In the world of e-commerce, fake reviews have become a major problem. Unscrupulous review platforms allow bogus reviews to be posted, making it difficult for customers to trust the authenticity of reviews. This is where verified reviews come in. A verified review is a review that is collected and vetted by a third-party. When a customer makes a purchase, the third-party site will send them an email asking how their experience went. This guarantees that the review is from an actual customer who made an actual purchase on your site. It’s a badge of proof that most customers need before shopping on a site.
Verified reviews are important because they help differentiate your e-commerce site from the competition. Customers want authenticity, and the authenticity of reviews is the most important factor for consumers to trust the reviews that they read. Trusted third-party platforms saying, “this review is real” is what customers are looking for.
WooCommerce includes a basic “verified owner” option built in. It restricts reviews to only users who have completed a purchase of the item. To activate this feature, log into your WordPress dashboard and navigate to WooCommerce > Settings > Products. Check the box for “Reviews can only be left by verified owners” and save.
To get verified reviews, install a plugin like TrustedSite Reviews. TrustedSite is a new, free plugin that allows you to collect and display unlimited verified reviews. Once you install the plugin, click on the blue “Create Account” button to complete your signup. From here, you will be able to manage all the features of your TrustedSite account.
With TrustedSite, you can set up a reviews request email that automatically goes out to customers when they make a purchase. You can also import old customers’ email addresses into your TrustedSite account and ask them for a review of your store. Bright Local found that “50% of consumers have been asked to leave a review about a business and actually left a review.”
Setting up the request email is a matter of choosing how long after a purchase your customers will get the email, and then adding your logo to the email. It’s all intuitive, and right there in your dashboard. You can upgrade your TrustedSite account for access to a TrustSite badge, a huge amount of display widgets (buttons, gallery, badge, carousel, summary and product stars) and more.
Verified reviews are the bedrock for growth for any new online business. They give skeptical or worried visitors the confidence to become your customers, and act as a kind of word-of-mouth that you can’t buy with advertising. And because plugins on WordPress make them very easy to collect and display, there’s really no reason to not have them on your site.
