Consumer Reviews: The Magic Ingredient of E-Commerce?

I just flew back from the Shop.org event in New York (and boy are my arms....)

I moderated a panel about amplifying word of mouth. Brett from BazaarVoice was on. They are doing some pretty interesting stuff over there. Essentially, there's is a hosted solution that allows you to put consumer reviews onto your site. They do some great stuff with it as well, like make those reviews crawlable and feed-ready, so the content being created for your site does double-duty for SEO efforts.

The thing that really struck me, though, was the number of data points that he provided where the simple inclusion of consumer reviews boosted pretty much every e-commerce metric worth considering: open-rates for email, click-throughs, purchases, purchase size, etc. I'm probably over-estimating, but it is clear that adding reviews in pretty simply improves the performance of your store.

I asked him why that could possibly be and he gave a great answer. I can't transcribe it, but it's clear: when you see a rating on a site, for a product, it is clear that someone else has already done the decision-making work for you. Reviews help to immediately winnow consideration sets down to a managable size. It's the e-commerce value proposition itself: make decisions quickly.