Shopper marketing blog

Bridging the Review Gap in UK Grocery: A wake up call to Brands

Posted by Paul on Oct 10, 2023 8:50:41 AM

When it comes to the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector, many brands may feel confident about their customer reviews. However, our comprehensive analysis shows a different reality, highlighting a significant and often overlooked gap in consumer feedback.

With a staggering 85% of FMCG products in top UK supermarkets needing new reviews, this isn't just a minor issue—it's a business-critical concern. So, let's dive deeper into the data, look at a leading example from the industry, and explore the tangible opportunities that await brands willing to bridge this gap..

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Topics: FMCG, Rating and Reviews, ecommerce, Shopper Research, digital shelf

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

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

Product reviews by brand in Carrefour Online - Spain

Posted by Paul on Jul 1, 2021 7:00:00 AM

As we were planning our expansion into Spain, we decided to have a look at the grocery retail landscape. For us, that meant having a look at the online supermarket product ratings and reviews for FMCG brands. Our focus in this post is on Carrefour the French-based retailer but we also looked closely at Dia and El Corte Ingles where we can also deliver ratings and reviews for brands. 

To undertake the review of online product reviews in Spain within Carrefour, the first step was to scrape the website data, then attribute the data to brand and manufacturer. Once this was done, the analysis could begin.

A short summary of our observations is contained below together with Excel and PDF downloads of the category and brand level data. More data is available down to product level with many more measures, please contact us if you would like to know more.

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Topics: Online, ecommerce, digital shelf, Spain, Carrefour

Digital shelf analytics suppliers compared - June '21 Update

Posted by Paul on Jun 2, 2021 7:45:00 AM

In March we released our first list of Digital Shelf Analytics providers. Since then we've had lots of contact from and conversations with more providers, so we thought it best to update our list.

We've added five new providers below: Convert Group, DataGram, DataWeave, Detail Online, and Syndigo. We've also added Import.IO for those who want to go for themselves as they provide the base technology that some of the DSA companies use.

If you are a Digital Shelf Analytics provider who covers multiple supermarkets in multiple countries and isn't represented below, then feel free to get in touch to be included in our next update. 

In the future, we plan to contact providers directly to get more information on their offerings. If you wish to be the representative for your firm then please fill in your details here: Sign up to represent your company

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Topics: ecommerce, CPG, Shopper Insights, digital shelf

Digital shelf analytics suppliers compared

Posted by Paul on Apr 28, 2021 4:00:00 PM

Updated May 2021

We had a tremendous response to our first post in post in March 2021. Since then we have found no less than 9 more providers to add to our list as well as New kids on the block Brand Nudge. All the tables below have been updated with the latest information available. 

Would you like to be kept informed with updates to our DSA list & other posts?

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Topics: ecommerce, CPG, Shopper Insights, digital shelf

The impact of Ratings and Reviews on sell-through rate - webinar

Posted by Paul on Feb 8, 2021 7:34:58 AM

Join Andrew Pearl VP Strategy and Insight EMEA at eCommerce performance analytics company Profitero and Paul Lees our Group Managing Director at CheckoutSmart, as they discuss fascinating original research on grocery ratings and reviews.

This study was specifically undertaken in the UK amongst over 3,700 online grocery shoppers to support the understanding of FMCG leaders and eCommerce teams, by answering their questions:

  • Do online grocery shoppers really bother reading online supermarket reviews?
  • Do they read reviews in our category/sub-category?
  • What elements are more or less important in a product review?
  • What makes a good online product review from a grocery shopper perspective

If you would like a copy of the full 22 page report with all 72 subcategories plus the "6 Golden rules of ratings & reviews" go here

Alternatively if you would like me to talk you through the results and the actions any brand should take as a result then I would be more than happy to do so. Simply use the Contact us form and I or one of the team will come back to you. 

We can help you increase genuine ratings and reviews across all the major grocery retailers (including ASDA, Tesco, Morrisons, Sainsburys, Waitrose and Ocado in the UK) but Also Boots, Superdrug, Iceland and Holland & Barrett. In fact anywhere you find ratings and reviews posted onto online sites by shoppers, we should be able to help you. Whether that it in the UK, Spain, Canada or the US. 

We can work with all sizes of organisation, from ones with a few SKUs to ones with hundreds, each one gets our full attention and guaranteed delivery of at last 30 unique and genuine reviews in each reailer.

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Topics: Grocery, FMCG, Rating and Reviews, Shopper Marketing, ecommerce, profitero

Tesco.com shopper research report & SWOT analysis

Posted by Paul on Oct 13, 2020 10:09:57 AM

As a leading digital shopper marketing agency, we are always looking to extend our understanding of the ever-changing grocery shopping environment. Recently we undertook a survey of regular grocery shoppers to understand how they shop on Tesco online and what they think about their experience.

The feedback tells us that there is opportunity for Tesco.com to grow faster but also some significant threats in the wings. Everything we asked has been collated into a comprehensive 20-page report which is available to download. We have pulled the highlights together into a summary SWOT analysis below, together with a few examples of the charts in the download.

If you would like the full report it is available to download here.

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Topics: Supermarket, Grocery, FMCG, Shopper Marketing, Tesco, Tesco.com, ecommerce, Shopper Research

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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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