Let we forget that a third pillar of social commerce is user reviews integrated into the shopping experience, given all the current hype around group-buy and f-commerce, user reviews site Reevoo has published a iconoclastic guide on the value of the review brand of social commerce.
It’s worth noting that as a social commerce solution, allowing customers to share feedback with each other – and with you – on your site or social network presence is hard to beat in terms of effectiveness in driving traffic, conversions, order value and repeat purchase. User reviews are not sexy, but they can be very useful. In terms of assistive consumer technology that helps people use their social intelligence to discover and decide what to buy, user reviews are the gold standard. They are also easy to deploy as well as increasingly expected by customers; TopRank’s Lee Odden summarises
[blockquote]Adding social features to existing commerce platforms and situations is the low-hanging fruit of social commerce at the moment and studies show a clear revenue benefit. I suspect it’s something consumers are starting to expect.[/blockquote]We’ll be providing a roundup of data, insights and recommendations in future posts – but for the meantime, Bazaarvoice has a wondrous collection of proof-points.
So back to Reevoo’s Six Essentials of Social Commerce – here’s the speed summary and useful stats (direct download).
The Six Essentials of Social Commerce: How to leverage the power of online ratings and reviews
To get a boost to your conversion rate, customer satisfaction and customer life-time value (your social commerce dividend), you need to get these six essentials of social commerce right:
- Coverage: Proactive harvesting of ratings and reviews for all your products – not just bestsellers – is the first Essential. Skip it at your peril
- Depth: Get more trusted reviews for each product – there is a direct relationship between number of reviews per product and sales for that product. More reviews = more revenue
- Speed: Get more trusted reviews faster – there is a clear relationship between the speed that reviews appear a new product and the impact of those reviews on sales. Faster reviews = more revenue
- Leverage: Expose review content beyond your site – on comparison sites, on Facebook. Use review syndication services
- Traffic: Get trusted reviews to drive more traffic by allowing customers to share reviews, and use reviews as consumer-powered SEO – the words they use to review, will be the words others use to search
- Trust: Make sure your trusted reviews are seen to be valid – use a third party ratings and reviews service that can act as a consumer trustmark
Great article Paul. The importance of substantive consumer review content can’t be emphasized enough but, we too have found that many retailers really struggle to generate enough reviews to be meaningful to their shoppers using traditional solutions.
Klaggle developed an alternative approach which helps retailers provide consumer product ratings quickly that are already attributed to a high volume of reviews. In this way, shoppers can immediately see how tens-to-thousands of previous purchasers felt about a product – and its most reviewed features. No solicitations, no waiting for proven results. For more information on our rapidly adopted approach, go to http://www.klaggle.com.
excellent, crisp, to the point article illuminating the facets that drive social commerce