When evaluating an e-commerce platform, or a new feature for your next site redesign, heavily consider adding customer review capabilities to your site if not there already. Customer reviews are one of the most important marketing vehicles we have as retailers. While word of mouth marketing from person to person is the most effective and the most credible, online customer reviews add third party endorsement 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

While a customer may recommend a product to two or three of his/her friends, a product review recommends, (or does not recommend in some cases) a product to as many people that visits your product detail page and reads the review. This can work to your advantage. Here’s how:

1. Customer reviews provide important selling points above and beyond a photo and product descriptions.
2. Customer reviews add third party endorsement to your product.
3. Customer reviews help you identify and promote top rated products.
4. Poor product ratings help you uncover potential quality and/or service issues. If a product receives a high number or poor reviews, you should seriously consider removing the product from your website.

In an upcoming post, I will help you create some strategies for enticing customers to leave product reviews.