A couple of months ago, I got a few desperate pings from a harried eCommerce Store owner who had been thinking over getting on AveJana for a long time. He had finally decided to get on board. But somehow the stress of an entrepreneur not getting enough sales was already showing in his pings.

His store sells clothing and he was spending a ton of money to get traffic on the store. But only 3 out of 1000 (yes you read it right) people visiting the store were actually buying. Just a cursory look at the numbers and I told he can’t survive with such conversion rates. I guess he already knew that. Sadly though, that is the case with most eCommerce Stores.

He wanted to ‘try’ reviews. I told him not to expect magic. It takes time for reviews to build up. But he wanted to get things done yesterday and increase conversions for his ecommerce store immediately. Anyhow, we got him on board.

The first step we took was send out review invitations to his old clients. He got some good reviews, some not so good. But we convinced him to publish all of them and reply to all of them. The main grouse in most of the reviews was that the products are expensive. We helped him draft replies. To his credit, he was selling shirts and trousers that were actually premium quality.

There was one shirt where he got about 3 reviews. That was the highest he had. We convinced him to move the product to the first page and use it for his Google ads. The conversion for that particular product improved a bit form 0.3% to now about 0.8%. Slowly over three weeks he got about 8 reviews in total on that same product. Then magic happened.

As the reviews went around the 6 to 8 figure, we suddenly started seeing a massive improvement in his conversion rates. Such was the improvement that within two days he had sold that shirt out. His conversion rate for this particular shirt shot up to an unbelievable 2.2%.

Overall however, the store was still limping at about 0.45%. An increase in conversions for this eCommerce store nonetheless.

However, even as sales went on the review invitations started flowing. And then once again an important event took place. For every 10 reviews received, the store got 4 reviews that were in the 3 to 4 star category, while 6 were 5 star reviews. As we dug deeper, we found that 99% of these 3 to 4 star reviews were due to two basic issues:

a. Poor stitching quality of shirt pockets and loose buttons.

b. Customers were not happy with the product packaging as the product arrived dirty.

These are issues that the store owner never knew about. Imagine such small issues were affecting his customer experience in such a big way. But it does happen, because while selling online the interaction with customers is minimal.

Luckily for him, his production was in-house. He gave solid feedback to the production team and rewired his production checks. For the packaging issue, he has now gone in for sturdier packaging.

With the two biggest issues resolved, most of reviews today are 5 star reviews. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. His return rates (customers who return the product) have dropped dramatically from 29% to just over 18%. His conversion rates have moved up on a store wide basis to 1.8% from just 0.3% earlier a good 600% higher. And, his repeat customer rate is rising fast even as we speak.

The point being… that while we can say a lot of good stuff about why reviews are important and so on. The very essence of Reviews is that they help you understand your customers better. They help you understand what is working for them and what is not. In eCommerce, this can be a big boon for store owners. To be able to understand the customer is priceless. Reviews help you to that. At AveJana we ensure we generate more reviews for your store than ever before. Our InMail form technology combined with Smart Reminders and an AI based MOP algorithm get you maximum reviews. Not just that we also ensure we help you maximize the use of these precious reviews through our Inline SEO widgets and one touch social push features. Try out AveJana and see how reviews benefit your business. Its FREE!

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