As an ecommerce marketer, your two biggest challenges are driving traffic to your site and once someone is there, converting them into buyers.

Should you include customer reviews as part of your strategy  for Increasing ecommerce conversion ratio's?

Increasingly, the trend is to add this feature to ecommerce sites.

Visitors who rely on customer reviews to make buying decisions will seek this information out, whether from your site or another site.

One concern site owners have when deciding if they should add this feature to their site is, “what if someone leaves a negative review?”

This can, and probably will happen. It’s human nature for people to want to leave reviews when they love a product or when they hate it. In large part, this is why most products fall into the highly rated category or low rated category.

This is not necessarily bad though. Suppose a shopper comes to your site looking for a toaster oven to use for making cookies. There are two reviews - one 5-star review and one 1-star review.

The 5-star review reads:

“I absolutely love this oven. I made cookies with it and they were baked incredibly fast and tasted fantastic. My kids loved them so much, they asked me to bake more the next day... and I loved how the scent of baking cookies filled the house.”

The 1-star review reads:

“I tried to make chicken in this oven and it was the worst chicken I’ve ever had. The chicken was, dry, overcooked, and not even my dog would eat it.”

The shopper on your site was looking for a toaster oven to bake cookies, not chicken.

The 5-star review offers your shopper proof that the product meets her needs, and likely will purchase the item.

It’s difficult to know if the shopper would have returned to your site if they had to go to another site to find a review.

Chances are better they would have if your price was a lot lower than competitors or if you offered free shipping and the site with the review did not. But, once they're gone, they may not return.

Not losing shoppers to other sites, though, is one of the best ways to increase your conversion ratios.

For more useful tips on increasing your conversion ratios or the shopping cart solutions AbleCommerce offers, please contact us.