5 Tips to Encourage Your Customers

Product review & rating has become a popular feature that most of the successful e-commerce merchants have applied on their product details page. Main advantage of this feature is: it assures the visitors and customers that this product is not just another banal e-commerce product. People are actually talking about it (both positive and negative) and their thinking is listed here!

People always leave for your competitors when your product details page can't satisfy them by assuring them. Your product details page is the most important part of the site as this is the place when your customers decide whether to add the product to the cart or to abandon it. Hence, every effort should be taken to assure the customers that the products you are offering are indeed offers good bargain and value for price.

One of the strongest features in your product details page is the option to let the customers express their opinion and experience about the product. A simple one line comment added by a happy customer can assure lots of other visiting customers about purchasing the product.

Following are 5 tips for making your product details page more efficient by encouraging customers and visitors to write reviews for your products:

Tips 1 - Product Details page Design:

Your product details page design should get special emphasize hence people always love to visit the products details pages that are visually attractive and neatly presented. The product details page should arrange the product images, description, prices and attribute selection options etc. very neatly and in a way so that customers can find information easily. If your product details page design and arrangement is vivid and attractive, people would love to write something about it. Adding Image zooming, image video and multiple images illustrates the product better and thus gives customers a good insight about the product. If a visitor finds a eye-catchy product details page, it's more likely that s/he would like to add some words there.

Tips 2 - Don't make the process complicated:

Keep the Review & Rating feature simple. A complicated process would simply forbid visitors and customers from adding the reviews. If you want the rating feature to be present along with the review option, offer a visual 5 star rating which can be rated using the mouse click. Offer the negative rating options that would give a bold impression to the visitors that they are free to rate it the way they feel. For the Review make the email fields optional as people often don't want their emails to be visible publicly. Offer an option whether to show or hide the email addresses from the published reviews. One issue you should be particularly careful about is the CAPTCHA. Easy CAPTCHA can easily be broken by the spammers and hard CAPTCHA irritates the real reviewers. Choose one which is difficult to break by the Spamming softwares yet easy for the human users to read.

Tips 3 - Moderate the Reviews and rating:

Your e-commerce platform should help you administering the review and rating casted by the visitors or customers. You should be able to publish/un-publish the reviews,(even manipulate if you want), control the visibility, control the number of reviews per page, reply back to a reviewer and other conventional review & rating moderation features. If you value what your customers are saying about your products, you should regularly moderate the reviews. Visitors feel frustrated they find that their reviews are never getting published in your website. Send them thank you emails for the reviews and visiting your website and as reply to the review, write something that would not only impress the reviewers but also other visitors.

Tips 4 - Keep the 'Negative Reviews' as well:

If your product details page is full of reviews with flattering and praising words & all 5 stars, that would possibly make other visitors doubtful about authenticity of those reviews. If customers are criticizing the products, it's your best chance to defend the reason and let others know it. Take the chance to confront the negative reviews with satisfying answers and place them among the other reviews.

Tips 5 - Reviewing Competition:

What about announcing a little gift, free coupon or discount for the top rated reviewers? Yes, that would definitely encourage visitors and customers explore your products and write something about them. A $5 coupon code, 5% discount or free gift wrapping would inspire lot more visitors and customers to write some lines for your products.