Online customer reviews and ratings have a significant influence on the shopping behaviour of consumers buying online.

According to the Deloitte study more than half of all U.S. consumers and 69% of Millennials say that reviews and ratings by other consumers influence their buying decisions more than any other type of online advertising. As a result of the study 51% of the respondents said they had purchased products based on an online recommendation, and 24% said they would like to have an online service that recommends products based on consumers’ recommendations.

An ecommerce persuasion poll, carried out by user experience consultancy, Webcredible, revealed that almost one third (28 per cent) of online shoppers are most likely to be persuaded to make an online purchase by the reputation of the retailer.

Only 50 % of the eretailers use customer reviews

Still, though, only 50% of online retailers use customer reviews on their sites, according to Forrester Research. Those who don’t likely fear what their customers might say. They shouldn’t, according to Forrester, which also found that 25% of online shoppers report that they are unlikely to purchase a product after reading negative reviews, and most don’t take those reviews seriously.
But there is another reason why retailers should consider integrating a system into their online-shops that gives their customers the opportunity to share their service experiences: It can increase their creditability with their customer base overall.

Honest and impartial reviews written by real people enable consumers to choose the right shop for a product or a service and to buy with more confidence.

The Trusted Shops buyer feedback service

In addition to the well known trustmark Trusted Shops is offering a review and rating service where online buyers can provide feedback on transactions, rate online shops in a structured way and leave comments, provided they registered for a Trusted Shops guarantee at checkout.

Shopkeepers can use these unbiased buyer feedbacks to learn what customers liked and disliked, identify potential issues and use these insights to improve the shopping experience.

Click here to learn more about the Buyer Feedbacks by Trusted Shops.

Transaction Rating and Seller Rating

A Trusted Shops Buyer Feedback is comprised of two parts: the Transaction Rating and the Seller Rating.
The Transaction Rating captures how the specific online purchase turned out: positive, neutral or negative. The buyer can also leave a brief comment to explain its choice. With the Seller Rating, the buyer can additionally rate the seller in 4 categories : website, delivery, goods and customer service. A star rating with a scale of 1 to 5 is used for each criterion, with 5 stars being the best rating.

Fig 1. Rating form for the online buyer

Buyer Feedbacks in the Trusted Shops System

Buyer feedbacks are currently displayed in the private member area of the Trusted Shops system only, i.e. online merchants view only their own buyer feedbacks and online buyers can view only their own feedbacks via the Trusted Shops system. None of these feedbacks are made public. This will be possible upon explicit request by the online merchant at a later stage.
Online merchants can identify transaction ratings quickly with the smiley icons displayed in the list of their guaranteed transactions (green for positive, yellow for neutral and red for negative rating) in the Trusted Shops system.
Online merchants can also view their seller ratings including the buyer comments as well as the average seller rating which aggregates all seller ratings of the last 12 months. Shopkeepers have the possibility to leave their own comment on a buyer feedback.

Fig 2. List of seller ratings
The Feedback Profile gives an overview of Transaction Ratings and Seller Ratings.
The positive transaction percentage is calculated as the ratio between the number of positive ratings against the sum of positive and negative ratings in the last 12 months. The transaction rating table provides also the breakdown of the transaction ratings of the last 1, 6 and 12 months.
The average seller rating is calculated as the average of all seller ratings in the last 12 months.

Fig 3. Rating profile: summary of ratings provided

Are you Trusted Shops member?

If you are Trusted Shops member, log into the system today and view the ratings of your online shop!

What’s next? The Buyer Feedback Widget

A special a buyer feedback widget will provide the ability to display shop ratings and buyer feedbacks. The Trusted Shops Buyer Feedback package will be available as upgrade to the Trusted Shops membership soon.
Unbiased buyer feedbacks help both online buyers and sellers to increase customer confidence and shopping experience and therefore complement ideally the Trusted Shops Quality Seal.

Fig 4. Example of Buyer Feedback Widget integration