subject: Creating A Website To Trust With Consumer Reviews [print this page] There are a lot of difficult obstacles in the way of up-and-coming businesses, but for those that get past some of the worst money troubles, there are also plenty of positive things to look forward to. At one time, the only thing a business could do was to spend buckets of money on traditional advertising, like newspapers and TV to only get smallest add-on the back page or get your commercial stuck on late-night TV. Beyond that you just had to hope for decent local business and good word of mouth to get you through the day. However, with the advent of the internet every business has the tools to make themselves known to millions for pennies on a dollar.
Among the many ways that you can expand your presence on the internet is to create an e-commerce store and have the ability to sell your products to people all across the country. But this is only the beginning; you have to make potential customers understand that your products can be trusted and the best way to accomplish this is through customer reviews.
Creating Trust with the Right System
You might be surprised how much stock people put in those little stars that show up under your product. You can have the same book on two different websites for the same price, one has four customer reviews that all rave about it and give it five stars and the other has nothing at all. Most casual searchers would ignore the book with no stars, while the addition of reviews might give them pause and even convince them to buy. But first you need the reviews.
You have a surprising amount of choices when you are building your e-commerce site and this can include the type of customer review system that you want. There are two major review systems that are used today, passive and proactive. The passive system simply let's anyone post a review. It does filter content to make sure that there is no defamation or bots involved, but that is about all it does. Going with a proactive system is much preferred since the system actively asks those that have bought your products to review them and leave a comment. This makes it easier to get a greater amount of comments, while also having a better chance of having more positive reviews.
Searching for the Best
Having reviews on your e-commerce page can also benefit you when people are looking for products through their favorite search engine. Going back to the earlier example of two books on two different websites, if both website have the perfect balance of SEO optimization and quality content the one page that has four reviews will still rank higher in the search results than the one without. Search engines track everything about your site and the more customer reviews that you have, the more that you will stand out in the rankings.
Even as you have products that you are trying to get rated on your website, there are also websites that you can register with that will allow customers to review your entire site and business. The more that you can wrap yourself and your business up in good consumer reviews, the more people will take notice of your site and the more business that you will be able to make.
