Consumers read and heed online reviews, suggests a new survey commissioned by consulting firm Deloitte & Touche LLP. And the experience of pet retailer Petco Animal Supplies Inc. backs up that conclusion.
The Deloitte study found that 62% of respondents said they read consumer-written product reviews online. Of those, 82% said those reviews directly influenced their buying decisions and 69% passed reviews on to family and friends.
The results were consistent across most age groups. For instance, 57.6% of those aged 17-21 said they had ever read an online consumer-written review, compared with 68.4% of those 22-29, 65.5% for those 30-44 and 63.2% of those 45-60. That response rate dropped off to 51.8% for those 61-74. In every age group from 17 to 74, at least 97.8% rated consumer reviews as credible, dropping to 93.3% for those 75 and older. The survey of 3,331 consumers over age 16 was conducted online from Aug. 28 to Sept. 6.
One retailer that has tracked the impact of online reviews is Petco, which added customer-written reviews to its site in October 2005, using technology from Bazaarvoice. The retailer has used Coremetrics’ system to analyze the results.
The first e-mail Petco sent out with its ratings—using five paws to indicate a top-rated item—had click-through rate five times normal. Customers who opened the message clicked on it more than three times, suggesting they were going back and forth between the e-mail and the links it contained to products that had achieved ratings of at least 4.5 paws.
Petco, No. 183 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, has since found that visitors who navigate to pages with top-rated products convert at a 50% higher rate than others, spending 60% more than those who do not browse that category. In addition, the retailer has discovered this year that products with 1 to 5 reviews are returned 135% more often than those with 50 to 100.
“Consumers are highly influenced by the experience of other consumers—far more than they are by marketing professionals,” says John Lazarchic, vice president of e-commerce at Petco.
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