Why FarOut has added the product review feature?

Write a review, a sister feature to referrals on social media

FarOut was built on the notion of converting happy customers into the best marketers. Our mission, since its inception, has been to supercharge the power of word-of-mouth by placing customers at the heart of your marketing campaigns. Our unique way is to encourage customers to create custom content and refer your products to their friends by sharing a post about your brand on their choice of social media. In essence, we want happy customers to do their best marketing and they do it for free. So we’re actively working on adding other forms of customer-based marketing. Another solid, effective way is collecting customers’ online reviews.

Review: an essential form of word-of-mouth

Recommending products to a group of friends is not the only way of word-of-mouth marketing. Another golden opportunity is to help customers share their experiences online. Consumers can share their opinions about a product in the form of writing a review. With the widespread online stores instead of physical ones these days, reviews now carry as much credibility as a personal recommendation from someone you know. And this fact is also supported by data where ​​88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Showcasing reviews is a must-have feature for almost all online stores, regardless of their industry niche. To build trust with your customers and increase the credibility of a product or service, a merchant owner should show product reviews so that other potential buyers know the experiences and problems that their peers have already come across. Displaying reviews on your website gives potential customers more confidence in their purchasing decisions, eventually leading to a higher conversion rate. According to Reevoo, reviews produce an average 18% uplift in sales.

On a parallel note, negative reviews may cause people to ditch your store. More than 85% of people hesitate to buy a product with a lot of negative reviews. However, a negative review comes with its own advantages. First, the business owners have a better understanding of what has gone wrong with their products and so put some effort to fix it for future buyers. Second, the complete lack of negative reviews on the product page will diminish its credibility as well because all positive reviews make it seem like the entire reviews are inauthentic. Third, some shoppers specifically just go through the negative ones to check if the downside of the product relates to them, and if not, they will buy the product regardless of the negative reviews.

Thus, reviews are an important deciding factor for a lot of online customers and a must-have feature for online stores. In summary:

• Online reviews do impact new customers’ purchasing decisions because they take reviews as a personal recommendation.
• Reviews cause an increase in conversion because customers buy with more confidence when getting informed of the nitty-gritty details of a product.
• It’s okay to have a few negative reviews. It not only warns you to improve your products but helps your product page looks more authentic.

And that is why we’ve decided to add such a useful feature to our app. So our clients rest assured, by installing our app, they have access to a decent review app without the need for installing a separate app. In other words, FarOut serves the vital review feature alongside other functions so that every online store can take the advantage of one form of word-of-mouth marketing depending on their needs.

How to collect reviews on your Shopify store?

Now, you have a better view of why having reviews on your product page is important. The next question is how to collect and showcase customers’ reviews in your store?

Since adding reviews is not a new thing in eCommerce, there are already a lot of reliable plugins that you can add to your store to get the job done. In Shopify, as the leading eCommerce platform, there are a lot of review apps that you can simply add from the Shopify app store. Fortunately, there are some good articles that have done a side-by-side comparison among the best Shopify review apps. So instead of deep-diving into the pros and cons of these apps, we refer you to some examples of such articles (article 1 and article 2).

FarOut Shopify app is also another independent option for adding reviews to your store. While we’re new in the review market, we cover almost all essential and advanced features of the top-rated review apps, including:

1. Moderating (i.e., reply to or hide) reviews
2. Collecting photos for reviews
3. Importing reviewers from AliExpress, other review apps (e.g., Loox, Yotpo), or a spreadsheet. Our app can be thought of as a standalone AliExpress review importer
4. Sending custom emails to request reviews, in addition to providing the “Write a review” button in the review widget
5. Giving away rewards (in the form of discount codes) to customers in exchange for a review
6. Creating unlimited campaigns for collecting product reviews. Separate campaigns allow you to test different settings and rewards
7. Schedule the time to send out review emails

FarOut review widget

However, what stands out FarOut from the other reviews lays on two aspects:

1. FarOut is not just a review app. We want to be an all-in-one marketing app that meets all your needs with word-of-mouth marketing, ranging from referrals, user-generated content to reviews, social media management, and affiliate marketing. While you can take advantage of other features, you use our product review feature so that you won’t need to install and pay for another app.
2. We developed this app mainly for small businesses with a tight budget. That is why, unlike other apps, we give access to all our features in our free plan. We set the quota in our free plan in a way that is enough for small businesses.

Summary

Review is an important factor in today’s eCommerce world. Buyers give more credit to products with reviews and evaluate the quality of a product through their peers’ online opinions. Fortunately, there is a pool of decent apps for stores backed by Shopify that can smoothly collect reviews and boost sales with social proof. FarOut is a competitive review app that not only provides review features but other world-of-marketing such as referrals and social media.