With all they gain from customer-written product reviews, online apparel retailers might as well put shoppers on their payrolls.
This growing customer feedback channel gives retailers a salary-free way to police merchandise quality, enhance marketing, refine the product mix, increase sales and even achieve more favorable rankings on major search sites like Google, Yahoo and Windows Live Search. Several have added the feature to their sites in time for the critical holiday period, when Comscore Networks predicts November-to-December online sales will top $24 billion.
Without exception, retailers say they post shoppers’ unedited (and sometimes typo-ridden) product reviews online as a way to offer unbiased guidance to other shoppers considering a purchase.
“A good customer review goes a long way to convincing that next customer that this is a smart purchase,” said Kent Anderson, president of macys.com. Macy’s Web site accumulated 10,000 customer-written reviews and product ratings one month after that feature went live in October.
Even negative reviews, which can be difficult to swallow, are essential because they lend credibility to other reviews while alerting retailers to issues needing attention, he added.
“Merchants don’t like their products publicly pilloried, like a report card for everyone to see. Nobody likes that,” said Bill Bass, chief executive officer at Fair Indigo, a Madison, Wis., branded apparel company. However, posting feedback that a size may run large provides useful guidance to other shoppers, who can factor that variable into their buying decision. “You want no surprises for the customer. You don’t want the customer to order a cashmere sweater and it’s not quite the right color or the fit they expected,” he said.
Shopper reviews led Fair Indigo to correct fit grading on some size 14s and 16s and also to offer size 2 and 0 on some items not previously available.
Other retailers, such as online jeweler Blue Nile and outdoor gear merchants Cabela’s and Evogear, also have acted on shopper reviews that spotlight product quality issues. One manufacturer corrected a durability problem with its skis for Evogear, and a jewelry maker whose earring clasps were flimsy replaced all the offending stock at Blue Nile. Retailers also refine Web site images, design and product descriptions as a result of reviews.
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At Blue Nile, merchants initially resisted the posting of negative reviews, especially if the complaint was based on personal taste, rather than quality. “But our ceo said, ‘If people don’t like it, I don’t want to sell it,'” said Darrell Cavens, senior vice president of marketing. As a result of shopper feedback, Blue Nile discontinued some product offerings this fall, proving customers can influence the mix.
The Blue Nile Web site sometimes receives hundreds of shopper reviews in a day, Cavens added, and those comments are circulated daily to 40 people in the company. The company has posted shopper reviews for more than four years now, using homegrown software to manage content and weed out inappropriate reviews containing profanity, for example.
Though he could not cite empirical data, Cavens said customer reviews drive sales, and it’s the substance of reviews that bear this out. As an example, he pointed to one review that read, “I purchased this cross for my six-month-old goddaughter’s christening based on the feedback from others at this site.”
Consumers place more trust in peer-written reviews than expert-authored ones and glitzy marketing come-ons, retailers said. “I want to hear what other people like me think,” said Fair Indigo’s Bass, “not an ivory tower person.” And, remarkably, consumer-written reviews are the most popular form of user-generated content among online shoppers, with 75 percent of Web shoppers using them, far more often than blogs or message boards, according to Forrester Research.
Macy’s, Fair Indigo and Cabela’s outsource administration of customer reviews to Austin, Tex.-based Bazaarvoice, whose staff and software screen comments before they are posted. Retailers set their own criteria for vetting reviews. At Fair Indigo, only shoppers who’ve purchased an item are eligible to review it and no reviews containing the name of a competitor — for good or bad — will make the cut, said Bass.
Cabela’s is already achieving the critical mass of reviews it sought, even though the feature was added only two months ago. “We have enough reviews to go to the next level and build merchandising and marketing around reviews,” said Vince Stephens, Internet manager, planning and analytics. For instance, e-mail campaigns can now include promotions for top-rated product, according to customers.
Stephens and other retailers said customer reviews can improve their rankings on Google and Yahoo because the content is easier for search engines to find using “spider” programs that crawl the Web to collect information. Sometimes Web site product descriptions do not use language that is spider-friendly, and a Web site goes unseen by the search engine.
While most retailers don’t have, or won’t disclose, a return on investment for shopper reviews, Cabela’s Stephens said he expects to recoup the cost in one year’s time.
At Evogear, no ROI was calculated for shopper reviews and the company is allowing the program to grow organically since its launch six months ago, said Nathan Decker, director of e-commerce.
Evogear uses a syndicated customer review program from PowerReviews of Millbrae, Calif., that allows shoppers to post images of themselves using the products. The service is free so long as retailers permit the vendor to post their review content on PowerReviews’ own portal, which is due to go live early next year.
Fair Indigo’s Bass is not troubled by an unclear ROI for shopper reviews. “There are right things to do and you do them because they are the right things. And you do it on faith that it will have an impact,” said Bass, an e-commerce pioneer who headed up Lands’ End and Sears’ sites before starting his own company this year. He trusts his gut: “I was a helicopter gunship pilot in the Army. And after we shot for a while, we would turn off the fire control computers, because we were better at it with our instinct.”