New Comet website dabbles in publishing
Comet's beta site ramps up content production
Comet’s released its beta e-commerce site. Why is it this interesting? Well, they appear to be doing a bit of a ‘Which?’ magazine and become a content producer in their own right. A large part of the site is dedicated to a ‘Knowledge centre’ of articles which looks like an attempt to help their core audience navigate their way around increasingly hi-tech (and increasingly confusing) consumer goods.
You’ll be pleased to hear they’ve resisted the urge to include a carousel of washing machine products on their homepage. Well, nearly. Alas, there are still no prominent Amazon-like ‘warts and all’ product reviews, which would have been brave but brilliant. Instead they’ve teamed up with independent reviews site reevoo, which I can only guess they’ve done to avoid any flack from its suppliers. But how will this work exactly? Will Comet select which reviews to show from this third-party site? How would customers react if not all positive AND negative reviews were shown?
Take a look at the Comet beta site: http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/betahomePage.do?zone_id=13
Hi there,
I just thought it might be worth clarifying a couple of points about customer reviews on retailers’ website that are powered by Reevoo.
We work with around 55 retailers in the UK, collecting reviews on their behalf and displaying the reviews on their websites. We only ask confirmed purchasers to complete a review, and we publish all the reviews we can – good, bad and occasionally ugly.
The benefits of this approach are that you don’t experience ‘fake reviews’ and you can read positive and negative comments side by side. Our retail partners are very positive about our approach to never editing reviews – they recognise the benefits of displaying them all.
Hope this helps
Chris Winstanley
Reevoo
Thanks for clearing that up Chris. It’s really encouraging to hear retailers realise the benefits of genuine / transparent peer reviews. I’m guessing retailers welcome consumer opinion given that this could help them quickly react to poorly performing product lines.
Sorry, I meant to ask the quesiton – have you seen this happen? Where a product’s reviews are so poor that the retailer dcides to take it off their inventory? Can you name any examples?
What retailers tell us regularly, and we see this from our own numbers, is that poorly rated products have lower than average conversion.
At first glance, you might look at this from a retailer’s point of view and think it’s a bad thing. But in reality the consumer still wants or needs whatever they were shopping for, so they buy a substitute product (with better reviews and ratings).
This means lower return rates for the retailer (reducing costs) and more satisfied shoppers (increasing loyalty). Everybody benefits from the inclusion of negative reviews.
Regards
Chris
[...] authentic reviews and user comments be used or will only the best comments be cherry picked? As a previous post about Reevoo emphasised, consumers are pretty savvy when it comes to evaluating recommendations’ [...]