It's common for your favourite e-commerce website to have reviews of products. In fact, consumers are increasingly using reviews and other user-generated content to make their purchase decisions. As a result, social commerce has become a critical asset to e-commerce.
The travel industry is leading the way in technology innovation with travel publication TTG hosting a virtual conference this week.
It had all the benefits of a travel conference but instead it was offered to you from the comfort of your computer chair. It had all the elements of a typical event - presentations, debate, networking, exhibitors and attendees.
The TTG site imitated real life (complete with city scape and fancy cars) visually and fell into the hands of convenience and of course there was no cost involved in attending.
Social commerce tools such as ratings and reviews pave the way for three-way communication allowing brands to interact with consumers and vice-versa and also allowing consumers to share info with each other. If implemented and executed properly, the results are astounding, but failure to do things right in the first place can leave you wondering where your investment has gone.
One of the fundamental principles of social commerce – in whatever form – is that it only works for businesses if it works for consumers.
Reviews, recommendations and other social commerce tools are only able to increase revenue for businesses because they’re helpful for consumers, giving them more information and more confidence in a vendor or product. And this can only happen if these social tools are carefully designed to work well for consumers, offer the right features and be as easy to use as possible.
We recently started collecting reviews and social content in our 18th country. With thousands of reviews collected every week across our network, in more than a dozen languages, we’re well placed to observe some interesting trends in international review culture.
We’ve already looked at which nationalities tend to turn the air blue when they’re unhappy with a purchase. But useful insights can be drawn from a much simpler analysis: how long are reviews across Europe?
It might be hard to believe, but bad reviews can be good for business. We've been digging into the data around the impact of displaying bad reviews on your website, and we've discovered some remarkable conclusions.
The surprising truth is that bad reviews have a variety of business benefits. Most significantly – and most surprisingly – they increase conversion rates: consumers who deliberately seek out bad reviews convert 67% more often than normal shoppers.
We're very pleased to see that our new partner GetItNow.gr has won an award for the best use of technology for customer service.
Social commerce is starting to take off in Greece, with forward-thinking retailers integrating consumer opinions into their ecommerce sites. That's why we're glad to be working with GetItNow.gr. GetItNow is the country's largest pure-play online retailer, and they've just launched iPhone/iPad apps to extend their multichannel reach.
Today sees the launch of Best Buy's new mobile site. It's great to see a major retailer building a mobile site that rivals the shopping experience on their main site.
With 38% of people already using their mobiles as a shopping tool - and the number purchasing through mobiles steadily increasing - Best Buy have timed this launch perfectly to mirror changing consumer habits.
The experts have spoken, and the data backs them up: user-generated social commerce content can be a fantastic SEO asset.
But - and this is a big 'but' - reviews and other social content will only help your SEO if search engines can see it.
This sounds common sense, but far too many people assume that anything users can see will be seen and valued by search engines. Sadly, it's not that simple.
Social commerce content has the potential to be a powerful tool to improve SEO for ecommerce. But not all social commerce tools are created equal and not all have the features necessary to help you with traffic and search engine rankings.
Here are the 3 key considerations when adding social content (like user reviews or consumer Q&A) to your site.