Case for increasing online store conversion by 14% with product reviews

Much has been said about the effectiveness of reviews as a tool that increases the credibility of online shopping. This article will deal specifically with product reviews and how much their presence or absence in the online store’s merchandise cards affects sales.

Users read reviews about products before buying - this is an indisputable fact. Another thing is that there is a certain problem when a potential buyer enters the product card of MI, but not finding enough information about the product they like (in particular the opinions of other customers), goes to a search engine to read reviews about the product and eventually finds a better offer in another the store. We tried to find out how the presence of reviews in the product cards affects sales. Consider the impact of feedback on the conversion of IM on a specific case (at the request of the store its name is not published).
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Where we took reviews about products

Our company Mneniya.Pro is committed to helping online stores collect feedback on products from customers. After a person has made a purchase on the site, after a specified period of time, he receives a target letter on behalf of the store thanking him for the purchase and asking him to leave a review about the product purchased with reference to the feedback form. The person leaves a review, after which he appears in the corresponding product card of the online store with the note "Customer Feedback". Thanks to such letters, reviews leave from 7 to 17% of all buyers (depending on the category of goods), so we cover the product cards with a significant amount of feedback from real buyers (20 times more than leaving reviews through a form on the site).



How we did the A / B test

We tried to analyze at one of our clients how feedback affects conversion. To do this, we launched an A / B test in Google Analytics and broke customer traffic 50 by 50 - one half of the visitors were shown reviews on product cards, the other half were not shown. The A / B test took place in real time only on those products for which there is at least one review. Products without feedback in the A / B-test did not participate. During the reporting period was taken 1 week. The amount of traffic was sufficient to collect data.

What is the result?

We compared the conversion "in the basket" with reviews in the product card and without and recorded the following results:
Conversion without product reviews: 2.73%
Conversion with product reviews: 3.12%



Thus, according to the results of the A / B test, the availability of reviews in the goods cards increased the conversion of the online store by 14%, which confirms the fact that reviews of goods affect sales growth. The benefits of having product reviews on the site also include the unique UGC content and the increase in time spent on the site, which has a positive effect on SEO, but we'll talk about this in another article.