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30 June
Can You Trust Customer Reviews?
Navigating The Online High Street
by
SoftwareGuru
26th June 2009
Buying online has come a long way from the
days of Amazon book searches and 56k dial up modems.
Nevertheless, there still remains a core factor when it comes to
whether or not a potential shopper will carry out an online
transaction: Trust.
In fact, without trust most online shoppers will not browse
beyond a website's front page.
The battle between savvy shoppers versus online
marketing experts has been growing intensely for some time now.
Almost one in three internet users are not shopping online,
with a lack of trust in the internet the biggest
reason.
In terms of the bigger picture, online shopping is still in its
infancy and companies of all sizes continue to make classic
mistakes.
One of the most repeated mistakes is ignoring online shopping
behaviour, clearly visible in analytics, and deciding that you
know what will work best based on the opinion of one individual.
If the end user experience does not create, convey and embed
trust instantly, then none of the other aspects of the website
matter.
Why? This is because the back button is the most popular
browser function and it takes less than a second to
use.
In fact, I bet you'll probably use it when you've finished
scanning this blog post despite all of the available links.
It's that powerful.
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In less than a second...
As online shoppers we have grown more confident in our ability
to find what we've looking for ourselves. We want websites we
can trust and we want value for money.
We dislike flash ads, pop-up ads and frankly, any ads that slow
down our page loading or create obstacles to our next click.
As the ecommerce saying goes:
"Don't Make Me Think!"
Many successful online businesses create communities that
encourage interaction and engagement.
A great example of this is the t-shirt store
Threadless.com which encourages users to submit designs
which the community can vote for and then if selected,
ultimately buy.
Offline Versus Online Behaviour
As shoppers, actions which we allow to grab our attention in the
offline world may be considered totally unacceptable online.
For example, budget airline Ryanair often court controversy both
in print and on TV as a form of cheap advertising. They have
been highly successful with this approach and in general most
customers have no problem with it.
The difference between online and offline behaviour etiquette
however, has left
many bargain hunters unhappy.
Companies can dismiss bloggers or social networking types all
they want but for every blogger or twitter user who vents their
negative experience there is probably a thousand more who feel
the same but who don't write about it.
Brand Management
This is why most companies now employ a digital media agency or
in-house employee to oversee "brand management".
The question that arises is how far will a company go to create
a positive impression of itself and to what lengths will it
attack its critics?
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Voting with your wallet
Belkin is one example of
fake customer reviews on Amazon that was revealed back in
January this year.
Belkin were discovered to have at least one employee
writing false reviews. This doesn't surprise me at all.
Since the start of 2009 I have seen many companies that sell
goods or services online, advertising on job sites for people
who will "track reviews and influence other shoppers."
In fact, I've lost count of the number of times I've seen it
advertised so it's safe to say that a lot of companies are still
at it.
This blog site agrees.
What's interesting is that whenever customers feel that they are
getting a poor deal or service, they won't always switch to a
competitor immediately.
This can fool the offending company into thinking that it can
get away with their current practises.
Then, when a product or service of equal value or worth comes
along and they feel they have a genuine alternative -
that's
when customers leave in droves.
Companies don't care what you think of them as long as they
continue to make money.
The only logical course of action is therefore to vote with your
wallet and inform your friends and family of your decision.
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Posted by
admin
at
15:12
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Read more about buying software online at Software4Students.