TrustPilot/Feefo/Google Reviews etc

[Marksw76]

Hi all

We're looking at potentially starting to collect reviews for our ecommerce store. Its mainly for our Google shopping ads and I was thinking of using a third party website to collect in the first instance rather than directly on Google, then plugging this in to Google Shopping so the reviews appear under the item description. I'm looking at either TrustPilot or Feefo. Does anyone have any experience of these options? Are there any others you would recommend that are compatible with Google Reviews?

 

[fisicx]

Use as many different platforms as you can. Your customers have their preferred way of leaving a review so give them a choice.

 

[Paul Carmen]

To show in Google Ads/Shopping the easiest way is with a 3rd party Google partner as you say. What fisicx says is true of brand reviews, but not product/service reviews, you really need to get a volume from one source for this to work well.

Depending on what you're trying to achieve and the scale of your business/sales, its often best to have a brand and product strategy across a few platforms, As people will normally check the brand/website out on Google Business before making a decision about buying, regardless of product/service reviews.

We work with Trustpilot and Feefo, but they're at the more expensive end of the scale. There are some good ways to do this more cheaply, and to put in a full review strategy that gets your reviews shown in paid ads/shopping, and to use them to show and grow your organic (non paid) search engine rankings too.

It's something we specialise in as part of our lead services for clients, feel free to ask me any questions, or drop me a message if you want to explore options further.

 

[Marksw76]

To show in Google Ads/Shopping the easiest way is with a 3rd party Google partner as you say. What fisicx says is true of brand reviews, but not product/service reviews, you really need to get a volume from one source for this to work well.

Depending on what you're trying to achieve and the scale of your business/sales, its often best to have a brand and product strategy across a few platforms, As people will normally check the brand/website out on Google Business before making a decision about buying, regardless of product/service reviews.

We work with Trustpilot and Feefo, but they're at the more expensive end of the scale. There are some good ways to do this more cheaply, and to put in a full review strategy that gets your reviews shown in paid ads/shopping, and to use them to show and grow your organic (non paid) search engine rankings too.

It's something we specialise in as part of our lead services for clients, feel free to ask me any questions, or drop me a message if you want to explore options further.

Thanks for your help! We are a relatively new store although have had reasonable success in our first year. We really want to build it into a decent brand hence the question on review websites. I noticed that Feefo and Trustpilot tend to be expensive but I guess I always though of these two to be the most trusted of all review sites and had the most credence.

Loox gets good reviews but I find this more suited to social reviews and our products are not the photogenic of items! If I'm honest Loox makes the website look a bit untidy.

We are still trying new products but offer very quick despatch/returns policy so I'm sure some products are not 100% there yet. From experience, I find people who are happy with the product/service tend to quietly reorder again and the ones the are not, tend to be more vocal. My concern with this, is that the same will happen with any reviews plug in we use that then get transferred to Google Shopping and if we get negative reviews it will screw up our Shopping ads cost/conversion rate.

There is nothing to suggest we will get negatives BTW, just going on the side of caution with it as things have started off working well and don't want to jeapordise this!

Hence why I want to use a plugin. Presumably I can remove it/not link it back to Google Reviews if we are getting negative feedback?

Re: Google Business profile, isn't this for bricks and morter stores only?

 

[Paul Carmen]

Not knowing your website or the platform its built on its quite hard to say. It's a bit beyond the scope of a forum, as you should create a spec for what you're trying to achieve and then pick a review solution that fulfils that criteria.

It's unlikely a proper solution will be based on a plugin though (Trustpilot, Feefo etc aren't). Loox only seems to do product reviews, they aren't listed as a Google seller ratings (brand reviews) partner.

To try answer your questions, for an ecommerce site you'd normally drive brand and product reviews that can be shown in paid ads results and organic results, which is multiple solutions for most review platforms. You'd normally:

• show the brand reviews everywhere for your company; e.g. XYZ brand rated 4.8 out 5 from 500 reviews
• the product reviews show on your product pages/shopping ads; e.g. widget 123 rated 4.5 out 5 with 50 reviews

The reviews are normally called in via JavaScript to display on the website, so show totals and individual product reviews without any filtering. There are ways to filter these on the website (but need a separately setup tool usually). However, in Google Shopping these are shown as is, as they are driven via a feed to the Google Merchant Centre and can't be filtered.

There are some work arounds here though; e.g. you can generate reviews and see how these perform before showing them in Google Shopping, but display them filtered on the website immediately.

In terms of pure Google reviews, these are driven by Google Business, most ecommerce sites/brands will have a Google Business page. You don't have to show a physical address if you don't want people to visit (although you need one to set this up initially, as you get a verification card posted).

If you mean showing reviews in Google ads, you have to get 50 across all products (to start showing in shopping), or usually 100 for brand reviews (to show in search ads). Once you link it to the ads platform, it will show all reviews good and bad, unless you stop using that service.

Drop me a PM if you want more detailed information, I can point you to some cost effective services and solutions, depending on exactly what you're trying to do.

 

[helmuc]

we are collecting reviews at trustpilot and Google Business.
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I have a tool that I bought a while ago at appsumo > wombot.io .. haven't had time to set it up, though the idea behind is brilliant!

All the best!
H