You’ve decided to become an entrepreneur and have a great product that you are ready to sell. You do not want to handle a lot of the logistics, or set up your own website, so you try and test the waters through sites like Amazon, Etsy, eBay, and many other marketplace options. These marketplaces are a great way to really get your product and brand out there, and sites such as Amazon can even help you set up a subsite to sell all your varied products as you expand.
Once you set up these accounts, upload images and content about your products, and sprinkle a little digital marketing, you’re all set, right? Amazon can handle the A to Z for all your products through Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA), and you just collect the revenues and ship more goods when needed.
You’re almost done, and now the most critical aspect comes.
Why you want to focus on your reviews, and why early on.
Each time you make a sale, it is a chance for your customer to leave feedback to you. They can leave feedback about anything, from the shipping time, to the price for the product, to the quality of the product, to how any issues or discrepancies were handled. It is now the most important time because you have the possibility to communicate with someone who has shown interest in your product.
This is true especially early on when you are just starting out. You want to be able to build that level of authenticity with your clients digitally and make them feel comfortable and happy with their purchase, which can eventually lead to subsequent purchases for you.
Impact of good reviews on your business.
No matter what people may say, a large number of positive reviews can be one of your best marketing tools out there. With so many options out there to buy similar products at varying levels of quality and pricing, the differentiating factor comes down to the number of reviews, and what rating you received.
If you are working on many reviews approaching five stars (the highest on most of these platforms, especially Amazon), then you already are ahead of the game. People will be more willing to buy you over a competitor, and in some cases, even if you come across as being more expensive or maybe don’t have the fastest shipping options, having those five-star reviews will help tip the decision scales in your favor.
Keep in mind, that with a substantial amount of good reviews, you might be in an advantageous position, but you need to maintain that position and that is a different beast altogether. Consider working with excellent partners such as My Product Today that specialize in ensuring your line of products stay five stars as long as possible, offering marketplace strategies and support, as well as focusing on your product design and what is currently trending.
Impact of bad reviews on your business
Here, you can expect the opposite of having good reviews. First, you want to see what the reviews are about, and determine if it is something related that you can control, or if it is out of your hands. If it is something within your power to change then you can use this as an opportunity to rectify the situation and actually end up providing such a positive experience, it can work in your favor. There are many times when someone provides a bad post that is solved, others can see it and will see that you are an active, authentic, caring business.
On the other hand, it can possibly spiral out of control and downwards, putting you in a position where you need to rethink your entire strategy. Bad reviews, not properly addressed can be the reason people won’t pick your product when making a purchase decision. You will have to fall into tactics where you offer your product at a deep discount to attract potential new customers.
In addition, since your reputation is being affected, you might have to spend additional time and resources not only actively engaging the community and resolving their issues, but need to spend more money on promotions, additional advertising, and possibly pivot to a different product type or business model altogether.
It is not the end of the world, and since the sheer volume of traffic and transactions are quite large on Amazon and other marketplaces, as long as you take a proactive, engaging approach, most likely you can get out of bad product review purgatory. You might also want to consider getting professional help from experts such as My Product Today, who have handled dozens of similar cases and have proven strategies to rework how you handle your business and get your star rating back up.
In the end…
Keep in mind at the end of the day, that you will need to put in extra effort regardless of how the reviews fall, one simply puts you in maintenance mode to keep up your high-quality products and service levels, while the other gives you the opportunity to think of better ways to operate or to see if this business model is working altogether.
Of course, it is better to be on the higher review path, because there are literal filters that could eliminate you from being found during product searches on all these sites, especially Amazon, which has rating filters, pricing filters, and even Amazon Prime only filters, as it really is in their benefit to promote their best sellers that lead to a sales commission for Amazon every time. This means that it could be significantly harder to get yourself out of rating purgatory than it is simply keeping up your ratings, as you will have fewer people looking at your products overall.
Regardless of the outcome, always consider utilizing experts to help you with your product makeup, design and delivery, as well as marketplace strategies, and make sure to be flexible enough to adapt and engage your online communities.
