Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Omni-channel Retail Strategy (44-slide PowerPoint presentation). The e-commerce market continues to grow exponentially. More consumers are opting for the convenience of online shopping. This trend has been accelerated by COVID-19. The future of e-commerce is Omni-channel Retailing. A single channel is no longer enough. The challenge is to find a seamless [read more]
How Product Reviews Affects Retailers
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Have you ever submitted a review for a product or service? Maybe it was the best thing you’ve ever bought and it was a positive review? Maybe you had an awful experience and you gave a poor review. Either way, the reviews that you leave really do affect the retailers you are reviewing. By reading this quick article you will learn about how your reviews impact the retailers who sell these products.
What Do You Need?
Depending on how you review a product or service can have an impact on the value of the item that you are reviewing. For instance, if there are consistent poor reviews for a product that is supposed to have a good value, it will serve to devalue that same product. In terms of finding the best value for whatever you are looking for, Radar Logic offers services that can aid in finding the best product in any given category. Using services like this can aid in saving countless hours and dollars when trying to determine which product is the best value for your dollar. Ultimately, if you buy products that have the best value then you will be gaining the most equitable assets over time. Buying cheap products only results in more frequent purchases of a similar nature. This is not conducive to saving you money!
Quality
Product reviews can have a drastic effect on the quality of a product that a retailer produces or carries. If a retailer consistently gets negative reviews about a certain company or product then they will be less inclined to order more of that product or carry new products from that company in the future. This means that if you prefer a certain type of product then you can go out of your way to submit well written reviews, which will be reflected to some extent in your options as a consumer. Essentially, through reviews you can make sure that products of superior quality are the ones that get the attention they deserve and help to further improve the quality of other products.
Performance
The type of review you leave has a drastic impact on the performance of different products and services distributed by retailers. If one product or service excels in the performance department then this sentiment will generally be reflected in the reviews that people leave for that product or service. The better performing a product generally means that you are getting better value for your money. If manufacturers see that certain products, or aspects of products are reviewed widely as helpful or an improvement, then these products or characteristics will most likely be incorporated into subsequent products or services.
Feedback
Ultimately, customer reviews serve as a tool for retailers and manufacturers of products and goods to receive feedback on whatever they are selling. This can come in many forms, such as positive feedback which encourages a company or manufacturer to continue to produce a certain product a certain way. Positive feedback can also help inform later developments of similar products, by incorporating features or characteristics that received an overwhelming amount of good comments.
Recognition
Product reviews can affect the way that retailers brand themselves in order to be more recognizable. One example of how this happens is when customers have bad reviews for a product that a retailer features, and the retailer pulls that product from the shelves due to bad reviews. Consumers have a lot more power over what appears on the shelves than they think, and the type of reviews they leave can impact the products they are exposed to. The more positive reviews a brand gets, the more synonymous the name becomes with quality, and value. This means that if you have a product you enjoy, have invested in, or are just interested in then you can leave your own reviews to let the company know how you feel about their product, and aid in improving their overall quality of service or product.
Hopefully this article has been informative and left you with an expanded knowledge base regarding the process of reviewing products and how it affects retailers and consumers in the long run. If you take this information into consideration when reading reviews and submitting your own then you should be able to weed through the bad review and submit your own stellar reviews. It is important to remember that your reviews are taken into consideration by retailers and manufacturers. With this knowledge you can tell your favorite companies exactly what you do or don’t like about your favorite products, or any products that you would like to see developed in the future. The hope is that by doing this you will be able to have a consumer experience that better reflects your needs, wants, preferences, and budget. This will not only save you time in the long run, but make your shopping experience enjoyable instead of tedious and stressful.
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About Shane Avron
Shane Avron is a freelance writer, specializing in business, general management, enterprise software, and digital technologies. In addition to Flevy, Shane's articles have appeared in Huffington Post, Forbes Magazine, among other business journals.Top 10 Recommended Documents on Retail Industry
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