Online market research puts amazon top of the list of most popular shopping sites. Why is amazon so popular? Is it the choice? They have over a million books in their database. Or their 1-click purchase ? No, it’s none of these. Research shows it’s the customer reviews. When searching for a product, it’s often the first thing that’s read.
Why? “I want to know the truth. I don’t read the sales page. I already know what it’s going to say; it’s going to tell me how great their product is” is the reply. Infact, during one survey, a user was seen to sort the reviews to list the one star write-ups at the top. The reason? So he could make sure he was not buying a lemon. I use amazon. And, thinking about it, I usually read most of the customer reviews before committing myself to a purchase.
So, if you were selling products, do you think you would want to add an ‘amazon-like’ review feature to your website? Well, you can. It’s easiest to add them to blogs, after all, blogs are interactive websites and with wordpress you have plenty of review plugins to choose; star rating, post as a review, review box or user reviews.
Or, you can use a wordpress review template. WordPress review theme will get you a fully functional review site operational in double-quick time, complete with review style posts. Or you can you can turn wordpress into a powerful review site engine with wpreviewsite wordpress plugin. It costs $97, but then quality isn’t free.
There is another alternative. You can create your own authority review site complete with product comparison engine using the review foundry script. It isn’t cheap, but there is a free trial. It has fully customisable review layouts, professional support with manual and can do some clever things! Your host will need MySQL database and perl, but if that ‘spooks’ you, they will install it for you.
Creating customer reviews on your website is not simple, but it could be profitable.
