Saturday, December 01, 2012
Your product reviews look and feel
The image you see attached to this week’s blog is fairly straight forward. Here, we have a RatingBox sample of a client that we have created to show you a possibility of what your product page could look like. As you can see, there are many different attributes and values that come with its integration. Take a look at some of our most popular ones;
SEO Integration – Everybody wants to be on the first page of Google, whether you are a service or a product provider, it is everyone’s’ desire to be there! The way Google notices and advances websites through their rankings and page numbers is through traffic, ‘tags’ and ‘keywords’, and website presentation, as we have mentioned to you in previous blogs. So when the page is being constantly observed and reviewed by clients, the integration comes in effect and your top search engines begins to recognize your page, and in today’s business, recognition is key.
Stay socially active – In today’s world, people spend more time on social network sites more than they actually think they do. Online networking has been a great success. Seeing your product on a website like Facebook or Twitter, gives you a huge advantage of over your competitors. You are guaranteed for success towards traffic piling into your website just by a simple ‘Like’, ‘Share’, ‘Comment’, ‘Rate’,
or ‘Review’. Using Rating System combined with social networking, you can steadily increase your page traffic.
Multi Dimensional Ratings - In multi-dimensional ratings, you are allowed to have more than one 'criteria'. Now, these criterias (as mentioned in our previous blog) are based on how you wish to rate your product or service that you provide. Go ahead and create any type of dimensional label, and you can chose from many of our dimension types. All these criterias that we provide are “weighted”. As you assign different weight for different criterias, you then can achieve a balanced average rating. It is
very useful for certain products and services that many businesses today offer and provide.
Good reviews – Making to have the right reviews on each product is crucial. Reviews have a huge impact on conversion. But why? A large amount of reviews allows segmenting the review content, so you are able to show better information to your customers. Imagine having 100 reviews on a product, that gives time for the customer to find its’ specific needs. Make sure your reviews are easy to read
and understood! And always to make sure to organize and sort your reviews, making it simple for consumers to find what they are looking for.
All these key features, on top of others, make up the Rating Box values and control. All integration packages are available upon request, and if you have any further questions about any of these ideal features, please feel free to contact us, we will gladly go deeper and explain!
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Thursday, November 08, 2012
Is too many reviews bad or..?
Reviews offer benefits to the social commerce, and the importance of showing reviews across your whole product list is apparent. Don’t keep your traffic boost, conversion uplift and SEO tools strictly to just your most valued products.
Having a wide range of reviews is a no-brainer. But let’s not forget the depth of the review. It makes you wonder, what is the max amount of reviews that is beneficial, and which ones don’t really need to be there.
After doing some studies with Rating System’s clients, we noticed that there is not an actual ‘magic number’ for the amount of reviews on products, because ‘the more the merrier’, sort to speak, and the more beneficial each product will get. That is, if you make sure that it sends positive feedback in all forms of direction.
So why is review depth important?
Review depth has a huge impact on conversion is very straight forward. But why have such a big impact? A substantial amount of reviews allows segmenting the review content so you are able to show better information to your customers. Imagine having 250 reviews on a product, that gives time for the customer to find its’ specific needs.
Last but not least, the SEO benefit of the reviews is fresh content they provide for your products site. Having a handful of reviews won’t make be a big deal, but with 10’s/20’s, you are really putting a good difference to your website, unlike your competitors.
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Sunday, October 07, 2012
Make your reviews work for consumers!
In no matter what form, your first basic principle of social commerce is that it is successful, only if it works for businesses AND consumers.
Social commerce tools, such as reviews/ratings, recommendations and others are only able to boost business revenue because they’re useful for consumers, by giving them important information and more confidence in their product or service. This can only be done if all of these tools are attentively assigned to work well for consumers, present the correct features and be able to be used as easy as possible.
Basically, if you’d want your social commerce strategy to deliver absolute results, you have to critically think about the usability of the tools the business offers consumers. To make sure this happens, your team – or in some cases Rating System – recognizes how valued that is, and always applies it to every step of implementing and building your review solutions.
Below, are some of the main key aspects and features of that Rating System has come up with for a successful rating/review solution;
- Make sure your reviews are easy to read and understand
- Organize and sort your reviews, making it simple for consumers to find what they are looking for
- Multi-dimensional ratings (mentioned in our previous blogs!)
- Having some sort of ‘complete control’ of the types of reviews that can be posted; ex – spam filters, abusive words, etc.
- Integrate products with a Questions and Answer box
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Wednesday, September 05, 2012
The importance of Customer Service in business
For some consumers and business, customer service is becoming the most important feature of a company. Although, many would say they disagree, today, in our business world, in the past it has been surprisingly hard to find a strong b2b or b2c customer service communication.
The benefits of a customer service focus, well, are straight forward. Businesses have recently been picking up on the importance and value of this service for quite some time, and they’re beginning to use their strong successful reputation for customer care to attract a ton of new customers.
You probably know some of these big brand names, including Amazon and John Lewis.
Differentiating your business from the competition through a strong customer connection, to show that you care, will result in not only catching the attention of all the current consumers who are looking for businesses who bring forward great attention, but also for future ones as well! There’s also a very high chance of avoiding damage to the competition of pricing.
Pricing damages in competition varies, and can strongly devalue your offering in consumers’ minds, and nobody wants that for their business. Competing for this type of service avoids all these unnecessary issues, and has a few other benefits too.
The hard work you in put in now in outstanding customer service, will definitely be repaid by increased customer loyalty. Ultimately, you will spend less keeping your existing customers than you would gathering and searching for new customers.
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Monday, August 06, 2012
Helping Businesses Worldwide.
 Rating System makes it easy for you to let your customers share opinions, knowledge, and experiences. We are here to offer the vital social customer reviews and marketing capabilities. Our team has decades of experience building software applications. Our costs are significantly lower than others in the market, which allows us to offer much lower pricing. We can customize every-thing to fit your business by matching your site(s) look and feel!
We are helping businesses worldwide to improve the online shopping experience and connect with customers through the power of online reviews, customer Q&A and social media.
Since the launch of Rating System in 2008, we’ve watched the service grow rapidly with newly added features on a regular basis making Rating System the best it can be. We are now watching over 3000 companies / websites who have integrated our services generating in excess of 5 Million Page-Views per day*.
Why the change?
“The company needed a fresh start. Rating System has extended its team to all over the world with employees working in parts of Europe and have recently upgraded to a much larger server for faster service and support. As to our service, we have added TONS of new features to all of our products that we felt were needed or not correctly displayed. The change is a big breakthrough for Rating System and we are all hoping to create better relationships with our customers and extend our service to all companies in need!”
You may notice that some pages on our website stayed the same, especially our Dashboard area for when you sign in. We realized that we had to make the new launch as soon as possible for our current clients to get the best of all the new features that we have just created - so that being said, we will slowly start changing that area and others to fit in with our new website.
New Features?
- New Web Widget Builder
- Bootstrap implementation
- Keynotes presentation
- New report
- New Pricing model
- Featured clients page is updated
Visit User Guide and Help Center for more information!
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Friday, July 20, 2012
Why the Question & Answer Solution Comes In Handy
In the recent blogs, Rating System has mentioned how important Ratings and Reviews are, and how much of a powerful source they have become for succeeding in online businesses. One important feature that can be often overlooked is the Questions and Answers box. As we have mentioned to you before, it is clear that before making purchases, clients often look and search for feedbacks and reviews before making purchases. So it is in no doubt in mind that the Questions and Answer toolbox is resourceful.
In addition to being a very high effective research tool that is proven to drive sales conversions, Rating System’s Q&A Box tool can lower your businesses call center volume, as well as creating proper product descriptions.
Lower your call center volume: By providing your customers with valid, proper distinguished answers to their questions is bound to decrease the call volume from their buyers. When the information is shared (or answered) and most importantly, trusted and thoroughly explained, the customer doesn’t feel the need to have to contact the company and begin asking questions that have should been already be answered.
Your products’ descriptions: At times, it could get very hard to place the right description on your products to drive customers to buy it. After a short period of usage of our Q&A box, the provider is able to gather the most important and useful information throughout the history of commonly asked questions. Presentation of your product is very important, and having a proper legitimate description can help you and your customers come to a final buyers conclusion easier!
In a short summary, questions and answers is a great partner to a reviews solution on your business website. The addition of a Q&A box can quickly create instant value with your customers.
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Tuesday, June 19, 2012
The Power of Ratings & Reviews
In this week’s blog, we are focusing on one of the most powerful tools in the online marketing ordnance: the ratings and reviews. The verdict of the value of ratings and reviews on ecommerce and brand marketing websites is simple; today it’s a win-win situation for everyone. But not everyone seems to be doing it right.
Whether you are a consumer or the business itself, if the customer is satisfied, the business is successful. Despite all the young, ineffective ways of marketing tools, including ratings and reviews, in past years, the ‘community’ managed to overcome these weaknesses and directed themselves into a better world of business. How did they do it? We’re here to discuss that with you.
These strategies are focused on 3 main aspects of your online business – onsite conversion, customer satisfaction, and customer value. Isn’t that what each ecommerce business should be about? Generating more traffic. Taking excellent care of your current customers and value their thoughts and opinions. Always welcoming new ones with open arms. These components are essential. There are very few simple steps a business owner can follow to achieve every one of these aspects in a proper and successful manner.
Step 1 - Make sure, whatever it is you are selling or providing for your customers, that every single product is integrated with ratings and reviews. Most people make this mistake today, thinking that only their most popular or most efficient product should have these structures. That’s where they’re mistaken. ‘Covering’ your market with ratings and reviews for every product, significantly can alter and boost your customer relationship and conversion.
Step 2 – Think of the phrase; “The more, the better”. This is what this step is about. The more your product is being rated, reviewed and discussed, the more returning (and new) customers will buy. Let’s say you’re close to purchasing a TV online, which product are you going to trust more? The ‘7.8 out of 10 with 54 reviews’ or the ‘7.5 out of 10 with 305 reviews’? The choice is clear. The more reviews, the more relevance of the product. You must do whatever it takes to increase your review volume!
Step 3 - Now that we’ve established the first 2 steps, the 3rd is quite simple and straight forward. Mentioned in previous blogs, the next step would be to leverage and extend your review content. You must put yourself out there. How can you do that? Simple. Social networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc) has proven to help businesses expand in the ecommerce world today. People talk, and people listen, especially if that person is your work colleague, your best friend, or some family across the seas. Integrating your products with ratings and reviews can boost your search rankings on Google or any major search engines’ result page. Having pre-purchase information and a post-purchase follow up e-mail can go a long way for your business! The solution is to find a review and social commerce partner who can get your review content in front of as many consumers as possible, aka Rating System!
Step 4 – The last step we’d like to mention is making sure that all your reviews are trusted. Having a website full of random and negative reviews isn’t going to help your business in any way. If you think your traffic, let alone your business, if going to grow and mature that way, think again. There are lots of different manipulators out there who seek to ruin your business by posting random reviews that are nowhere near relevant to the product, or only post negative and disrespectful reviews. Even some who try and think they are smarter than the system and its people to post fake reviews. Be smart. All of these do damage to your business and to everyone selling online. They undermine trust in reviews and social commerce. The idea here to have your solutions and reviews validated by a third party (which could be your review and social commerce partner – Rating System!) that is trusted and valued by consumers in its own way.
Take these few simple steps and suggestions in high consideration. 95% of all consumers sometimes or always check reviews before purchasing the product/service, and 60% of these consumers are more likely to purchase on a site that has valid and trusted reviews. What does that tell you? The power of these reviews shouldn’t be underestimated. They can either make a business, or break it.
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Friday, June 08, 2012
Bad Reviews - Beneficial for business?
Looking back at our previous blog, we mentioned how bad reviews, as hard as it might be to believe, are good for your business. Looking at some of our major clients, and other types of businesses associated with the same type of services, we were able to gather some significant data and relations between a good business and its bad reviews.
What stood out most are the benefits of having bad reviews on your website. The biggest and most significantly – as well as surprising – the so called ‘bad reviews’ increase your conversion rates, where consumers who just sit seek out bad reviews convert more than 70% often than regular shoppers.
That’s not all. When you keep these reviews posted and displayed for everyone to see, your company or product gets (alongside all your good reviews);
- consumers tend to stay longer on your website, which gives you some time to persuade them to purchase your service or product;
- receive more traffic on your webpage, surprisingly, only a small amount leave your site after seen 1 or 2 badly reviewed products;
- showing and demonstrating client service by responding to these negative reviews;
- and finally, customer feedback, which plays an important key in your marketing area.
A couple of bad reviews are inevitable, it’s bound to happen. Every successful business has its’ flaws, but make sure they are controllable and fixable. Otherwise, if your business is filled with negative reviews, then it’s hard to call it ‘successful’, more ‘faulty’ than anything.
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Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Expert Moderation - What we can do for you!
The next topic we would like to mention is our expert moderation. Rating Systems’ team monitors and manages your products or services Ratings & Reviews and/or Questions and Answers to ensure perfect quality and accuracy. Moderation is a content quality assurance process that ensures appropriate standards, relevance, removes unsuitable or offensive content.
For example – Let’s say a customer posts a negative review about your product or service. If the entire review is based on abusive content or completely irrelevant to subject, our support will make sure that this review does not get published. But, if the review is relevant, and it just seems to be an unhappy customer, we will try to contact the customer first, to find out what their reason might have been for such a review. Then, if it seems to be an actually product issue, we will contact your company personally, sharing this information with you and try to resolve and see what point of view the customer is coming from.
Let’s face it. Negative reviews are somewhat important to the product. Nothing is ever perfect. You aren’t going to purchase an item that has ONLY positive reviews. Seems a little “fishy”, sort to speak. When others are talking about your brand online, we’ll make sure it’s in the best possible light. As mentioned before, these ‘posts’ might be returned to the author with an attached message explaining the reason for return or not posting.
The most important part is; you maintain complete ownership of the data that can be sent to you nightly. All of the posts are archived and are available to you anytime at the end of the day. You own all your rating & review and Question and Answer content. You are always in control. Take advantage of this great opportunity today!
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Monday, May 21, 2012
Multi - Dimensional Ratings
Another great feature that we would like to discuss is multi-dimensional ratings. In multi-dimensional ratings, you are allowed to have more than one 'criteria'. The criterias are based on how you wish to rate your product or service that you provide. For example, here are some most common used criterias that Rating System provides;
- Quality
- Service
- Value
- Reliability
Remember, the list goes on. You may create any type of dimensional label, and chose from many of our dimension types. All these criterias that we provide are “weighted”. Think of it this way. Take the 2 criterias - ‘quality’ and ‘features’. To some business or individual, quality has is more important than value, and visa versa. Let’s use the iPad 2 for example. Its’ quality is superb, but there are many features that are missing for its value of money, so it seems that many believe. Flash is not integrated with Apple, thus making is somewhat of a downfall for certain customers. Of course, there are many other features it is missing. This was just one of them. So, if a person were to rate the quality for 5 out of 5 and value for features is 1 out of 5, the average rating would be a 3. But, what if this criterias were weighted differently? Let’s say instead of a 50/50% weigh, a 75/25% weigh. After being rating a 5 and a 1, the rating would still be a 4. Here’s a simple formula;
0.25 + 0.75 = 1.00
(0.25 x 1) + (0.75 x 5) =
= 0.25 + 3.75 = 4
As you assign different weight for different criterias, you then can achieve a balanced average rating. It is very useful for certain products and services that many businesses today offer and provide.
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