You can read further insights from Brett on his Bazaarblog - ideas to let customers build your business and read about his customer ratings services Bazaarvoice.

You can also see a compilation of stats at

These are the insights on customer ratings I picked up from his talk:

1. Surprising how positive customer reviews tend to be - average ratings across all categories is 4.3 / 5 - see top chart.

2. But do sometimes see high negative reviews for an individual product or e-retailer when returns are high. Where returns give a rating of 2/5, then there is a problem but you do need to know about it from customer conversations.

3. Customer reviews drive conversion rates as the top chart shows. unsurpringly, more reviews increase conversion and even reduce returns (since expectations are set – know what the pros and cons are already). Also tend to increase average order value, e.g. for CompUSA through use of reviews achieved:

• 60% higher conversion
• 50% higher order value
• 82% more page views per visitor

4. Providing links to top-rated products significantly increased conversion. Also having a sort on top-rated box in search or product listings will increase revenue per visit.

5. Additional tips on improving results from customer reviews:

• Include reviews in search results. By default, merchandising is now sorting on ratings – increases conversion. Include them within products too.
• Putting reviews in print catalogues.
• Have featured review (or on Amazon ‘spotlight review’)which is most insightful, longer, a good summary or best rated.
• Reviews also help pull natural search since increases number of pages around product, increases content freshness.
• 100% of reviews have to be moderated (actually by ‘stay at home Moms, in Austin Texas). Only 6% are rejected for profanities, religious rants, brand criticism, etc. Also useful to tag these into different product categories.
• Around 1% can be false generated review.

6. Increasing customer review submissions:

Persuading site visitors to submit reviews is a challenge, but we have seen the reviews. So how do you do this?

Here are the top 5 methods to increase review submissions:

1. Splash Page – Centralize information about ratings and reviews and make it accessible throughout your site.

2. Home Page – Maximize customer awareness of ratings and reviews by highlighting the feature on your most heavily trafficked page.

3. Contests – Use contests to rapidly build a critical mass of community content.

4. Email Marketing – Leverage existing email newsletters to drive customer awareness.

5. Featured Products – Feature highly rated products to reinforce the importance of customer feedback.

Detailed case study of impact of reviews and ratings

• Overall, products with reviews have a 12.5% higher conversion rate than those without.
• Products with 20+ reviews have a 83.85% higher conversion than those products without reviews.Note that products prompting the most reviews tend to be the best sellers and thus are generally higher converting.
• Analysing the session conversion for the same products before and after going live, the same products with reviews have a 35.27% higher overall session conversion rate.
• Conversion was not negatively affected for products without reviews.
• The look-to-book ratio is 4x lower (better) for products with reviews compared to those without.
• Overall look-to-book is 32.6% higher (worse) for products without reviews.
• Since going live, products with reviews have seen a significant decrease (better) in the look-to-book ratio.
• Products without reviews saw no significant decrease.

Source: Bazaarvoice Figleaves conversion rate research