Over 80% of Internet purchases and registrations are made after reading customer reviews.

After reading negative reviews, over 90% of online users change their purchase intention.

When choosing a restaurant or buying a product on the Internet, I never act without looking at customer reviews. Customer reviews are powerful influencers to consider in your online business strategy. In this article you will learn (1) why reviews are so important for your website, (2) the most popular platforms to quickly collect verified reviews from your customers.

1. Why are customer reviews important on the internet?

If you want your business to succeed online, there are many ways to achieve this, but quality content is one of the most important. It's also a good idea to have a positive reputation around what you do and this can be done by providing regular, reliable customer feedback.

1.1 Trusting your brand on the internet

The Internet is evolving rapidly and there are far fewer scams. However, if your brand is not well known to the general public, or if the customer has never bought anything from your site, they will need to be reassured to take action (contact you or buy your product).

Adding user reviews with verified and humanised text is a powerful way to build trust for your brand online.

1.2 Improve your Google ranking

Underestimated and yet very powerful levers.... customer reviews are taken into account by Google for your natural referencing! YES! When Google ranks your site on search engines, reading customer reviews that are satisfied with your product or service reassures it (too) that you are meeting a need X.

We therefore advise you to use 2 to 3 review platforms to optimise your presence on search engines by associating your company with reviews from your customers. Pro tips? Respond to your customer reviews with keywords 🎁

1.3 Improving the user experience

By giving your users a sense of assurance when they make an online purchase, you effectively reduce their stress level about the transaction. And with the right placement of positive reviews, you reduce the amount of time they have to spend wondering if what they're buying is right or wrong. As long as you've given them plenty of reasons to be reassured and done everything in your power to make it easier for them by giving them a taste of what to expect around that product or service, you've helped improve their overall e-commerce experience - and their confidence in it will be stronger too!

2. Platforms for customer feedback

Now that you understand why customer reviews are essential, let's get into the technical details and talk about how you can get those reviews to boost your online business results.

2.1 General platforms

Trustpilot

Trustpilot is a rating and review platform that helps businesses collect feedback from their customers. Customers can rate your business using a 1-5 star system and write constructive and honest feedback about their experience with your brand. The advantage of using Trustpilot is that the platform offers a free version that is thoroughly checked to ensure the authenticity of each review. This gives credibility to your reviews on Trustpilot by mentioning your company.

To share a trustpilot embed on a social network, however, you will have to subscribe to a paid subscription.

Verified opinion.com

Verified Reviews is a useful platform that offers customers several ways to provide feedback and reviews about their experience with businesses. The platform gives you the choice of publishing the reviews on all your social media sites, including Facebook, or embedding the reviews directly on your website. (Paid)

Google

The famous Google reviews. The 5 yellow stars are something everyone knows, the star rating system used by Google on Google My Business. It's easy to set up a Google My Business account to collect customer reviews of your business. The only downside to this solution is that customers need a gmail address to be able to add their reviews on Google.

2.2 Platforms by sector of activity

Some review platforms have chosen to specialise in particular sectors of activity:

Sortlist (Digital agency)

Coursereport (Training)

Switch up (Training)

Conclusion: Best practices for web reviews

• Respond to all opinions (good or bad)
• Integrate your e-reputation into your workflow
• Publish your customers' satisfaction on the media
• Don't put up false notices
• Use trusted solutions (verified review platforms)  

In conclusion, customer reviews are an excellent way to build trust with your customers and visitors. By doing so, you strengthen your online reputation (e-reputation), which in a roundabout way improves your web presence, your search engine ranking and therefore your overall sales. Keep in mind that honest feedback is much more effective than biased opinion. There are many ways to highlight customer reviews or testimonials on your storefront or e-commerce website. If you use Webflow, we give you a tip right after

Manage your customer reviews on Webflow

With Webflow, you can quickly create a CMS display of new customer reviews by copying this Truspilot Slider template (offered for free by Digidop) and connecting it to your CMS to dynamically populate it.

Gift 🎁 If you have any question about its integration, please feel free to contact us!