Are review services viable ?

[threenine]

I have been conducting some analysis for a new e-commerce client of ours, into the viability of adding a customer reviews service to their website.

Services such as TrustPilot, Revoos etc.

I have analysed sales, heatmaps, user videos and analytics from a number of other e-commerce sites we manage, that have implemented user review services themselves and based on the research, have concluded that these services have a neglible impact on sales. In most cases the heatmaps actually indicate these are very cold areas of pages on the site.

Now I totally appreciate that results can and do vary, but I was just wondering if anybody else here has conducted similar research and came to completely different conclusion.

I recall back in 2010-2012 these were all the rage, but has their popularity and viability diminshed ?

 

[fisicx]

Tests I've run come to the same conclusion. People no longer trust the review sites, companies with dodgy reputations spend a lot of time pushing down the poor reviews so you get a very distorted picture. Social media can be a much better barometer of how people feel about a company.

 

[threenine]

companies with dodgy reputations spend a lot of time pushing down the poor reviews so you get a very distorted picture

We actually had an enquiry a couple of years ago asking if we had such a service

 

[AllUpHere]

We actually had an enquiry a couple of years ago asking if we had such a service

'reputation management' is a lucrative business.

 

[fisicx]

I had a run in with an SEO company a few years back. They had an appalling (and well deserved) reputation. Any Google search of their company name brought up all sorts of scam warnings including a number of threads on UKBF. It was so bad they had to change the company name. All the bad press has gone and the review sites have glowing testimonials of the new company. But it's the same awful company selling the same pointless SEO pacakges to unsuspecting punters. As soon as someone posts a complaint anywhere it gets swamped by 5 star responses. TrustPilot is one of those sites to scores them well.

 

[RedApple]

Reviews online can help in some ways.