How To Add WooCommerce Reviews To Your Online Store

The biggest drawback of an online shopping store is that customers cannot physically experience the products before purchasing. Thus, online product reviews help shoppers in estimating the quality of the product based on the opinions of their fellow shoppers.

To mark the importance of online reviews, Chris Anderson, head of Ted Talks and entrepreneur said,

Your brand isn’t what you say it is — it’s what Google says it is.

If you want your business to win in the online space, reviews play a very crucial role. It is not only vital in maintaining a positive brand reputation, but also a powerful tool for establishing loyal relationships with customers.

Why Does Your Business Need Customer Reviews?

According to research, 90% of people read customer reviews, and 88% trust these reviews as much as a personal recommendation. These numbers show us that in today’s web-based shopping world, everyone is apparently reading customer reviews.

1. To Drive Sales

A wealth of user-generated words on your product can have a phenomenal impact on customers’ purchasing decisions. When a shopper reads a positive review of your products, it builds confidence to buy a well-reviewed product.

Consumers want proof from their fellow consumers to know if a product or service is worthwhile investing in. The power of reviews is 12 times more than just biased advertising.

2. Best Way To Verify The Product Quality

The global eCommerce market reached nearly 3.5 trillion dollars in 2019. Countless brands in every category have emerged, but there’s only one problem – there’s no way in which the customer can verify the quality and reliability of products.

This is where the brick and mortar stores have an advantage over online stores. In a brick-and-mortar store, a customer can physically touch the product and gauge the quality of the product. For online stores, reviews and rating is the next big thing for doing the job.

As a customer, when you first land on a product page, you can take the help of the reviews to verify the product quality. Also, when your product has a dozen positive reviews, it builds a positive image of your brand that customers can trust. In fact, for 72% of the shoppers, their purchase decision is influenced by a positive review.

3. An Addition To Your SEO Efforts

In the eCommerce business, to rank on top of the SERPs is the primary goal for most businesses. As you might be aware, building an SEO-friendly website to drive traffic requires a lot of effort and patience.

Ecommerce SEO is a combination of many tedious tasks like keyword research, link building, competitor research, content management, and many more. Luckily, customer reviews are great additions to your SEO efforts, and the best part is you don’t have to even lift a finger.

Most customers happen to use keywords, like the product name, in their reviews. Thus, adding more content to the page related to your brand.

Aren’t eCommerce reviews a great addition to your SEO efforts?

4. Aids The Buying-Decision Process

In an online purchase, the most complicated thing a customer has to go through is the buying-decision process. The reason behind this is that shoppers invest a lot of time and energy into evaluating products, reading reviews, and comparing various products.

In a customer’s buying journey, reviews play a specific role in easing the buying process. With the help of reviews and ratings, a customer gets a better idea about the product and its attributes.

5. Identifies Areas Of Improvement

No brand in this world has not received bad or negative reviews. Even the biggest of the brands with excellent customer service and unmatched products get negative feedback. Believe me or not, this is all okay.

In fact, negative reviews serve as a mirror for your business to let you know the areas of improvement. If you are seeing multiple negative reviews with similar complaints, it might be a big problem that needs your attention.

Although there may be some negative reviews due to misinterpretation of a situation, you can ignore such remarks.

An outstanding 94% of customers rejected a business because of negative reviews. As a business owner, you can leverage negative feedback to identify the problematic trends in your products and services and improve them to win back the shoppers’ confidence.

How To Add WooCommerce Reviews And Ratings?

So we saw how critical eCommerce reviews are for establishing a loyal relationship with your customers. A comment or a recommendation from a fellow buyer has a huge impact on the person’s buying decision.

Now in this section, we’ll see how to enable WooCommerce reviews and ratings and we’ll also see some best practices for WooCommerce reviews.

Before we move ahead I’ll recommend you download the Product Reviews For WooCommerce plugin by MakeWebBetter. This will help you in later optimizing the review section for your WooCommerce product pages.

Let’s dig in…

Step-by-Step Guide For WooCommerce Reviews

Enabling reviews is very easy in a WooCommerce store. By enabling a few settings here and there, you can start collecting the precious words of your customers.

Without further ado, let’s begin:

Step 1:

In your WooCommerce admin panel, navigate to – WooCommerce>Settings>Products.

Upon reaching the product tab, scroll down to find the “Product Rating” option. When you find the Product Rating option, hit the checkbox beside “Enable product reviews”.

Step 2:

Once you’ve enabled product reviews, you can set whether reviews can only be added by verified users.

Step 3:

If you also want to add star rating on your products, hit the check box beside “Enable star rating on reviews”.

Step 4:

If you want to make the star rating obligatory for your customers then select the checkbox beside: “Star ratings should be required, not optional”.

Step 5:

Once you’ve enabled the WooCommerce reviews for your online store and saved all your preferences, you can press the Save Changes button.

Step 6: Enable Product Reviews For WooCommerce

Once you’ve configured all the settings for the WooCommerce reviews, the next step is to install the Product Reviews For WooCommerce plugin. Though, this is an optional step but is highly recommended if you want to enhance the review section.

Once the plugin is installed you’ve to enable it from the General Setting tab. To access the tab visit the MakeWebBetter → Product Reviews For WooCommerce → General Setting tab.

On this page, you’ll find the “Enable plugin” option. Press the toggle button next to this option to enable the plugin.

By following these simple 6 steps, you can very easily enable reviews on your WooCommerce store and start collecting valuable customer feedback.

Collecting feedback is crucial but it has to be done most optimally. If you have ample customer reviews, there are some amazing ways to use them efficiently and win your customers’ trust.

Let hop on to the final part of this article: WooCommerce Reviews Best Practices.

WooCommerce Reviews Best Practices To Win Customer Trust

We saw how customer reviews are crucial for business owners in the eCommerce space. Then we saw how to enable the reviews and ratings for customers if you own a WoCommerce store. Now I’ll be sharing a few best practices for using WooCommerce reviews efficiently on your online store.

Let’s get started…

1. Make Sure Your Theme Is Working Properly

WooCommerce reviews are enabled by default. But there can be a case you might run into a theme that makes some unwanted changes to how they appear on your product page.

If the reviews on your page are being altered in an undesired form, you might have to consider switching to a different theme. If you are not willing to give up on the theme, you might have to dive into the codes as well.

The best way is to create a child theme before performing changes on your current storefront. If you can’t figure out how to do this on your own, contact a WooCommerce expert to get things done for you.

2. Make Sure The Product Ratings Are Added To The Product Page

As I mentioned earlier, WooCommerce gives you the option to either make ratings obligatory for the audience or not.

The product rating might look something like this on your storefront:

Making your WooCommerce ratings visible for your customers can take you a long way in building a healthy relationship with the shoppers. Here are two big benefits of having WooCommerce ratings on your product page:

• A shopper can make an overall opinion about your product before even viewing the page in detail. Ratings create a first and lasting impression.

• WooCommerce ratings save a shopper’s time by knowing the reviewers’ opinions at a glance without even reading them in detail. This is really helpful when your product has a lot of reviews.

With such important benefits, you need to give serious thought to adding WooCommerce ratings with reviews on your store. They can have a big impact on shoppers’ buying decisions.

3. Allow Customers To Add Extra Details

You can make your reviews even more powerful by allowing your customers to add some details beyond textual information. To make your WooCommerce reviews even more engaging, permit your potential customers to extra details like product images.

In the eCommerce world, shoppers are of varied learning nature. Among these, some are based on the ideology – “believe what you see”.

For some buyers, a product image uploaded by a fellow customer is much more convincing than a textual review or a 5/5 rating.

This where the Product Reviews For WooCommerce plugin comes in handy. With this extension, the WooCommerce merchants can optimize the review form and add a field where the customer can upload product images.

By enabling the plugin from the WordPress admin panel the WooCommerce merchants can add this functionality for the product pages.

4. Highlight Your Best Reviews

As we know, you cannot satisfy every customer and bad reviews are a part of the eCommerce game. But if you get a glowing review for your efforts, why not go shouting from the rooftop and tell the world?

Highlighting positive customer reviews can give you instant conversions. Did you know for 72% of consumers a positive review makes them trust a local business more?

Here are some great ideas in which you can use a positive review on your WooCommerce store:

• Displaying reviews on your homepage. With the help of HTML, you can use the widget footer area for highlighting your customer reviews.

• Adding to other widgeted areas of your site like a sidebar. You can place them in a way that shows up as the shopper browses your store.

• Share your positive reviews on social media platforms and spread the word to let the audience know of your happy customer base.

• Creating graphics that use customer reviews as a quote that could be shared on social media or included in a slide deck on the website.

Review Display Shortcodes

With the Product Reviews For WooCommerce, you can take the help of shortcodes to display the product reviews on a page. Here are the shortcodes that the plugin offers:

• [MWB_SHOW_REVIEW_GRID]: This allows you to display the reviews in a grid format within a post.

• [MWB_SHOW_REVIEW_LIST]: Using this shortcode you can display the reviews in a list format within a post.

• [MWB_SHOW_REVIEW_SLIDER]: Using the [MWB_SHOW_REVIEW_SLIDER] shortcode allows you to display the reviews in a slider format within a post.

Check out the plugin documentation to learn more about the full implementation of the shortcodes.

5. Ask Customers For Reviews

After reading all this, you might be wondering – “How to get reviews in the first place?”

It is an understood fact that you’re less likely to hear from happy customers. On the other hand, unhappy customers have a reason to contact you.

Often happy customers are the most forgetful ones and they need a short reminder to appreciate your efforts. Product Reviews For WooCommerce lets you do this in a breeze. The plugin allows the merchants to send automated and manual email reminders to customers.

The admin can fix the number of days after which the review reminder will be sent to customers. Also, you can reward the customers that review their purchase for the first time.

6. Make The Review Section Engaging

Here are some options that are provided by the Product Reviews For WooCommerce for enhancing the review form on WooCommerce Product pages:

• Question And Answer Module

  You can add a separate question and answer module to your product pages. As a result, the customers can ask questions that are specific to the products. Consequently, get answers from you or fellow shoppers.

  To enable the question and answer module visit the MakeWebBetter → Product Reviews For WooCommerce → Q & A Setting and enable the module.

• Voting

  You can give the option where the customers can upvote or downvote reviews on the product pages. This will help you understand if the reviews are actually helpful or not.

Over To You…

With this, we come to the end of this article. I discussed critical reviews for a business owner and the complete methodology for enabling WooCommerce reviews. I also discussed how to efficiently use them for your online store.

In my opinion, customer reviews are one of the best word-of-mouth strategies in the digital age. While positive reviews build a healthy relationship with customers and generate revenue. On the other hand, a negative review allows you to improve your flaws and increase the number of happy customers.

In the end, I would like to conclude it with a quote since someone else has already said the best, so:

Clear feedback is the cornerstone of improvement.

— Sir David Brailsford, Team Sky General Manager