Shopper marketing blog

What makes the best consumer product reviews?

Posted by Paul on May 5, 2023 9:00:00 AM

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?

- How do you get and maintain 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.

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Topics: Online, Grocery, FMCG, Rating and Reviews, Shopper Insights, Ocado

10 Reasons why shopper reviews are vital for successful new products

Posted by Paul on Apr 27, 2023 8:30:01 AM

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
 
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Topics: Supermarket, Grocery, FMCG, NPD, Shopper Marketing

Moaning March – What shoppers' reviews are saying?

Posted by Paul on Apr 13, 2023 7:55:40 AM

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.

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Topics: Online, Grocery, Rating and Reviews, Shopper Insights, digital shelf

How to get summaries of Amazon product reviews using ChatGPT

Posted by Paul on Apr 3, 2023 7:38:51 AM

Update: Since this post was created, it would appear that ChatGPT has made it impossible to analyse reviews from a URL. You can still copy and paste reviews for it to summarise.

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. Having said that, 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 summarize the reviews, you can quickly and easily gain valuable insights that can help you make informed decisions about your products and marketing strategies.

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Topics: Rating and Reviews, Shopper Marketing, Amazon

Are your Top 3 reviews hurting your sales?

Posted by Paul on Feb 7, 2023 7:30:00 AM

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.

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Topics: Online, Grocery, Rating and Reviews, Shopper Insights

How shoppers find grocery product reviews

Posted by Paul on Oct 3, 2022 7:48:46 AM

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.

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Topics: Online, Supermarket, Grocery, Rating and Reviews, ecommerce, Shopper Insights, digital shelf

Why your reviews program should be Always on

Posted by Paul on Jun 6, 2022 7:56:01 AM

If you have been working in eCommerce for an FMCG company for any length of time, then you will already know how important ratings and reviews are to shoppers. In this blog article, we talk about how important it is not only to have product reviews on all the online supermarket websites but also that they need to be kept fresh.

Shoppers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their approach to ratings and reviews and have adapted their use of them over time. Today, to be influenced into buying a product shoppers not only need to see a good number of reviews (at least 30) but critically those reviews need to be recent (certainly less than 1 year, ideally less than 6 months old). To do this you need to ensure you continuously add reviews to your products ensuring the latest ones are constantly fresh.

The top reasons for keeping your reviews fresh are*:

  • 97% of shoppers consider review recency as relevant when considering a purchase
  • 86% of shoppers feel that review recency is more important when considering a product or brand they haven’t purchased before
  • 62% would not purchase a product if the only reviews available were published a year or more ago.
  • The number of reviews displayed by retailers has been growing, for example, the average number of reviews on ASDA.com has grown from 6 to 29 in 2 years
  • As most shoppers only read between 1 and 10 reviews, recent unfavourable reviews can unfairly impact shoppers' perception of your brand or product
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Topics: Grocery, Rating and Reviews, ecommerce, Shopper Insights, Shopper Research, digital shelf

Find out who was the number one online grocery in February

Posted by Paul on Mar 14, 2022 7:50:59 AM

In the second month of their online grocery shopping tracker, CheckoutSmart continues to bring fresh insights into this fast-growing, fast-changing market.

NB The numbers below are deliberately obscured, if you would like to know the answers please contact us.

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Topics: Online, Supermarket, Tesco.com, Shopper Research, Amazon, Q-Commerce

Amazon number 2 in UK for online grocery, Getir leads Q-Commerce

Posted by Paul on Feb 28, 2022 7:47:50 AM

CheckoutSmart create groundbreaking online grocery shopping tracking service for FMCG brands & retailers in the UK

Today CheckoutSmart launched its online grocery shopping usage tracker as part of its SmartResearch services. Using feedback from thousands of grocery shoppers each month, CheckoutSmart will track the usage of the online grocery supermarkets, Amazon grocery, Food Aggregators and Q-Commerce all in one place.

This will allow brands & retailers to:

  • Track the scale and trends of each grocery delivery sub-sector and the players within them. 
  • Make decisions about their investments and the relative importance of each player
  • Use the data to engage with their businesses in discussions about the prioritisation of channels and the resources required.
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Topics: Online, FMCG, Tesco, ecommerce, Shopper Insights, Shopper Research, Amazon, Q-Commerce

Shopper Marketing: Trends in Supermarket Ratings & Reviews

Posted by Paul on Sep 21, 2021 7:55:05 AM

One of the biggest changes for Shopper Marketing teams in the last 18 months has been the meteoric rise in Online grocery shopping driven by the shopper's needs arising out of the Pandemic. In turn, this has brought focus from brands on their reputation on the digital shelf in the form of product reviews, but many brands are disappointed by what they have seen. To help, we launched our SmartReputation solution which works with ordinary grocery shoppers to ensure they are fairly represented.

SmartReputation not only allows your products and brands to get the reviews and shopper feedback they deserve but also monitor the content of the reviews looking for trends. We can also ensure they stay fresh over time (i.e. the oldest is less than 6 months old) as we know this is the second most important factor in driving choice amongst grocery shoppers after having at least 30 reviews. For more, read our comprehensive survey of what drives online grocery shopper choice with reference to ratings & reviews.

To see the trends in supermarket product ratings and reviews we have looked back a year to compare the reviews visible on the Top 6 retailer sites in September 2020 to those in September 2021. Intuitively, you would think that the number of reviews has gone up in that time pretty much universally, well you'd be wrong. In some categories, in some retailers, total reviews by category have dropped dramatically whilst in other categories with good numbers of SKUs they are still well behind the curve in terms of getting fair representation on shelf i.e. the average reviews per SKU which really needs to be 30 or more. 

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Topics: FMCG, Rating and Reviews, ecommerce, Shopper Marketing Agency, digital shelf

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  • Actively manage your shopper reputation in all online retailers
  • Create instant shopper action in any retailer, on any sku in the way you want
  • Start a genuine dialogue with shoppers about your products
  • Launch more successful NPD faster and use immediate feedback to improve your mix
  • Excite shoppers with easy to execute, effective virtual on-pack activities
  • Upgrade your understanding of the retail execution within all retailers
  • UK, Europe, US and beyond

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