When online gardening retailer Burpee.com began asking customers to post reviews of the products they purchased, company management imagined it would take several months to collect enough reviews to help boost the site’s business. But they reaped some positive results much sooner than they expected.
After one gushing reviewer in early May explained how Sea Magic Organic Seaweed Growth Activator perked his spider plant up “just like a light socket,” sales of the fertilizer doubled over the following month, says Don Zeidler, marketing director.
“There’s no way we could have created that kind of enthusiasm about the product on our own,” he says. The site has generated roughly 850 reviews on 450 products, with customers rating attributes such as the crop yield of vegetable and fruit seeds, a vegetable’s taste or a flower’s appearance on a scale of 1 to 5.
Many small businesses don’t have the technological know-how to set up a review system, or the staffing to manage all the reviews that pour in, third-party providers give merchants a way to outsource much of the review process.
There’s an extra benefit from posting reviews that some retailers might overlook. Product reviews can help boost a site’s rankings on search sites like Google.com, since the mechanisms the search engines use to scan Web sites for matches can pick up the content of the reviews.
“What customers are looking for when they go to buy a product is validation,” Mr. Zeidler of Burpee says, and reviews from other consumers provide that.
Photo by tdenham.
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