JUNE 30, 2020 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS— PowerReviews today announces the release of UGC Analytics, the market-leading user-generated content reporting and text analytics suite powered by AI and Natural Language Processing.

The new platform enables brands and retailers to understand, benchmark and improve consumer sentiment through deep analysis of customer-submitted content (ratings, reviews, imagery, video, Q&A and consumer consumption of and interaction with this) on product pages. 

“Our team is thrilled to launch what we can say with confidence is the number one UGC-dedicated analytics platform on the planet. This is a powerful suite of products we’ve been perfecting for over a year now,” said Brandon Matthies, head of Product at PowerReviews. 

“We’ve been working closely with our customers to build products that drive insights that help ecommerce brands and retailers achieve what they are most focused on – selling more products online. The feedback we’ve received so far is exceptional and we are so excited to offer this new suite of analytics products more broadly. We are thrilled that our customers will now be able to back major product, merchandising and marketing decisions with data, as well as understand how they are performing against their competitors.”

Amanda Everse, SEO Manager, Gardener’s Supply Company, comments:
“UGC Analytics enables me to aggregate our customers’ opinion. This has armed me with critical evidence to go to our merchant and say “look at what our customers are saying, you need to fix this”. This insight is such a time saver for us.”

Jessica Donoghue, VP Marketing, PROFOOT, says:
“[With UGC Analytics], we discovered that we have more reviews—and generally longer, more interesting, and higher- quality reviews—than our competitors. It was reaffirming to see how much our customers love our products.”

For more information and further customer endorsements, visit the PowerReviews website.

Contact Andrew Smith, Director of Product Marketing at PowerReviews, for further comment at andrew.smith@powerreviews.com.

ABOUT POWERREVIEWS UGC ANALYTICS

UGC Analytics – our market-leading reporting and text analytics suite powered by AI and Natural Language Processing –  is designed to enable brands and retailers to understand and improve consumer sentiment.

UGC Analytics is a collection of real-time reporting solutions combined:

• Product Sentiment Analytics: Enables brands and retailers to analyze the performance of individual products and their entire catalog to understand where to make improvements that drive the biggest impact.
• Benchmarking Sentiment Analytics: Enables brands and retailers to benchmark against competitors by product, brand, and product category by scraping all UGC data from across the entire internet to understand and improve product sales performance.
• PDP Site Analytics: Enables brands and retailers to gain visibility into exactly how consumers interact with their product pages and their path to purchase to drive more conversions.
• Operational Reporting: Everything brands and retailers need to understand and optimize the performance of their UGC program.

UGC Analytics draws on analysis of more than 53M consumer reviews from across the internet. It has uncovered over 2M unique discussion topics through consumer feedback and 150K unique adjectives to ensure effective and accurate benchmarking.

ABOUT POWERREVIEWS

PowerReviews (PowerReviews.com) is a software and data company that works with 1000+ leading brands and retailers to bring authenticity and transparency to commerce.  The PowerReviews Customer Content Platform has three solutions that help our customers collect and manage customer-generated content to improve the product and customer experience across the customer journey. We help clients meet the evolving need for social proof, accelerating the path to purchase and brand advocacy.

PowerReviews is known for innovation, consultative partnership, and actionable insights, supported by our open platform and approach. Our dedicated team of experts provides thoughtful analysis and turn-key service. PowerReviews is headquartered in Chicago, IL, USA.

Introducing the Number 1 UGC-Dedicated Analytics Platform on the Planet

By now the value of User-Generated Content (or UGC for short) on website product pages is well known. Ratings, reviews and consumer imagery/video are all highly valued social proof points for shoppers as they progress through the customer journey on the path to purchase.

But despite the extensive positive impact the UGC they capture has on sales and traffic, and even the more qualitative benefits like shopper confidence, few brands and retailers analyze UGC on a deeper level. Either as insight to drive product portfolio improvements or enhance their customer experience.

Why?

They haven’t had access to an intelligence engine powerful enough to take all of the rich sentiment data (from the thousands of UGC they’ve collected across the web) and turn it into clear, actionable insights.

Well, we at PowerReviews can very confidently say: all that has changed now.

The High-Potential Analytics Power of UGC

UGC offers a ton of context-rich and actionable insight voluntarily provided by your customers. The sort of information organizations otherwise have to go to great lengths to capture through surveys or other methods. What makes UGC so powerful?

1. You can easily map consumer feedback to specific products. Think about that for a second: most brands and retailers have extensive catalogs of hundreds or even thousands of products. Monitoring customer sentiment accurately across this sheer volume of items is literally impossible via any other methodology.
2. Reviewers often provide demographic information (be this age, location, gender and – in some cases – use case). Being able to factor this insight in provides a highly valuable extra layer of context. No other type of customer feedback data captured digitally provides that level of specificity. With UGC, you can very precisely map product feedback and information about those who bought it to the actual product itself.
3. Unlike other forms of customer feedback, UGC is almost always constructive and meaningful in its focus – whether it’s related to a specific product or your entire customer experience. Whether positive or negative, it typically includes extremely powerful, actionable and context-rich recommendations and suggestions for improvements.

UGC is a datasource with incredible potential but has up to now been completely underutilized. It’s time to unleash it.

What makes UGC Analytics a big deal?

We built UGC Analytics with input from today’s top brands and retailers. Over the past year, as we were building and improving upon this suite of analytics products, we asked for feedback from our customers — who also knew their review data was a goldmine of incredible insights just waiting to be discovered.

In fact, we did a thorough analysis of what other vendors in the space are able to offer. UGC Analytics is superior for a number of reasons. Check out our capability comparison chart for a deeper dive.

Here are a three things UGC Analytics does that no other UGC vendor does:

• Benchmarking: Enables consumer sentiment comparison at the product, product category and brand level. Any product, any product category and any brand.
• Product-Level Sentiment: Understand sentiment at the individual product level. Analysis of your entire product catalog in granular detail.
• Potential Syndication Partners Insight: Provides exceptional guidance on who you should partner with to ensure you maximize the reach, value and impact of your UGC content.

Keep reading for more on that.

What does UGC Analytics allow you to do?

UGC Analytics is a reporting and text analytics suite powered by AI and Natural Language Processing that enables you to drive positive change across your business. These include:

Optimize your overall product catalog and drive individual product improvements

Brands and retailers typically have extensive product portfolios. Knowing exactly where and how to make adjustments – both to individual products and at a more holistic level – to drive meaningful business impact is a huge challenge.

More specifically: how do you know how each product resonates with shoppers? What exactly do they like about each of your products? What don’t they like? Is the information provided at point of sale both accurate and detailed enough to generate realistic expectations?

UGC Analytics enables you to mine all the insight-rich customer feedback captured via your UGC program for the most actionable and impactful improvement opportunities. Our pilot customers used it to build specific evidence for their merchants about modifications they needed to make, make adjustments to product descriptions on their site and considered dropping entire product lines.

Benchmark product and website performance against competitors

To become a market leader, you need to know what you’re up against. How exactly do you compare to your competition?

But most brands and retailers are unable to compare product and brand performance in the detail they need and with the precision required to make the desired impact.

This information – in the form of UGC – is all over the internet. It’s on your site, your competitors’ sites and a whole host of big box retailer and ecommerce marketplace sites. And trying to combine all of this data (which is usually structured differently depending on its source) gets overwhelming very quickly.

UGC Analytics enables you to analyze all this UGC data from your site, your competitor’s sites and any other third-party site this information exists on. It then enables you to compare consumer sentiment at the product, product category and brand level.

For example, say you make razors and Gillette is your main competitor. UGC Analytics enables you to see how your brand stacks up against the overall Gillette brand, as well as compare any of your models to any Gillette model. Extremely powerful stuff.

Understand, dissect and improve consumer path to purchase

As we mention above, User-Generated Content (ratings, reviews and visual media from customers) is proven to have a huge impact on the online shopping journey. Often, it’s the driving factor in converting browsers to buyers along the path to purchase.

But most are unable to size or even define this impact. They have no way of knowing the extent of consumer interactions with UGC content and the precise nature of it.

What type of UGC content results in better outcomes? Does consumer imagery or video make purchasing a product more likely? What about product Q&A content? How big an impact do different star ratings have on purchase decisions?

UGC Analytics enables you to answer all these questions and more. How? By capturing very precise insight about how consumers interact with this content, along with their subsequent actions (i.e. do they go on to purchase or not).

For example, across all our data, we have established that online shoppers that interact with some form of UGC are 103% more likely to convert. Q&A is the most impactful content (153% increase in conversion), followed by reviews (115% increase in conversion) and imagery (81% increase in conversion). UGC Analytics enables you to understand UGC’s tangible impact on your specific buyer journey.

Understand how your customers talk about your products so you can ensure your messaging and branding is on point

UGC Analytics analyzes every single piece of ratings and reviews content submitted about each of your products anywhere on the internet.

Due to its NLP-powered text analytics capabilities, it’s therefore able to take all this data and then surface very specific trends and insights to the forefront.

As a result, you can very quickly understand how your product and brand messaging is resonating with shoppers. Are there expectations of your products accurate? Or do your products end up disappointing more often than not? What exactly is it that doesn’t hit the mark?

UGC Analytics enables you to establish answers to all these questions and more. In doing so, it delivers highly actionable insights that drive informed and strategic improvements – whether for an individual product or on a broader basis.

How can you credibly say it’s “the best UGC-dedicated analytics platform on the planet”?

Put simply, because it is. We knew this was a huge gap in the UGC marketplace. As we talk about above, UGC is an incredible datasource that most brands and retailers are simply not leveraging as they could for maximum benefits. But there’s no other vendor in the space that is enabling them to fully realize this incredible potential.

UGC Analytics stacks up favorably to all other analytics platforms offered by our direct competitors. Here are the main reasons why:

Today is a proud day for us at PowerReviews. We are excited to offer brands and retailers the opportunity to maximize the huge potential impact of their UGC data to drive broad and meaningful business change.

For more information on UGC Analytics, check out the dedicated section on our website, or see it in action by requesting a demo.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has gripped the US, consumers shifted nearly all of their buying online. According to Adobe’s Digital Economy Index, U.S. ecommerce jumped 49% in April, compared to the baseline period in early March prior to shelter-in-place restrictions. 

User-generated content around ecommerce has also exploded. This includes consumer reviews, responses to those reviews by other consumers and brands, along with a marked increase in the posting of Questions and Answers and other content, to help inform consumers and support browser-to-purchaser conversion. 

Proactive management of the reviews process is an essential element of both ecommerce and – more broadly – brand reputation management. In today’s digital world, it only takes one consumer and one negative review to bring down a brand’s reputation and inject fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the collective digital consumer consciousness. 

In a recent webinar with my co-host Sri Rajagopalan, I had the opportunity to discuss the heightened need for proactive customer engagement with Jon Jessup, CEO of Reputation Studios. I have formulated a list of key takeaways and best practices for proactive reputation management. 

Brands’ Responses to Reviews are Nearly as Impactful as Consumer Reviews.

Many organizations understand the importance of landing great customer reviews to influence sales. But a best practice reviews management program necessitates monitoring and responding to reviews and the brand’s response can influence buyer behavior as well. 

In fact, a Consumer Review Survey conducted in December 2019 shows that 73% of consumers say they “always” or “regularly” read brands responses to reviews. And 71% said they are more likely to do business with brands that have responded to existing reviews. 

Customers Expect Timely Responses from Brands.

How long is too long to respond to a customer online? A timely response should come in a day, but theoretically a customer will accept a slower response if a review is posted over the weekend or on a holiday. There’s also a bit more leeway if a customer posts a 5-star review saying they loved the product. 

The response time window is dictated, in part, by the platform used for the review (i.e., Google reviews or Twitter). 

Additionally, the exact response time depends on the product, category and the type of review – positive or negative.

If a consumer has an adverse reaction to a product applied to the body or ingested, there are FDA requirements dictating the timeliness of the response and specific process to be followed. 

Negative Reviews Require More Urgency. 

There’s more urgency to respond to negative reviews 1) to satisfy the customer and 2) to protect the brand reputation.

Typically, a customer expects a response on a negative review in three to five business hours or less. But even this timeframe can be too long if a customer posts something negative on Twitter or via Facebook Messenger. 

If brands don’t respond to a negative review in a timely manner, the reviewer can become even more vocal, alerting other followers to the brand’s lack of response. However, brands that respond quickly and address a customer’s needs can reap rewards – as a detractor can become a strong brand advocate.

Q&A Forums Augment Product Details.

Q&A forums have become a common feature on most ecommerce sites. The Q&A section of a site can be exceptionally strategic in helping to fill the gaps in customer product knowledge. 

However, the content must be accurate, and this requires monitoring. A consumer who thinks he or she knows the answer may offer an answer, but the details may be wrong. The brand can – and should – comment on another person’s answer, and especially so if it is incorrect. 

In this respect, it’s vital to give this responsibility to individuals who actually know the right answers and who are well-versed in customer and consumer engagement. 

The need for timely response applies for Q&As as well. If a question posed remains unanswered, customers can question the brand’s lack of a response. 

According to one research study, 82% of consumers look for an immediate response from brands on marketing or sales questions. This near immediate need for response was deemed “important” or “very important.” And overall, nearly two-thirds of buyers expect a response within 10 minutes to any marketing, sales, or customer service inquiry.

Staying abreast of Q&A content can also help brands understand the customer experience and opportunities for improvement. 

Embrace automation. But not too much.

Automation can help brands manage an influx of customer reviews. But authenticity is key. So the role of technology should be to assist humans so they can respond to the customer quickly and efficiently. For example, populating reference and phone number information for reviews. 

The first step is to consolidate everything from all channels into a single response platform. You can then provide automated responses for the simplest reviews. More complex issues can be filtered and routed to the right people internally for response.

If, for example, a customer leaves a 1-star or 5-star review on Google, but with no explanation, an automated response asking for further details is acceptable. 

Similarly, if a customer leaves a 1-star or 5-star review of a product citing a particular feature, automation can filter those responses based on context and sentiment intent. They can then be forwarded to the right customer care agent to formulate a response in the brand’s “voice.” Rating-specific and channel-specific response templates can help customer care agents answer customers quickly and efficiently.

Having the Right Data and Analytics to Uncover Insights Pays Big Dividends

Brands typically capture a ton of data about their customers. But few leverage UGC insight in the same way they do survey or CRM data. The truth is it represents fantastic information to drive key product and organizational improvement.

How can companies use the data to make their products better? How can they use the data to better target customers?

Even analysis of your UGC program can have big impact. Which products need more reviews? How does interaction with your UGC drive purchase activity? And beyond that, you can analyze response volume and quality to ensure your reputation management processes are as effective as possible.

Liberate Customer Sentiment to Inform Your Business.

The best way to gain 5-star reviews is to have a 5-star product. The next best thing is to listen and respond to customer feedback to create a 5-star product and/or a 5-star experience. Too often, customer engagement is siloed and the Voice of the Customer isn’t flowed throughout the organization. This is a mistake, as insights from reviews can be invaluable in informing and guiding business improvements from product development to customer service to site content. 

Brands should collaborate often to review feedback from customer reviews to respond to trends. Some brands discuss customer sentiment monthly, which isn’t nearly enough. Consider meeting a few times a week to enable a more proactive means to understand and respond to any shifts in consumer sentiment and proactively manage the customer experience and brand reputation.

Webinar Speakers

Andrew Smith, Director of Product Marketing at PowerReviews

Andrew is an experienced ecommerce technology marketer. Passionate about all things internet shopping, he is excited to share the latest PowerReviews consumer trend data with the ecommerce community.

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Carol Krakowski, Director of Insights at PowerReviews

Carol Krakowski partners with the Customer Success and Analytics teams at PowerReviews to maximize client value using PowerReviews data. With a passion for telling stories with data, she has more than eight years of experience analyzing ecommerce companies and datasets to power insights for internal and external audiences.

Today, nearly all consumers rely on user-generated content such as ratings and reviews, Q&A, and customer-submitted photos and videos to make informed purchase decisions. In fact, our research found that a whopping 97% of consumers consult product reviews prior to making a purchase. And 88% seek out photos and videos from other shoppers before buying.

Consumers purchasing food and beverages are no exception. 

In this post, we’ll explore why leading food and beverage brands are making user-generated content a priority and how your food and beverage brand can leverage UGC to attract and convert more shoppers, boost loyalty and improve products.

Why Food and Beverage Brands are Prioritizing User-Generated Content 

Traditionally, food and beverage purchases took place within the four walls of a brick-and-mortar store. And today, the majority of these purchases still happen in physical stores.

But food and beverage ecommerce is certainly growing. A study from TABS found that in 2019, 56% of US consumers made at least one grocery purchase online, compared to 38% in the prior year. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has only sped up this growth. A report from Fabric predicts that online share of grocery sales will approach (or even exceed) 10% this year. That’s four years sooner than previously forecasted.

Online shoppers are actively seeking out user-generated content for various food and beverage products. And this content is positively impacting their purchase behavior. Our own research found that 72% of online grocery shoppers are more likely to purchase a grocery item they’ve never bought before if there are reviews for that product.

Food and beverage shoppers are also turning to user-generated content when they’re making purchases in a brick-and-mortar store — especially when they’re considering an unfamiliar product. Our research found that 52% of in-store shoppers are more likely to purchase a grocery item they’ve never purchased before if there are reviews for that product.

User-generated content gives both online and in-store food and beverage shoppers the confidence they need to try new (or new to them) products. And collecting and displaying this content has a positive impact on the brands that sell these products, too.

UGC Increases Traffic to Food and Beverage Product Pages 

In an ideal world, a shopper would navigate right to your website when they were in the market for a food or beverage product you sell. But the reality is, 70% of shoppers start the purchase journey on Google or Amazon.

The good news is, user-generated content like reviews and Q&A makes it easier for shoppers to find your product pages, even when they’re not starting their search on your website. By continuously collecting user-generated content, your site’s content remains fresh and relevant with keyword-rich, permanent assets on your product pages. Search engines can crawl this content, which helps more shoppers find it. At PowerReviews, we’ve found that brands experience a 20% traffic lift from organic search when displaying user-generated content. 

UGC Boosts Sales of Food and Beverage Products

Once a shopper lands on a food or beverage product page, user-generated content (or the lack thereof) helps determine what happens next. If there’s user-generated content on the page, the shopper is more likely to purchase the product in question.

At PowerReviews, we’ve found that brands can experience a 65% increase in conversion when reviews are displayed on a product page. And they can expect a 6X sales lift when a customer’s question is answered via Q&A.

UGC Enables you to Better Serve Customers  

The content your shoppers submit is full of insights that can help you improve not only your products, but the overall experiences your shoppers have with your brand. This, in turn, will boost loyalty — and sales. 

For example, perhaps you notice many shoppers rave about the taste of an energy drink, but many complain about the cap being difficult to open. This could be an opportunity to work with your supplier to improve the packaging. You can also respond to reviews mentioning the tricky cap to let shoppers know you care about their feedback and are taking action to resolve the issue.

How Food and Beverage Brands can Leverage UGC to Boost the Bottom Line

User-generated content helps food and beverage shoppers make confident purchase decisions. And it helps food and beverage brands attract and convert more shoppers. 

Let’s explore a few ways you can leverage UGC to boost your business results.

Collect and Display Reviews

Reviews are important at the best of times. But in the wake of COVID-19, consumers rely on reviews even more. Our recent analysis found that consumer interaction with online reviews (think sorting, filtering, etc.) has almost doubled compared to pre-pandemic levels.

If you’re not already, now’s the time to start collecting product reviews from your shoppers. The most effective way to do this is to send a follow-up email to your shoppers asking them to submit reviews. Also, be sure the entire collection process is easy for your shoppers to compete on any device. 

Once you’ve started collecting reviews, display this content in a way that’s easy for shoppers to find and consume. Make reviews front and center on your product pages and throughout your website.

Collect and Display Customers’ Photos and Videos

Professional photos and videos of your products are important. But for many shoppers, they’re not enough. As mentioned earlier, our research found that 88% of shoppers specifically seek out visual content like photos and videos submitted by other customers before making a purchase.

Food and beverage shoppers use customer-submitted visual content to better understand product characteristics like size and texture — and to discover new ways to use a product. For example, Canyon Bakehouse collects customer-photos and videos, many of which show unique ways shoppers are using their gluten-free bread products. 

Start collecting visual content both natively and through Instagram. Then, display this content on your product pages and throughout your website to engage and inspire your shoppers. 

Empower Food and Beverage Shoppers to Ask Questions

No matter how comprehensive your product descriptions, shoppers will still have questions. Consider adding a Q&A tool to your website so shoppers can get answers to their purchase-blocking questions right on your product pages.

Make sure your Q&A is searchable so future shoppers can see if their question has already been asked and answered. 

Syndicate Content to Your Retail Partners

If you’re like most food and beverage brands, you sell your products through a variety of different channels. If so, be sure you’re syndicating your user-generated content, including ratings and reviews, Q&A, and consumer-submitted photos and videos. That way, content submitted on your own website will also appear on product pages on your retail partners’ websites.

For example, this review for Hormel’s real crumbled bacon was originally submitted on the brand’s website. But thanks to content sharing, it also appears on the product page on Target.com.

By sharing your review content, consumers can find the content they’re looking for, regardless of where they’re shopping for your products.

Highlight User-Generated Content on Amazon

Today, many shoppers start their purchase journey on Amazon. Ensure they can find all of the information they’re looking for — including social proof in the form of user-generated content.

Of course, it’s important to collect user-generated content natively on Amazon. But to maximize review coverage, you’ll also want to ask your ratings and reviews provider if they make it easy for those who write reviews to share that content on Amazon.

In addition, look for unique ways to highlight user-generated content on your Amazon product pages. For example, you can create an image that includes text from a positive review and add it to your image carousel to entice shoppers to learn more.

Showcase UGC in Your Other Marketing Channels

Food and beverage shoppers trust the opinions of others like them. So look for ways to enhance your marketing initiatives — including emails, organic and paid Instagram and Facebook posts, and retargeting ads — with user-generated content like star ratings, excerpts from reviews, and photos taken by your shoppers.

For example, Brew Dr. Kombucha regularly showcases photos taken by shoppers on their own Instagram page.

And Silk uses the text of a customer review in one of their Instagram posts.

Make User-Generated Content Accessible In-Store  

A PowerReviews survey found that 70% of consumers are interested in accessing product ratings and reviews in-store. And as mentioned earlier, the presence of this content makes a shopper more likely to try a new food or beverage product.

Ensure the reviews, Q&A, photos and videos on your website are easy to consume on a mobile device. And look for opportunities to enhance in-store displays, product signage and product packaging with star ratings, excerpts from reviews or even photos submitted by your customers.

Leverage Insights to Improve Your Business

User-generated content is chock full of valuable insights that can fuel better business decisions for food and beverage brands. But far too often, these insights remain untouched.

Start leveraging the insights from your user-generated content to identify ways to improve your food and beverage products and your customers’ overall experience with your company.

You can start by monitoring the overall sentiment for a specific product, or example, a new iced tea you just released. If you notice it’s mostly negative, you can dig into the content more to identify specific ways to improve the product — or even pull it altogether. 

You can also acknowledge negative feedback from shoppers, which can help you turn negative situations around and show shoppers you are a brand that cares about its customers. This builds loyalty, which then drives sales.

Start Leveraging User-Generated Content to Drive Food and Beverage Sales

Today, food and beverage shoppers depend on user-generated content to make informed business decisions and gain the confidence they need to try new products. This is true regardless of whether a consumer opts to purchase food and beverages online or within the four walls of a brick-and-mortar store.

Food and beverage brands that effectively leverage user-generated content have a big opportunity to drive traffic and sales, uncover actionable insights, and build a reputation as a customer-centric business.

JUNE 2, 2020 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS— PowerReviews reveals the staggering changes in consumer behavior and interaction with online ratings and reviews over the past three months in its research published today.

The June edition of the PowerReviews Market Trends Snapshot is based on analysis of consumer activity across more than 1.5MM review product pages from the websites of more than 1,200 brands over the past three months. It reveals:

• Digital sales volumes increased 206% from February 2020 to May 2020, but stable over past month
• Review submission volumes up 2.3x from April to May
• Consumer review engagement has increased steadily over the past three months; hits high of 89% above pre-pandemic levels in May.

Carol Krakowski – Director, Insights at PowerReviews, states:

“Review submission volumes increased significantly in May, which was the biggest change in all the metrics we analyze. We actually predicted this in last month’s snapshot because we know review submissions lags behind time of purchase. With sales levels showing no signs of declining, we would expect this figure to either climb further still or at the very least remain at its currently high level.”

“Purchase volumes continue to consistently be at around three times pre-pandemic levels. They did not significantly decrease or increase since last month’s snapshot report. This implies normalization in the market. It’ll be very interesting to see how much of this holds once stores reopen.”

“Consumers continue to rely on ratings and review content to justify purchase decisions, providing the validation and social proof necessary to drive sales. Review engagement among purchasers is now at around 70% higher than more typical times and total review engagement has steadily increased in the last three months.”

Online shopping volumes stabilize at 3x pre-pandemic levels

eCommerce web traffic also begins to rise in April after staying steady through March.

Consumer review submission volumes up 2.3x from April to May

Review volumes climb steadily over last three months and reached 81% above end of February levels

PowerReviews will be hosting a webinar on Thursday June 11th offering a deepdive into these findings.

Read the full research findings on the PowerReviews blog.

Research Methodology

PowerReviews research is based on analysis of activity across more than 1.5MM product pages from more than 1,200 retail/brand sites between February 24, 2020 and May 24, 2020.

FURTHER INQUIRIES

Andrew Smith

Marketing Director

andrew.smith@powerreviews.com

ABOUT POWERREVIEWS

PowerReviews (PowerReviews.com) is a software and data company that works with 1000+ leading brands and retailers to bring authenticity and transparency to commerce.  The PowerReviews Customer Content Platform has four solutions that help our customers collect and manage customer-generated content to improve the product and customer experience across the customer journey. We help clients meet the evolving need for social proof, accelerating the path to purchase and brand advocacy.

PowerReviews is known for innovation, consultative partnership, and actionable insights, supported by our open platform and approach.  Our dedicated team of experts provides thoughtful analysis and turn-key service. PowerReviews is headquartered in Chicago, IL, USA.

On June 1, we published our monthly ecommerce trends snapshot – an analysis of consumer activity across 1.5MM+ online product pages from 1,200+ retail/brand sites from February to May 2020. It revealed that the ecommerce landscape has settled into a “new normal”.

In this webinar, we dig deeper into the data and provide an in-depth analysis from our experts.

We explore:

• The huge increase in sales volumes over the past three months, which have stabilized at a “new normal” level
• A 2.3x increase in review submission levels over the past month alone and reasons for that
• Review ratings and length trends, and some practical tips for encouraging longer 5-star reviews
• And much more

Webinar Speakers

Andrew Smith, Director of Product Marketing at PowerReviews

Andrew is an experienced ecommerce technology marketer. Passionate about all things internet shopping, he is excited to share the latest PowerReviews consumer trend data with the ecommerce community.

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Carol Krakowski, Director of Insights at PowerReviews

Carol Krakowski partners with the Customer Success and Analytics teams at PowerReviews to maximize client value using PowerReviews data. With a passion for telling stories with data, she has more than eight years of experience analyzing ecommerce companies and datasets to power insights for internal and external audiences.