By Kat Matfield
How would you expect an entry-level product to score in customer reviews compared to a high-end product?
Quality products get high scores – regardless of price
If you assume entry-level products will always get lower ratings than the top-of-the-line alternatives, you’d be wrong. Good quality products get high ratings, whether they’re basic models or high spec class-leaders – but this doesn’t mean that consumers don’t notice or don’t care about the difference between them. In fact, there’s reliable evidence showing that reviews upsell customers to higher-value, higher-spec products.
So why the similar scores?
Consumers have a good understanding of the relationship between quality, value and price. If an inexpensive, entry-level product does the job well enough for the price, it will be scored highly – as highly as a high end model whose premium features and class-leading performance easily justify its price tag. Both products have met the purchaser’s expectations.
The upselling effect of review text
Consumers pay attention to much more than just the top-line score when they’re looking at reviews. Sites which add a content-rich review solution, as opposed to just scores out of 5 or 10, see an increase in the average order value per customer of around 26%.
The differentiation between low and high end products happens in the text of these richer reviews, where purchasers extol the benefits of the advanced features of more expensive models as effectively as any salesperson. Just take a look at the two example reviews below, the first for a high-end product, the second for an entry-level model:
The end result is that when customers read reviews, they spend longer on site, look at more products and end up purchasing more expensive, more sophisticated models. Consumers benefit from a more informed, more considered purchase decision and businesses benefit from greater customer satisfaction and higher order values.