As an online destination for photography, imaging and consumer electronics, Adorama relies on customer reviews to provide product context for shoppers. To help drive more interest in some underperforming items, Adorama turned to review syndication. Beginning in February 2017, the retailer started syndicating reviews from brand manufacturer sites. Four months later, 15% of total product reviews were syndicated. The retailer expects to triple this percentage by the end of 2017.
With the help of customer-generated content (CGC) platform provider TurnTo, the retailer opened up syndication to give visibility to more merchandise that hadn’t motivated many reviews previously. Product syndication is designed to prevent shoppers from leaving the site and searching for customer reviews on either the manufacturer’s site, or another online retailer.
“Some items don’t sell all that well,” said Lev Peker, CMO of Adorama in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “The turnover volume is low, and you have to take into account that the average review response rate is 5%. When items that don’t sell much have no reviews, it’s difficult for a customer to then buy them. They tend to gravitate towards items that have reviews.”
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“Brands tend to collect more than their share of product reviews, and that’s because people who buy from a merchant may still go back to the brand site to write the review,” said George Eberstadt, CEO of TurnTo. “When someone goes on the Adorama site, sees a Nikon camera and a Canon camera and thinks about what they should get, they might notice that the Nikon has 500 reviews and the Canon has 50 reviews. They infer from sheer volume that the Nikon is a more popular camera. Any signal of popularity makes a big impact on sales. The brands want this to happen because it helps them sell the product on the merchant’s site, and the merchants want it to happen because the more reviews they can show, the more people value them as a shopping destination.”
The Adorama team generates syndicated reviews much faster than it generates non-syndicated, on-site reviews. For example, the syndicated reviews grew to 15% of total product reviews in a four-month span. Peker suggested that collecting the same percentage of non-syndicated reviews would have taken at least a year.
Next Step: Visual Reviews
Now that syndicated reviews have proven successful, Adorama is piloting visual reviews, which will enable shoppers to upload videos or sample images taken by a camera. The pilot is designed to help shoppers share product information more effectively; since visuals often are difficult to describe verbally, text reviews may not be as effective at depicting the product’s quality to a potential customer.
“Once people start uploading pictures they’ve taken with a camera, a shopper can tell right away,” Peker noted. “Look at this picture I took, and look at that picture I took with two separate cameras. These reviews make a huge difference for the consumer. It’s the same with audio equipment. If you go to BOSE and try to read reviews of headphones, some customers will say the bass isn’t quite as strong in these headphones. Different terms mean different things to different consumers and you start wondering what they meant by that.”
Visual reviews appeal to consumers will all levels of technological expertise, said Peker. This inclusive nature boosts customer engagement overall, he noted.
“A customer that leaves a review for us is a much more engaged customer and they’re much more likely to buy from us again,” said Peker. “From that perspective, we take that one step further, allowing them to add pictures. We have four million unique viewers every month, and some customers want their name and review in front of all these people. This helps build loyalty, because uploading the photo can make them feel closer to the brand.”