If you do any shopping online, you’re probably familiar with product reviews. Especially on a website like Amazon, hundreds of people leave feedback about their purchases, giving shoppers valuable insight into that item. This plays a huge role in the decision-making factor for many consumers online.
Product reviews can be a huge booster for your parts website, too. Here are a few reasons you MUST add an integration that lets your shoppers leave reviews.
1. Reviews are good for SEO
Product reviews can actually improve your website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO), improving your website’s ranking on search engine results. To cut the fancy talk, that means shoppers are more likely to see your parts website when they search for a part online.
Basically, Google and other search engines like to see unique content and customer engagement. That’s how they judge your site as quality content that people are interested in.
When people are taking the time to comment and share their opinions, that counts as engagement. People are interacting with your parts website, and Google likes that.
Reviews also update your page on a regular basis. Every time a shopper leaves their review, there is “new” content. And since frequent activity means that something is up-to-date and active, Google likes that too.
In short, reviews give your website these SEO boosts:
- Unique content
- Engagement
- Frequent activity
The only downside? SEO benefits won’t kick in until you have enough reviews.
When you first start collecting product reviews, you won’t see immediate results. A handful of reviews simply aren’t enough new content for Google to even notice. Once you have at least 100, you should start to see some improvement.
That’s why you MUST focus on gathering reviews whenever you can.
Here are some ways:
- Include a packaging insert in each shipment, asking for a review
- A few days after a purchase, email customers asking for a review
2. Increases buyer trust that you’re not a scam
When a shopper finds your website for the first time, they don’t know who you are. And since fraud is a real fear shoppers have when browsing online, they might hesitate to trust that you’re a credible business.
Seeing proof that other people have bought from you helps ease those fears. The more product reviews and testimonials you have, the easier it is to build customer trust on your parts website.
3. Increases buyer confidence in their purchase
Auto part shoppers don’t want to go with the hassle of ordering the wrong part and returning it! Your parts department probably doesn’t want to deal with that, either.
All the time, shoppers buy parts or accessories that don’t fit their vehicle or doesn’t match their vehicle’s color. Especially if you don’t have product photos of those parts!
So when a customer leaves a happy review saying that the color matched perfectly or the fitment wasn’t an issue, it increases the confidence level for other shoppers. They’ll see that the part worked for other people, so it will work for them too.
4. Reviews may even reduce returns!
Good reviews help convinced people to buy, but bad product reviews aren’t necessarily a bad thing for your dealership. Remember that these shoppers aren’t attacking your dealership directly; they’re just reviewing the product they bought.
If a customer comments something like “good quality, but did not match the color of my 2014 RAV4,” that’s GOOD! Future shoppers will see that and know not to buy if they have the same vehicle. Otherwise, they might make the purchase, find out for themselves that the color didn’t match, and return it. It’s an easy way to prevent shoppers from ordering the wrong part.
They’re more likely to find the right part the first time, with the help of other reviews.
RELATED: 6 Mistakes with Handling Returns that are Eating Into your Profit Margins
5. Improve Google shopping ads
Shopping ads on Google like to display a star rating next to the product. Not all products have the rating, so Google will only display the rating if it can.
Along the same lines as reason #3, a high rating will make shoppers more confident. When they see so many other happy customers, they trust that they will be happy as well.
RELATED: Google Shopping vs Google Search Campaigns (+ Strategies for Success)
To sum up, product reviews are an amazing addition for your parts website. They remind shoppers that your parts website is trustworthy and help them make purchase decisions.
Not all parts websites take the time to gather reviews (and not all parts eCommerce solutions have a feature that allows it), so it’s yet another way your team can stand out and grow parts sales online.
