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

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

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

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

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

CheckoutSmart launches easy online grocery ratings & reviews

Posted by Paul on Oct 1, 2018 2:19:09 PM

Customer reviews

Online Grocery Reviews

Shopper Marketing agency CheckoutSmart’s new offering taps into the known online and in-store sales benefit from increasing an items rating and reviews. A report from PowerReviews says the threshold for securing shopper trust at the product level is to collect up to 50 reviews

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Topics: Online, Grocery, Rating and Reviews

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