Aim to get 10+ reviews per product, which is enough for shoppers to make an informed decision. If a big percentage of your products have zero or only a few reviews, that can hurt your conversions.

 

How?

  1. Place the Write a Review button prominently in the Reviews section 
  2. Offer sweepstakes or discounts in exchange for writing a review. 
  3. Send an email after delivery to request a review on the product(s) they bought (see best practice #145) 
  4. You can go as far as giving away some products in exchange for reviews 
  5. Ask for a review on their return visit for the products they bought (see best practice #193)
  6. Include reviews from the brands you sell

 

 

 

And some other thoughts on reviews:

  1. Encourage reviewers to add a photo and/or video to their review. 
  2. The review should have information about the reviewer, for context (age, size, use for the product…), whatever is relevant for that product 
  3. Build trust by having verified reviews,  such as with TrustPilot.
  4. You can ask them to rate the product on a few attributes (e.g. for a computer screen: Brightness, Screen Quality, Light Weight) and then you can show those attributes in the distribution summary.
  5. If your products have a lot of reviews, it makes sense to add a Sort dropdown, or at least sort the reviews by relevancy (show the most helpful reviews, positive and negative, at the top or in a featured section)

 

Load More or Pagination?

My take on this is that a Load More button provides a better user experience, but pagination might establish more social proof if there are several pages. It gives users a quick idea of how many reviews there are.

Test it if you can.

From a member of Ecom Convert:

I actually prefer pagination. If I see there are 12 pages of reviews, and the average is 4.7/5, I’m immediately more comfortable with the product. If I see “Load More,” that doesn’t necessarily indicate there are very many reviews.

If you show a review count summary at the top of the list of reviews, I suppose it’s really just a preference thing if you want Load More for pagination. It can make the page extremely long, though, which I’m not a huge fan of personally.

 

Examples