Shopper marketing blog

Online reviews have become one of the most powerful influences on shopper decisions. They shape trust, drive trial, and impact conversion both online and in-store. At CheckoutSmart, we analysed thousands of verified reviews from Sainsbury’s, ASDA and Tesco in 2025 to see where retailers are excelling and where improvements are needed.

Here are the key findings and what they mean for retailers.

• Fresh Reviews Drive Conversion – Sainsbury’s Leads
  Shoppers value recent reviews more than average scores. Sainsbury’s outperforms competitors with over ten times more fresh reviews than Tesco and ASDA combined. Reviews older than six months quickly lose impact and erode trust.

• ASDA’s Value Strength Needs Clearer Communication
  While ASDA has strong value credentials (5.1% positive value mentions), it lags behind Sainsbury’s (7.1%). The issue is not perception but communication. Clearer value messaging in product descriptions, promotions, and loyalty mechanics could help ASDA reclaim its price leadership.

• Tesco’s Service Challenges Hurt Trust
  Tesco’s main challenge is service, not product quality. It records the highest level of negative service mentions (2.8%), centred on out-of-stocks and delivery delays. These issues undermine trust and outweigh positive reviews. Fixing availability and delivery reliability is key to regaining shopper confidence.

At the request of one of our brand partners, we are stepping into the world of FMCG brand tracking. We are going to research some of the top brands in the UK and find out what shoppers think of them in terms of buyer recommendation, and the results may surprise you. 

These are the brands we included were:

NB All these brands are "Top" brands in the UK. They were chosen after shoppers selected ones they bought regularly from a long list of brands to ensure a significant number of responses for every brand. As a result, this list's "bottom" performers are still amongst the most frequently bought and top recommended brands in the UK.

Consumer-facing brands should leverage bespoke consumer feedback data to train or fine-tune AI / ML models to get ahead. These expert models can help them gain valuable insights into consumer preferences, behaviours, and sentiments, enabling them to optimise product descriptions, packaging design and advertising copy.

One application we have developed for such AI models is to assess and classify product reviews with helpful tags. Using consumer feedback as the basis, we have created proprietary measures of product reviews, such as how influential an individual review is and how strongly it reviews the product's taste or effectiveness.

By analysing these new measures, brand owners can identify their performance and patterns in consumer reviews, generate new insights, compare themselves to competition and even highlight individual reviews for a specific purpose, such as "suitable for advertising". 

Using bespoke shopper data to train AI models represents a significant opportunity for consumer-facing brands to enhance their understanding of consumers and markets.