Making the Most of Customers' Online Reviews - WSJ.com

Image via Wikipedia

Companies are learning to make the most out of customers' online reviews of their products

By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER

Online, everyone has an opinion. For e-commerce businesses, the hard part is making the most of them.

Amazon.com Inc. began posting customer ratings and reviews of its products online in 1995, with an anonymous five-star write-up of Dr. Seuss's "The Butter Battle Book." Since then, most online businesses have found that allowing customers to post reviews—including negative ones—can boost sales and help merchants quickly identify problems with their products.

Now, makers of review software are adding features that allow businesses to get more out of consumers' input online. They have found ways to boost the number of reviews on a site and lend them more credibility, so shoppers are more likely to feel comfortable making purchases. And merchants can now reap the benefits of input from consumers before a sale is made, by posting questions from people thinking about buying a product and the answers, including comments from other consumers.

Building Trust

The review software developed in-house by Drugstore.com Inc. relied on customers to motivate themselves to submit reviews of the products they bought. But after outsourcing its reviews in June of 2008 to San Francisco-based Power Reviews Inc., Drugstore.com launched a system that automatically emails customers about three weeks after they've made a purchase, encouraging them to post a review.

Getting those email requests "makes you feel important and also increased our brand's connection to you," says David Lonczak, chief marketing officer of Drugstore.com, which is based in Bellevue, Wash.

After launching the program, Drugstore.com witnessed a more than 300% increase in new reviews, lending a lot more credibility to its products—especially those with a large number of positive reviews.

There was also a side benefit. Customers who responded to the emails could be confirmed as buyers of those products—unlike some people who post reviews on products they haven't actually purchased. These "verified buyers" are given a badge next to their reviews, adding authenticity to what they report.

"Three or four years ago, you were just happy if you found a review on something. But now you wonder if I can trust the reviews that I am reading to make a decision," says Andy Chen, Power Reviews' chief executive.

Feeling Connected

Skepticism about whether the reviewer actually bought the product isn't the only reason a shopper might not give a review much weight in deciding on a purchase. Sites like baby-products retailer Diapers.com are increasingly deciding that customers are more likely to trust a review from someone they feel connected to in some way.

In the market for baby products, "the most important recommender is going to be people who are in a very similar situation to yourself," says Josh Himwich, director of e-commerce solutions at Diapers.com, which is based in Montclair, N.J. "It is the closest thing you can get to a recommendation from a sister or friend."

Sometimes a review will include personal information about the author that might establish a connection with a shopper. But that's not true of many reviews, and even when such information is included it isn't prominently displayed.

So two years ago Diapers.com started using a feature offered by Power Reviews that helps shoppers distinguish one reviewer from another. Now when customers contribute a review, they have to check one or more boxes to identify themselves in terms such as "first-time parent" or "grandparent." Reviews show up on Diapers.com categorized under those headings.

The site plans to expand on that service next year by allowing users to search through the jumble of reviews on any given product based on those identifying categories—choosing to see, for example, only reviews written by the parents of twins. Mr. Himwich expects that feature to give his site a leg up on others that only sort reviews based on ratings or on comments that have been voted the most useful.

In the coming weeks, Bazaarvoice, a software firm based in Austin, Texas, will expand a system that takes the idea of drawing connections among shoppers a step further, by linking reviewers' write-ups with their Facebook profiles. That will make it easy for reviewers to share write-ups with their friends, and for other shoppers to see a lot more information about who has left a review. "Everybody knows you will trust somebody you know more than somebody you don't," says Bazaarvoice Chief Executive Brett Hurt.

Any Questions?

Another service from Bazaarvoice is helping merchants mine input from consumers who are still considering a purchase. The Whitney Automotive Group, which runs auto-parts supply site JCWhitney.com, watched sales jump after it hired Bazaarvoice to add customer reviews to its site three years ago. But the comments alone couldn't help with another problem: shoppers inadvertently buying the wrong product.

So two years ago, the company asked Bazaarvoice to add the capability for shoppers to pose questions about products before they buy, instead of just leaving comments after the fact. The service allows customers to "let us know what information isn't out there," says Tom West, JC Whitney's chief executive.

It also sparks discussions among shoppers about the company's products. Normally, online shoppers ask questions about products by sending an email to the store, or phoning a call center. The answers a shopper is given only benefit that one person—other shoppers don't get to listen in. Now, when a JC Whitney customer posts a question on the site, other customers or JC Whitney employees or suppliers can post answers that all shoppers can see. The software keeps track of which questions have and haven't been answered, and directs new questions to employees who are experts on the subject.

The feature hasn't increased sales much, says Mr. West, but it did cause the company's product return rate to drop 23% in the first year after the system was put in place, compared with the previous year, for those products that had received a critical mass of queries.

"It turns out that if it was a question for one person, it was a question for even more," says Mr. West. "While we may lose a sale, we also prevent a return."

Bazaarvoice has been extending the service to suppliers who want to answer the questions asked about their products on retailers' sites. For example, Samsung Electronics uses the service to answer questions on BestBuy.com and other sites about its television sets, signing its answers "Mr. Samsung."