How to Get Better Customer Reviews for Your Ecommerce Store

If you want to convince more potential customers to buy from you, a powerful strategy you don’t want to miss is getting better customer reviews on your ecommerce store. 

Customer reviews are a sales tool for your ecommerce business. In fact, studies show that customer reviews can boost your conversion rate by 270%.

So, in this post, we’ll be looking at a few strategies and tools to help you get better customer reviews.

We’ll walk you through:

• The benefits of focusing on customer reviews.
• Strategies to acquire better customer reviews.
• Customer review tools and plugins to help your ecommerce store.

Let’s start by looking at how focusing on customer reviews can benefit your business.

The benefits of focusing on customer reviews

Customer reviews refer to opinions customers write about your products or services after buying from your businesses.

Reviews show potential customers/clients that other customers have had a positive experience with your products or services. This is important for the following reasons.

Establishing trust and credibility

Reviews help build trust with potential customers. Customers trust reviews more than your marketing claims because they’re independent and unbiased.

📈 Reviews are the new form of word-of-mouth marketing, as research shows that 84% of customers trust reviews as much as word-of-mouth marketing and personal recommendations. 

When your business gets numerous good reviews, it shows potential customers that you’re credible, and as a result, more will trust your brand. 

Improving SEO efforts 

Customer reviews usually contain keywords and phrases directly related to your products or services. This can help your ecommerce website to appear higher in the search engine rankings when customers search for specific words or phrases that appear in the product review. 

Alternatively, new online reviews on your ecommerce website provide fresh and regularly updated content for search engines to rank. Search engines favor websites that regularly update their content as it shows that the site is active and relevant. 

Creates a feedback loop

Customer reviews can enable you to build a customer-centric business by using this feedback to improve your products and services continuously.

For instance, you can monitor reviews for mentions of product defects or dissatisfaction with your services. Then, use this information to rectify these issues. This will allow you to improve customer satisfaction and encourage customer loyalty. 

📈 Did you know that a 1% shift in customer satisfaction causes a 67% shift in customer loyalty?

For this reason, improving customer satisfaction can massively improve your customer retention rate and increase your loyal customers.  

Increases your store’s sales

Reviews help potential customers make purchase decisions.

📈 A recent study revealed that  93% of customers consult reviews before purchasing.

When your product or service has tons of positive reviews, it assures customers they would be making a good choice buying it. With buyers confident that they’ll get great value for their money, they’ll not hesitate to buy your products. This increases your sales.

Customer reviews have several benefits for your ecommerce business. It’s important to focus on getting better reviews to reap these benefits.

So now we know the benefits, let’s look at the strategies you can implement to get better customer reviews. 

Strategies to acquire better customer reviews

Customers rarely leave reviews when you don’t ask for them. You’re more likely to receive a negative review from a customer who is unhappy with your product or service than a customer who is happy with it and would recommend it. 

Simply asking for reviews might not be enough to get better feedback, but it is what you should start with.

You can complement this with strategies that encourage customers to leave better reviews, which will impact your business more. 

1. Offer incentives

Offering incentives can be an effective strategy for encouraging customers to frequently leave better reviews on your ecommerce store.

📈 According to Shopify, 73% of customers are more likely to leave a review when offered an incentive. 

Incentives motivate customers to leave reviews since they will get something in return. You can offer different types of incentives depending on your business.

For instance: 

• If you’re a software vendor that offers monthly subscriptions, you can allow a customer to use your service at half-price for the following month after leaving a review. 
• If you sell physical goods like electronics, you can encourage customers to leave a review by offering them a 15% discount on their next purchase. 

Incentives could encourage more positive reviews that could increase your overall star rating on review platforms/review sites like Yelp, Trustpilot, Google reviews, and Tripadvisor. 

However, you should never influence these reviews. They should be unbiased and honest reviews from your customers.

2. Engage post-purchase

As mentioned earlier, you will likely not get reviews if you don’t explicitly ask for them. Engaging with customers post-purchase allows you to ask them for reviews. 

You can do this by sending them post-purchase emails or SMS messages encouraging them to review what they’ve bought or your service.

Send post-purchase emails

If you deal with services, you can ask for reviews once you’ve delivered the service.

However, if you sell products, giving customers enough time to use the product before asking for a review is important. This allows them to form an opinion about it.  

So how long should you wait? This depends on the type of products you sell. A study done by Power Reviews suggests the following timeframes for different types of products: 

• Seasonal goods like themed beverages – 1 week. 
• Perishable goods like plants, flowers, etc. – 2 weeks. 
• Hard goods like electronics – 3 weeks. 

📈 After sending an initial email, consider sending a follow-up email after a week or so. This is because an additional 28% of customers will leave a review the second time you ask them. 

Utilize the order confirmation page to get customer reviews. 

You can also utilize the order confirmation page to ask for reviews after a successful transaction.

Here you can include a thank you message to set the tone, followed by a clear call to action (CTA) statement like “Share your experience”. You might include a statement explaining the importance of their review and how it will be used.  

To utilize your order confirmation page to get reviews on your WooCommerce store, you’ll need the Flux Checkout for WooCommerce plugin. 

Ask for customer reviews post-purchase with Flux Checkout

Flux Checkout allows you to create a custom order confirmation page to replace the default WooCommerce ‘Thank You’ page. This page is completely customizable; you can edit it to make it visually appealing to customers and fit your store’s design. 

Its custom content section allows you to add any content you wish. This includes a CTA asking customers to leave a review post-purchase.

You can use this to include a short message asking customers for a review, a CTA button, and links to the review section on your website, or review platforms like Zomato. 

3. Prioritize quality over quantity 

Focus on getting detailed, qualitative reviews rather than just star ratings. This involves encouraging customers to share experiences, stories, photos, or product videos. 

📈 According to Emarketer, 62% of customers are more likely to buy a product after seeing photos or videos from other customers. 

Unlike star ratings, which summarize the overall customer experience quickly, high-quality reviews offer more detailed insights into the product or service. They help potential customers make informed decisions by providing them with a good understanding of your product or service. 

You can encourage customers to leave quality reviews by offering sliding-scale incentives. This means that customers will get better incentives for leaving higher-quality reviews.

For example:

• A 5% discount coupon for a star rating only. 
• A 10% discount coupon for a star rating and a well-written review. 
• A 20% discount coupon for all the above accompanied by a photo or video. 

Explaining to customers that their reviews help you to provide better products and services can also encourage them to leave high-quality, informative reviews. 

4. Address negative feedback

Negative reviews can cause damage to your ecommerce business. They deter potential customers from purchasing, ruin your reputation, and lower your site’s SEO ranking.

📈 To mitigate the effects of negative feedback, you should have a strategy to address them. Failure to do so increases the risk of customer churn by 15%. 

To address negative feedback effectively, responding to and resolving it as quickly as possible is important. Acknowledge the customer’s concerns and apologize for any inconvenience they may have experienced. Offer a solution or compensation if appropriate, and take steps to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.

Apart from damage control, addressing negative feedback shows customers that you value feedback and are committed to doing better.

This can improve customers’ perception of your business, even after finding negative reviews. Also, this could encourage more customers to leave reviews about your business. 

5. Create a user-friendly review process

You should make the review process as straightforward as possible. It should allow customers to leave reviews quickly and easily without requiring them to navigate through multiple pages or fill out lengthy forms. 

The review process should also be mobile-friendly, as many customers prefer to leave reviews on their mobile devices.

Why is a user-friendly review process this important?

When customers don’t have to jump through hoops to leave a review, more customers will participate in the review process and share their feedback.

A user-friendly review process also:

• Results in higher completion rates – A simple review process increases the likelihood that more customers will complete it. On the other hand, a complicated review process discourages customers from completing it. 
• Encourages repeat reviews – Customers who have an easy time leaving reviews will likely do so again. This increases the volume of your reviews over time. 

To make it easy for customers to leave reviews, create concise and easy-to-follow instructions or questions that walk them through this process. This should start with a clear CTA. 

Avoid subjecting them to long, tedious, and complicated forms, which could discourage them from completing this process. Make sure to notify them once they are done and thank them for participating. 

There you have it! Five effective strategies that will enable you to collect better customer reviews on your WooCommerce store. 

On its own, WooCommerce allows you to collect online customer reviews. However, this offering is extremely limited. Customers can only leave a star rating and a brief comment about the product or service. 

This doesn’t provide any insight into the product or service and will probably not be enough to convince most potential customers to buy. To acquire and display better and more impactful reviews, you’ll need the help of plugins. 

Tools to display and acquire reviews

If you’re looking to acquire better reviews or testimonials and display them on your website, you can do it using the following plugins:

• WordPress Business Reviews (WPBR)
• Flux Checkout for WooCommerce

WordPress Business Reviews (WPBR)

WPBR is a WordPress plugin that aggregates and showcases your reviews from different platforms such as Google, Yelp, Zomato, and more.

This plugin allows you to build your collection of reviews directly from your WordPress dashboard. You can search for your business online, gather its reviews, and design how they are presented on your website. 

WPBR allows you to create compelling customer testimonials and reviews section on your website by doing the following:

• Customizing how your reviews are displayed – You can choose between different display styles, like transparent, light, or dark, and formats like gallery, list, or grid. To create a clean display, WPBR allows you to select the components appearing in the review. 
• Tagging your best reviews – Using WPBR’s review tags, you can group your best and high-quality reviews from different platforms and display them together. 
• Only displaying your best reviews – You can use WPBR’s review filters to display only your positive reviews. This helps you to avoid displaying negative reviews that could discourage potential customers from engaging with your business. 
• Adding your own custom reviews – If you have reviews from other platforms, you can manually add them so that no feedback is left behind. 

WPBR automatically pulls in new reviews from these platforms to update your testimonial section with fresh reviews. This way, you can keep this section up-to-date and constantly promote your customers’ best experiences. 

The benefits of WPBR

WPBR enhances your ecommerce store’s social proof by displaying various reviews and testimonials. Many potential customers rely on social proof to inform their purchasing decisions. Seeing that others have purchased and enjoyed your products can sway them to buy from you. 

WPBR gives you complete control over how reviews are displayed on your website. You can customize this section to appeal to potential buyers so that it has a greater impact on their purchasing decisions. 

How to use WPBR with WooCommerce

After purchasing WPBR and installing it on your WordPress website, a reviews tab will be created on the WordPress dashboard main menu. Here’s where you’ll customize WPBR to aggregate and display reviews on your website. 

Clicking on the Reviews tab will reveal four other sections that you need to set up:

• Collections – Here, you can search for your business online and gather its reviews. WPBR allows you to design the presentation of your reviews with a real-time preview. You’ll also be able to trim the length of each review and choose the components that will be included. To finish up, you’ll set up a negative reviews filter to ensure only your best reviews are promoted on your website. 

• Single reviews – Tag your best reviews from each platform and display them together here. You can add or remove reviews manually in this section. 
• Review tags – You can create a collection of single reviews using review tags. These reviews will be displayed together when a user searches for a specific tag. 
• Settings – In this section, you can add the platforms from which you’ll be compiling reviews, for instance, Google, Yelp, etc. You can also choose how often WPBR checks for and automatically adds new reviews to your website. 

After completing these settings, you can display your testimonials section anywhere on your WooCommerce website using a shortcode. We recommend adding them to your homepage, landing pages, or product pages.

Flux Checkout for WooCommerce

Flux Checkout is a WooCommerce plugin built to optimize the checkout process to improve your store’s conversions.

You can also use it to add a customer feedback section to encourage your customers to leave a review post-purchase. 

Flux Checkout has a ‘Thank You’ page feature that lets you acquire customer feedback using the order confirmation page. This page has a custom content area that you can leverage to ask customers to share immediate feedback post-purchase. 

It allows you to add elements to this section, including text, images, buttons, links, etc. Because of this, you can add a message requesting feedback and explaining to customers why their feedback matters, followed by a CTA button leading them to the review pages. 

After creating this section, use the content placement setting to position your customer feedback request:

• After the order status. 
• Before or after customer details. 
• Before or after product details. 

Aside from this feature, you can also do the following with Flux Checkout for WooCommerce:

• Creating a multi-step checkout process – Flux replaces the default clunky one-page WooCommerce checkout with a simplified multi-step checkout. This checkout takes customers through a series of easy-to-follow steps to complete the checkout. 
• Eliminating distractions – Flux keeps customers focused on completing the checkout flow by removing distractions such as headers, footers, sidebars, etc. Also, you can remove unnecessary fields to avoid overwhelming customers. 
• Address autocompletion – You can save customers time when filling in their billing or shipping address by auto-filling these fields once they select their address. 

Benefits of Flux Checkout

Flux Checkout streamlines the checkout process for customers, allowing them to complete it quickly and without any frustration. They can also complete it without frustrations or errors since it’s user-friendly. 

A simplified checkout process can significantly decrease cart abandonment rates, increase conversion rates, and boost your store’s sales. 

Through its ‘Thank You’ page feature, Flux provides an avenue for immediate feedback. This can be useful in convincing more potential customers to buy from you and help you improve your products or services. 

How to use Flux to acquire customer feedback

To set up Flux to acquire customer feedback, you’ll have first to purchase it and install it on your WordPress site. This will create a Flux Checkout section under WooCommerce in the main menu of your WordPress dashboard. 

The first thing you’ll need to do here is activate the ‘Thank You’ page. You can do this by going to WooCommerce > Flux Checkout > Thank You Page and clicking the toggle switch to enable it. Once this is done, can open the ‘Thank You’ page tab and use the custom content section to request customer feedback. 

You can add a text asking them for a review, for example, “Share your experience” followed by a button directing them to where they can submit a review. You can even add incentives such as coupon codes to encourage them to leave a review.

After this is done, you can use the content placement settings below to decide where this content will be displayed on the order confirmation page. 

Improve your ecommerce customer review strategy today

Improving your ecommerce customer review strategy will help you to get better, high-quality reviews. Better reviews have several benefits for your business, including convincing new customers to buy from you and increasing your sales.

The default WooCommerce customer review strategy is fairly limited. Fortunately, you can improve it with the plugins mentioned in this guide to acquire better reviews and display them where they will significantly impact your store’s sales.

• Flux Checkout for WooCommerce – to acquire customer feedback post-purchase using the order confirmation page.
• WordPress Business Reviews (WPBR) – to aggregate and display your best reviews from different platforms on your website.