Essential customer reviews and ratings tools

The 5 best tools for collecting and showcasing customer reviews

Reviews have become essential to buying and selling online with customers trusting customer reviews over 10 times more than descriptions or claims made by the brand itself. Reviews can also benefit a brands’ search marketing efforts, as often they will feature highly in SERPS, particularly for local results. They enable marketers to collect and request product and customer service reviews. Some tools also curate conversations happening on social media for brands to use as social proof on their websites.

Customer review and ratings tools enable marketers to collect and request product and customer service reviews. Some tools also curate conversations happening on social media for brands to use as social proof on their websites. We've researched five of the best customer review and ratings tools so you can decide which is best for your business. These tools have been selected to be particularly useful for e-commerce business.

Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:

If you’re not asking for and responding to customer reviews, your brand is almost certainly being discussed somewhere without you.
It’s far better to be part of the conversation (even if you’re tackling negative issues) than to be without a voice.
Customers expect the odd bad review (there’s evidence to suggest customers don’t trust reviews that are all positive). It’s the balance of good to bad reviews that’s important.
Are you making the most of your reviews? They’re powerful for SEO product listings, PPC ads and as navigational filters (i.e. ranking products using customer feedback)

TrustPilot

TrustPilot is a customer review platform, designed with the client and their goals in mind. Businesses can use the free account option to collect and respond to reviews, but the “lite" account (which is paid) allows you to add it to your website. Trustpilot focuses on transparency to ensure trust is built and retention is sustained. Achieving this by giving businesses the tools needed to collect reviews. This transparency means users trust the results, which is good for business.

Key features:

Customer Service is outstanding
Industry standard for features on offer Trustbox
Widgets which can be embedded on your site
Ratings can be pulled through by Google for any PPC campaigns

Feefo

Feefo gives you a complete understanding of your customers’ experience. It provides the ability to manage all of your consumer ratings and review them from its dashboard. The tool offers a little more control over the feedback and reviews shown than TrustPilot. The dashboard allows you to manage who see’s what and in what format, whether that be through Percentages, Star Rating, or Text. The paid service allows you to email real customers to collect authentic reviews from them.

Key features:

Provide Google with ratings data so that product ratings show up in Google’s results pages
Reports and analytics
Social sharing
Customizable rating displays
Ratings can be pulled through by Google for any PPC campaigns

YOTPO

YOTPO helps businesses generate more reviews. They claim it allows businesses collect 9x more reviews, with its Mail After Purchase (MAP) feature. The company also says that it can generate reviews from 10% of a business’s customers simply with the use of data-driven, automatic emails.

Yotpo tends to generate more reviews than any other “review” site, in part due to the incentives sent their way in the way of coupans to respond. This of course, tends to mean a slightly more favourable review, meaning you may be missing critical feedback.

Widgets available, which have shown to improve on-site conversion by 2.5x
Uses user generated photos to help market your business
Facebook and Twitter integrations
Reviewers are incentivized to respond

Bazaarvoice

Bazaarvoice, provides a good service similar to the other tools mentioned but with additional features such as an analytics plugin and the ability to create a product sampling program and community. Its price tag is a slight deterrent, however the analytics available may make it worthwhile. In addition the ability to respond to product reviews is incredibly simpler and more efficient process.

Customers sent a post-interaction email, to encourage feedback
Conversion Impact Report shows your Conversion Rate
Questions & Answers section on the product detail pages gives another way to add SEO-rich content

Revoo

Reevoo provide an honest, impartial and trusted review collection platform to some of the largest global brands. Reevoo is a fairly standard review site, with easy functionality and additional data and reports which can be pulled through the simple to use dashboard. The ability to review all the user ratings and reviews from one dashboard is handy.