customer.

Author: Mark Lowe
Date: July 17, 2009

The guide is a great resource and provides an overview of payment processing, merchandising, marketplaces, email marketing and more.

Click here to download the PDF

There are many providers out there who use the hosting provider of the supermarket's " stack 'em high and sell 'em cheap" , and given the large numbers of subscribers this is an effective strategy. One can only hope that of these 100,000 sites that they are the throw-away who-cares type of websites and not of any criticality. I do wonder how many are powered with their OSCommerce's and Magento's as either through ignorance or desire everything is done on the cheap with not a thought of consequences.

Software is not infallible and the more people who are allowed access to a machine the higher the chance that a flaw can be found and exploited. Security patches have to be applied, firewalls maintained correctly and most importantly backups should be performed at least once a day. The sad thing is that hosting plans from reputable hosting companies that have such features cost only maybe $10 - $20 a month more. In my opinion this is a small price to pay for a company website or online store who doesn't want to go through the pain and agony that these 100,000 site owners will be going through right now.

To add insult to injury it appears that the hosting company had their database of credit card details on the same server too. So these site owners will need to check and cancel their cards as they have probably been sold off to criminals who like to buy things with other people's money!

In the current economy the temptation is to cut costs without necessary regard to the consequences. I'm sure these 100,000 site owners would have chosen differently if they knew what was to befall them.

If you are concerned about your site security and related aspects give me a call and we can discuss. We have helped many clients protect themselves and their web investments, both infrastructurally and programatically i.e. how well can the hardward and firewall defences protect your site, as well as any coding of the website itself and whether this can be tightened up.

Mark Lowe,
June 10th, 2008

Is Quality compromised through off shoring and outsourcing?

These days the hype is all about outsourcing and off shoring another way of cutting cost by our major Corporate causing further the US employees face the hardships of this present economy.
Being in a virtual team myself where the project was off shored and outsourced I saw a drastic change in quality of work performed. Be it inexperienced fresh graduates posing as experienced developers with lack of understanding of the consequences of their actions, cultural bearers or time differences but I feel we are compromising the quality of work performed. Especially when we assume our strategic business partners are tackling things right. Whatever happened to ensuring that the deliverable is quality finished?

This was my considered response on a topic that I feel particularly strong about:

Outsourcing in of itself is not a bad option to take - after all I have had a 25 year career providing and managing such services, although always in a domestic context. Well trained, well motivated people will provide an excellent service and, in my opinon, often better than in-house development personnel.

Off-shoring is a completely different issue and my experiences of such have not been good. Sure code gets churned out to meet functional specs in the immediate term, but at the cost of true software engineering skills and best practices. This turns maintenance into a horrific and costly undertaking. I don't doubt there are some success stories out there, but I have not seen any that have come close in quality to anything I have been involved with over my 25 years.

Someone else mentioned the adage of you get what you pay for. This still holds true today despite increased commodization in the software services industry. Even though the smaller sticker price of the project is appealing, often the true TCO may end up being higher. The traditional service companies have had no option but to modify their profile to mirror the large offshore players in order to survive and compete. I can't help thinking that there are parallels with the auto industry. This trend isn't going away but one can't help but think back that the heyday of great software prowess and the profession of true software engineering is but an increasingly distant memory, as today's inefficiencies get masked by moore's law inspired advances to hardware and infrastructure.

The bean counters win and firms get the software they deserve.

By Mark Lowe
June 8th, 2009