Shopper marketing blog

At CheckoutSmart, we are passionate about consumer product reviews. We not only provide up-to-date reviews for brands nationwide, but we also take the time to analyse and learn from them. Reviews offer valuable insights from shoppers, giving us a glimpse into the latest trends and category-specific information. With over half a million reviews from the top 6 supermarkets in the UK alone at our disposal, we have a wealth of information to explore.

Whether it is the latest trends, such as we bring alive in our Moaning March post or category specific insights from the Haircare category, there is always plenty to hear and learn. As we have all the up to date reviews for the Top 6 supermarkets in the UK in our database (over half a million) we have plenty to delve into.

We also use the review data to run our Always On SmartReputation solution, delivering reviews with precision where they are needed by SKU and retailer. This ensures that our clients can have complete confidence in the freshness and impact of the reviews on their brands, alleviating any concerns they may have. This frees up resource to get on with more added value activity as well as reducing the anxiety of surprises when someone in the team spots a series of poor reviews on one of your key packs.

In this blog post, we will be delving into the fascinating world of coffee reviews in Morrisons. Morrisons stands out as an intriguing space for reviews, as they do not participate in syndication like some other retailers. This means that not all products have a significant number of reviews for analysis, potentially causing them to be overlooked. However, in the coffee category alone, we have gathered over 100 reviews for each brand we are examining from the past 2 years. This wealth of reviews provides us with a solid foundation for uncovering valuable insights.

The event held in London was an intimate and relaxed gathering, featuring a knowledgeable group of industry experts who weren't there to push products, but rather, to share their thoughts and ideas. The audience consisted of a diverse mix of food and beverage manufacturers, food service providers and operators, and a handful of retailers, contributing to a well-rounded and informative day filled with lively conversations and shared insights.

Rather than rehashing the entire agenda, my intention is to provide a condensed summary of the relevant topics, with a focus on novel and significant areas. However, summarising is not an exact science, so my apologies if I missed any insightful comments made by presenters.

The Food industry challenges

My overall summary of the themes for the day:

You can learn a lot from spiders

ML Measures for reviews insight

We believe that there is lots more to understand about ratings and reviews than just "How many do I have?" and "What's my average rating"?

Simply having 30 product reviews with an average rating of +4 is not enough to guarantee success. In fact, it's less than half the job. To truly convert shoppers, you need to have at least 30 high-quality reviews on every retailer site, and they need to be "fresh" - less than 6 months old. But it's more than this, it's about the ones that get read, the latest ones or the "Top 3" as we call them. These reviews must be positive and have influential text to maximize your conversion rate.  To achieve this, you need to work with a partner who can deliver high-quality reviews across all retailers.

After analyzing the Top 3 visible reviews for all products on Ocado's website, our data revealed that 52% of the reviews are 5-star, but only 18.3% are less than six months old. However, even those recent reviews may not be the most influential ones. To create the best reviews, they must not only be 5-star and fresh but also contain the right components. So, what makes a review text more influential?¹

¹ From Quality in Product Reviews: What Technical Communicators Should Know Jo Mackiewicz - 2015

In this post we look at all 6 components of influential reviews and provide examples of "the best" of each. We will then go on to answer two vital questions:

- How do you know if you have the best reviews?

NB All example data and reviews for this post are from Ocado data collected at the end of April 2023. All reviews are from the Top 3 latest reviews available on each item ie those most likely to be read by the shopper.

Are you preparing to launch new products? Harvard Business Review reports that 90% of new products fail within the first year, despite significant investments in research, development, marketing, and advertising.

To improve your chances of success, it's important to obtain consumer reviews as soon as possible. Here are ten reasons why consumer reviews are crucial for all new grocery products:

 Reasons why shopper reviews are critical to new products are:

1. Answering for shoppers: "Will I like it?"
2. For instant shopper credibility
3. You look like a bestseller
4. Shopper read reviews for products they don't know
5. The in-store opportunity
6. Reap long term benefits
7. Increasing popularity of reviews with shoppers
8. Your competitors are growing reviews
9. Actionable insights
10. Avoid early delists

When grocery shoppers don't get what they want, they complain. When they complain online, they write 1-star reviews. In March, they wrote over 6,500 new 1-star reviews across Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury's, Morrisons, Waitrose, and Ocado.

As the leader in ratings and reviews reporting and understanding, we wanted to know what shoppers had to say and what issues were topical. So, we delved deep into the data to come up with some fresh insights and observations.

I am sure just about everyone has heard of ChatGPT. Many have also given it a quickly go and been amazed with what it can do. Exactly how practical is it for work purposes?

If you do know ChatGPT, please go to the bottom of this article to get the AI created introduction:

Well, if you're an e-commerce manager, shopping marketing manager, or brand manager, there's a practical application of ChatGPT that you can use today to get fresh insights into customer reviews of your products on Amazon. By using ChatGPT to summarise the reviews, you can quickly and easily gain valuable insights that can help you make informed decisions about your products and marketing strategies.

As part of our work on delivering Ratings and Reviews for FMCG clients we are often asked “What is a Good Rating?”. To answer this we decided to look at the data on the Sainsbury’s website. What we found surprised us.

We have undertaken an exclusive analysis of the product level shopper Ratings & Reviews on the Sainsburys.co.uk website and found that a few suppliers have led the way with gathering reviews whilst most have done very little. As a result, some categories and brands have thousands of reviews and others just a handful.

What emerges from our analysis is a clear opportunity for nearly all grocery FMCG manufacturers to gain a competitive advantage in their category by giving online grocery shoppers a perspective from their existing consumers.

If you believe in the products you sell, why wouldn't you want your consumers to tell others how great they are?

Online reviews have become increasingly important to shoppers, with a recent survey conducted in April 2021 finding that 94% of consumers indicated online reviews as the most important factor in their online purchase decisions.

However, a 2022 study by professors from The University of Massachusetts & South Florida, titled "Swayed by the reviews: Disentangling the effects of average ratings and individual reviews in online word-of-mouth", challenges the commonly held view that a product's average rating plays a greater role than individual reviews in consumers' purchase decisions in increasing product sales.

The study found that while a product's average rating is all-encompassing and a comprehensive measure of product quality, "...most consumers who have high purchase intention also consult individual reviews before making up their minds". This shows that consumers are not as "rational" as received wisdom assumed and that consumers’ purchase decisions highly influenced by a few top-ranked reviews.

There is general agreement amongst members of the FMCG / CPG eCommerce community that grocery ratings and reviews are an important factor driving the rate of sale on retailer sites. However, many believe this is only when a shopper is actually doing their online shop.

Our research across nearly 3,000 regular grocery shoppers says this is not correct. These days, shoppers are looking for grocery product reviews both when they are in or near a store, at home, at work, and even walking down the street.

The key findings are:

• Online and Offline grocery shoppers regularly seek out and read product reviews. They can be at home, in-store or frankly anywhere when this happens.
• Google is the friend of the shopper seeking grocery reviews, so brand owners need to have enough good quality reviews in all relevant online stores.
• Shoppers are prompted most often to discover product reviews by seeing a product in-store, ads / social posts or when looking for a new product in a familiar category. Therefore it is critical if you are marketing to shoppers your products are supported with reviews.
• Research Online and Purchase Offline (ROPO) is a common grocery shopper behaviour but this is taking place at the fixture in an Omnichannel way. Many shoppers see a product they are curious about in the store, and their first instinct is to read the reviews wherever they find them, and then choose to buy it right away.

This research shows that grocery product ratings & reviews are used far more widely than just when shopping online and are a key driver of the purchase decisions online & in-store.