Product reviews are increasingly important

Not too long ago, customers relied on sales staff in a store, and/or word of mouth when wanting to know more about the products they want to buy. One of the strengths of physical retail is that it enables customers to look, touch, try the product, and consult the sales representative before the purchase. With the advent of the Internet and e-commerce, these rules have changed. There is no salesperson to advise the customer (apart from chat maybe), no touching, no trying before you buy. Customers rely on the product information provided by web shop owner. If the product does not satisfy you after receipt, you simply send it back.

So, what do online customers look for to reduce the risk that the product doesn’t meet the expectations and prevent the risk of sending it back? Most of them will look for reviews, influencers or online tests. Some 82% of all shoppers trust online reviews in the purchase process (link to Pew).

Reviews are pre-eminently “the voice of the customer”. A very valuable source of information. Not only for other customers, but also for you as an e-commerce retailer and for your suppliers. Positive or negative, it provides opportunities to improve your business.

Product reviews can make you differentiate from your competition

Providing product reviews that help your customers, will set your shop apart from the competition. For example, giants like Amazon and Walmart have transformed themselves into customer opinion companies with millions of reviews and much more content. Reviews are the reason to go to this site. You will find everything you need to know. If there are enough reviews and relevant review related content, people will stay on your site and buy from you. If you don’t have (enough) product reviews it becomes more likely that customers will leave your website in an early stage and look elsewhere for that info.

As a rule of thumb around 20-30 reviews is the minimal range of product reviews to give customer the confidence that this product has been tried enough by enough people.

The traditional way of representing reviews misses relevant insights

Customers will – in general- not read all those reviews but only a few. But if there are many reviews, how will he find those reviews that are relevant for him?

In some cases, there are twenty thousand reviews. These reviews contain a tremendous amount of valuable information; however, nobody will read that many reviews. Traditionally, all reviews are simply presented one below the other. Search into reviews is not enabled. Most retailers show summaries into a 1-5 star-rating and in some cases add some predefined features. Data is then collected by a questionnaire. This summary however only shows the overall rating, not what caused this rating neither if there are any (latent) weak spots or usp’s the customer should or want to know about.

AI technologies significantly enrich the product review experience

Cutting-edge AI techniques can help to solve this. Natural Language Processing, Neural Networking and Sentiment Analysis allow reviews to be read and interpreted like the human brain does. It doesn’t matter if you have ten or ten thousand reviews. In a matter of microseconds, all content is processed. And the ability of these techniques to understand words and phrases in its relevant context is getting better. Why is this relevant?

All topics and features that people mention are revealed. Sentiment analysis then results in insight about what people think about each of these individual features.

The insights, produced by the AI, regarding the features and sentiments is then presented in a clear overview, providing deep actionable insights into people’s preferences and opinions about the product and its features. This, combined with the ability to actively search into the reviews will boost the customer’s confidence in buying the product, by eliminating specific concerns, and illuminating any doubts on features, that the customer may have.

CartUp AI has the most sophisticated techniques and the most insightful presentation of reviews insights in the market. CartUp AI’s product review module presents insights in three main ways:

1. A word cloud which contains the most discussed topics and features. These features are clickable, resulting in a selection from the total set of reviews, based on the selected feature.
2. Clickable sentiment bars. This gives the customer a direct overview of what people think about most frequently mentioned features, or a specific feature the customer is looking for.
3. Search bar which allows the customer to search for any info within all the product reviews. NLP techniques enable complex search queries. If anyone has written something about that specific feature the AI based product review search engine will find and present this review.

It needs only small investments, has rapid payback and is easy to integrate

These AI techniques are no longer available for the big giants, such as Walmart, Amazon or Bol.com. With CartUp AI, these are within reach of almost every e-commerce retailer. The models are proven and validated. This means that the models can be easily trained with the product and browsing data of the e-commerce retailer, ensuring a rapid deployment process.

AI based product review insights are key to strengthen the buyer’s confidence, therefore improving your conversion, and they will reduce the flow of returns. Also, these techniques expose the hidden insights resulting from product reviews, which is not only relevant info for your customers, but for your product development, procurement, and suppliers as well. Because it is such relevant information, you can include an advanced product review module and the activation of more product reviews in the annual (marketing) agreements with your suppliers.

Improve your CEX, start now

If you are looking for an affordable state-of-the-art product review module you should consult CartUp AI. CartUp AI’s module is the most complete module in the market, providing genuinely unique insights, based on cutting-edge techniques and models. This results in unique sentiment analysis-based insights and presentation. CartUp AI’s models can be trained on the all modern languages, can be implemented without real IT-involvement. It allows you to start fast with a low IT impact, low cost pilot to convince yourself or your superiors.

Therefore, don’t wait with embracing these new AI big data techniques! Contact CartUp AI, and start your low risk, low-cost pilot, with a satisfaction guarantee.