No fish story: Customer reviews reel in higher sales at BassPro.com

Bass Pro Shops has significantly increased conversions on BassPro.com since featuring ratings and reviews from customers on the site. Bass Pro Shops, No. 77 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide to Retail Web Sites, found that shoppers who browsed the site’s new “Top Rated Products” page had a 59% higher conversion rate than the site average and spent 16% more per order than other browsers.

The new feature, using hosted technology from provider Bazaarvoice, features the product rated most highly by customers in categories such as fishing and hunting. “By placing our community’s authentic opinions at the center of our merchandising process, we were able to drive a significant boost in conversion and post-purchase satisfaction,” says David Seifert, director of operations, direct marketing.

Services from Bazaarvoice, which includes community management services, analytics and syndication in addition to hosted technology to capture and post customer reviews on the site, allow customers of Bass Pro Shops to rate and review any of the 75,000 products on the site. Based on the customer reviews, Bass Pro has not only created Top Rated Products as a discrete browseable category on the site, but also has analyzed the content of those reviews to identify and promote top-selling products and address underlying issues.

Bass Pro expects to expand on its initial implementation in coming months by making access to the Top Rated Products page easier, by incorporating Top Rated Products as a filter for search results, and adding to the reviews a feature from Bazaarvoice that displays a star-rating graphic for reviewed products.