How to Get More Shopify Product Reviews For Your Online Store

There’s been a growing trend over the years.

And where we are right now in 2022, there are a lot of scams online. There are even more things online that aren’t necessarily scams, but are just not reputable or of quality.

Companies are deceptive and they lie. An eCommerce company might tell their customers, products arrive in a few days, but it ends up taking a few weeks. They might not outright steal your money, but there are plenty of companies out there that say they’re one thing but are actually another.

This is a big thing happening all the time online, and your average consumer is well aware of that.

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In this post, I will share the benefits of getting product reviews, the tools we use to collect product reviews, what to do if you're just getting started, how to get more reviews as you start getting sales, and how to ask customers for reviews (and actually have them respond)!

Product Review Benefits

Benefit #1) Increase Conversion Rate

So one of the things that people, including yourself, use to make buying decisions are reviews and ratings. In fact, as many as 79% of consumers trust product reviews as much as a personal recommendation.

That’s four out of five people!

At first that might sound crazy. I mean maybe to me because I’m a bit older in my 30’s. But that’s just the way it’s working now. People look online to see what other people are saying.

It used to be that a friend’s referral was the best thing you can ever get. And it probably still is.

However, online reviews are a very close second.

This is why you can bet on your conversion rates going up when you have product reviews on your store.

Benefit #2) User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is a term that you’re probably familiar with or heard thrown around.

Simply put, user-generated content, is any form of content, such as images, videos, text and audio, that have been posted by users on online platforms such as social media and wikis.

So one reason that we wanna have people kind of typing and leaving product reviews on our store pages, is because Google and Bing and every other search engine, crawl our websites.

And the more content we can have, and the better content we can have on our pages, and the more unique it is, the better chance we have of Google recognizing us and saying, "Oh this page, you know what, this is a good authority on product ABC, let’s place them on the first page."

When you have this user generated content, it goes well above and beyond the product description that you would write, even if you do a good job of rewriting them.

To recap, Google and the other search engines will rank you higher organically if you have plenty of unique (and quality!) content on your pages. Which means of course, more traffic, which you can turn into more sales.

So think it's pretty clear why you should have product reviews in your Shopify store. Don't sleep on it. Don't think, “Okay, one day I'll start getting products reviews… Maybe.”

This is something you should definitely start implementing today.

How Do You Collect Shopify Product Reviews?

How do you collect reviews? Well, with Shopify, they make it really easy.

The next thing that I want to talk about in this post, are the tools to use for product reviews in your Shopify store.

At Drop Ship Lifestyle, we are on Shopify. And if you’re reading this, I’m assuming you are too.

If you’re not on Shopify, you should be. A huge reason being because of the Shopify App Store. In the app store, there are dozens of different apps to help you collect and display product reviews.

Shopify has their own free app called, Product Reviews. It’s super basic, but it does the job. It has tons and installs and more than 1,000 reviews. It’s a great app to start your store with.

Now, if you’re ready to take your product reviews to the next level, there are two options I would recommend. The first being Stamped.

Stamped.io

What Stamped does is kind of build on to the Shopify Product Reviews app to let you do extra things like collect images from your customers and even videos. It has all kinds of other cool stuff like built-in autoresponders to follow up. 

There is a free version of this but honestly, if you’re going to use it, and you want the benefits of using it, you’re going to at least need the base level plan which starts at $15 a month. Find out more details and pricing plans here.

Loox

The other one that I would recommend is called Loox. What’s cool about this Shopify product reviews app is it’s primarily image-based. So if you sell something that’s extremely visual, very lifestyle, then Loox is the best option for you.

Let’s say you’re selling something like bracelets. Lucky for you, you’re customers are most likely going to be the type of people that would love to post photos of their bracelets on Instagram.

In that case, Loox makes it very easy to not only collect those reviews, but to also display the images in a very nice looking review section on your page. It’s going to generate you a ton of user-generated content such as product images.

Plans start at $10 a month and go up from there. To get more details and get started with a 30 day trial, head over here.

To recap, the good news is both of these Shopify apps have free trials. So try both of them out to see which one is best for you.And if you’re just starting your drop shipping store, you don’t need either of them yet– you’ll want to use the Shopify Product Reviews app.

How Do You Get Product Reviews if You Don’t Have Any Sales?

Now next thing though that I should talk about in this post is what if you’re reading this and you're brand new and you have no sales.

Who knows? I'm sure someone out there reading this is brand new and has no sales. And if you do, post in the comments below, just write, “No sales.” Don't feel bad. I'll help you out, just comment “no sales” in the comments at the bottom.

If that’s you reading this, you know how powerful product reviews are and you know that they increase your traffic and conversions, there’s only one problem… How do we do it?

Well, the simplest way is to reach out. If you were expecting me to say that you should go to other people’s websites and steal them, you’re wrong. Don’t do that! Don’t go to other stores on Amazon, eBay, where ever and copy and paste the reviews. Don’t ever do that.

Instead, contact the brands or suppliers you sell for. Ask them if they have any reviews you can use for the products you’re selling.

This is how you ethically get legitimate reviews for the products you’re selling.

You’ll get all the benefits as if you had sold the products yourself, except with this way you get them from day one. So if you don’t have sales yet, the best way to get them is to just ask your suppliers for reviews.

So you get all the benefits as if you had sold the products yourself, except you get them from day one. So that's what you do if you don't have sales yet. You literally ask your suppliers. That's the best way to do this.

How Do You Get More Product Reviews?

Fourth thing that's important to talk about is how to get more reviews.

Well, you could probably guess the first way to get more product reviews, and that’s to ask your customers.

And if you're afraid to ask your customers for reviews, that means you're not doing a good job of running your business, okay? You should be totally comfortable with asking 95% of your customers to leave you a review.

Additionally, you should be persistent with following up so you actually have them leave one for you.

How to Ask Your Customers for Product Reviews

So that brings us into how do you for product reviews. I’ll admit, it can feel awkward. But know that it’s a pretty normal thing that people are used to doing. And it should be something you get used to asking for as well.

What I recommend doing is building a post purchase automation campaign. Post purchase meaning it gets triggered after a purchase takes place on your site. And of course, automation, meaning it just happens on its own.

We have ours built out in Klaviyo, which is the autoresponder we use. However, you can use the ones built into Looz or Stamped.io.

The way it works is easy in concept. After someone buys, and that package is delivered, the first email is triggered to go out. It could be five or seven days after the customer purchases from your site.

The first autoresponder email will say something along the lines of, "Hey we saw "that you received your item. "We would love to hear your thoughts about it. Here's a link, can you please leave us a review?"

At this point, some people will do it. Most won't. And that’s fine because that's just how the world works. If they don't do it, you have another follow up email go to them.

This follow up says, "Hey, you know, I really hope you're enjoying this. We would love your feedback, it helps us as a small store. Here's the link again. By the way, we're offering a special coupon code for everybody that does leave a review. You'll save x% in your next order. Please click here to leave us a review."

Now in addition to that, we actually have our follow up sequence go for about a week. But in these emails, we’re not just asking for a text review.

Remember that the things that really increase conversion rates are the visual parts of a review such as images or videos.

Depending on what you’re selling, you should be following up asking for a text review and an image of the product maybe in their home or if you're selling surfboards, be like, "Hey, can you take a photo of you and your surfboard "at the beach or the surfboard on your car."

Something fun like this will also help you stand out from your competition. It will get more people to trust you and buy from you.

Of course you have to modify the text and strategy to fix your brand what you’re selling. However, it doesn’t change the that you have to follow up post purchase. Put it in on automation and that will make it as easy as possible to collect product reviews.

How to Track Product Reviews

To track who is leaving product reviews or not, we typically track that using either Google Sheets or in Trello.. If you want to use a tool that's built in to see if people are actually leaving you reviews or not, you can use in Stamped. They have a dashboard, that will show you all of your orders.

Not only that, but it will also show if the person left a review or not. And if they didn't, you can click a button that says resend. That sends them another email asking for a review. 

You can also just give people a call. Let them know, "Hey, I would really appreciate a review." Something like that would be great to have your VA take on.

To Recap on How Product Reviews Can Benefit Your Store

The point is to be doing everything you can to get as many reviews as possible from everybody that buys from you– once you start getting sales.

And before you start getting sales, you're asking your brands and your suppliers for reviews that you can use to get your conversion rates up. It’s as simple as that

So definitely do this and start working on your product reviews right away. It'll make a massive difference in terms of your conversions and eventually with site traffic.