Learn more on chances for bargain with or without Buyer Rating.

A recent survey held by the German E-Commerce-Center for Traders (ECC) in association with the German Postal Bank P.O.S. Transact Company reports growth rates up to 38.7 %.
Looking at small and medium sized businesses, German ECC’s project manager Sebastian Baal strongly recommends the use of buyer rating tools.
In the context of this survey, almost 1,000 test purchases were conducted by 200 online shoppers. Visiting online test shops, they were free to choose any product they liked. Some shops received positive buyer ratings, others did not meet the customer’s requests.
According to this, the study detected only 10 % chances for bargain for those shops, not showing any customer reviews. 13.9 % chances for bargain were memeasured at shops displaying positive buyer ratings.

Buyer Ratings to boost new business

The study has detected a high impact of buyer rating on trust and confidence in eCommerce business. Especially for those online shoppers, visiting at first glance and who do not have any detailed information on the shop, do highly bank on buyer ratings and reviews. This also reflects the result of Germany’s GfK survey conducted in September 2009: 75.4 % of all first time visitors found that buyer ratings are very important; also 68.5 % of all visitors choosing prepayment have set high value on positive rating scores and reviews.

Especially for small and medium sized businesses, these studies have clearly proven a positive impact of buyer reviews. Customer reviews appeared to have a rather low bias on a purchase decisions made by test shoppers who could choose among a variety of alternative of shops.

Web shops displaying buyer ratings encountered a chance for bargain of 59.7 % among test shoppers choosing between only two web shops. Web shops displaying buyer ratings encountered a chance for bargain of 17.7 % among test shoppers choosing between four web shops. Taking into account the distinction, buyer ratings rather influence any purchase decision of first time visitors.

Click here to find out more about the Trusted Shops buyer rating.

Learn more about this shop from managing director Marco Schuler.

How would you briefly describe your shop?
In fact, we’re a crazy bunch of people, ready to take the challenge of selling solely these unique sports goods. Due to the fact that we have a narrow range of products, we can surely be called experts on Powerisers Jump aids. Anyone should feel free to contact us with any questions or suggestions on our product, we’re happy to talking to our customers.

When did you launch your online shop?
Our go live was due to January 1, 2006.

Would you call the ‘Powerisers’ shop your fulltime job?
Yes. Currently our staff counts 2 fulltime employees, supported by freelancers on demand, e.g. promotion teams at trade fairs and events.

Do you also run a ‘Powerisers’ store location in addition?
Yes. Our store is located downtown near the station measures 550 sqm: 150 sqm sales floor plus 400 sqm storage area.

What is the impact of Web 2.0 / interactive communication on your marketing strategy?
We care a lot about our buyers’ opinion. In this way, we’re looking at Trusted Shops ‘Buyer Rating’ as being a very strong marketing and research tool.

Recently implemented on our homepage, we are now getting a good idea on our buyers’ opinions and their expectations too. Taking this into account, we are able to deal with any problems just in time. Also, steadily improving our services and our product performance according to our customers’ needs, helps us to keep customers happy, thus loyal.

In addition, we have found our engagement in social networking such as Facebook and Twitter, or our postings at selected online planes, as of being essential to raise awareness for our brand. What you see is what you get: Only visibility and interactive dialogue may establish trust and confidence.

How do you earn your customers’ trust?
We are customer obsessed. Every customer is important to us and we continue working hard to meet his individual needs every single day. Keeping our buyers happy means us being  successful!

What are your preferred marketing channels?
We are using Google Adwords and ebay ad commerce. Currently we are working to integrate affiliate programs, such as affilinet and zanox into our marketing plan.

What is your strategy for customer loyalty?
We believe that attractive promotion deals help us winning over the customer. Also we have established a cost-free newsletter service, providing valuable content on a regular basis.
Yet, simple as that, we strongly believe that keeping our customers happy is the most efficient way to keeping them loyal to our shop!

What features are you using on your web shop yet?
We are currently using online videos showing both, our product features and product practice. Also our websites provide high-quality pictures and flash animated features. This helps us best to promote the unique product features.

Trading in Germany and European mainland markets, did you encounter legal difficulties yet?
Oh yes, yet these problems did rather address brand trademark law rather than our online shop business. Also, mistakes in our legal terms & conditions had to be corrected (which is one of  Trusted Shops member service core competencies, note by author).

What’s your piece of advice to etailers?
Running your online shop successfully means way more effort than just providing a website. First, you got to know your visitor to turn him into a customer. In this way you will establish trust. Second you have to understand and to meet his needs. This guarantees you to make him a happy customer. Third, understanding your customer’s individual demands gets you to offer the best fitting product and service to him (which is the essential to Trusted Shops Buyer Rating, note by author). This makes him a loyal and valuable buyer, keeping your online shop successful and highly efficient.

What is your main source of information on relevant topics in e-Commerce?
Google and Trusted Shops weekly newsletter.

To find out more about this shop go to Powerisers.

Online customer reviews and ratings have a significant influence on the shopping behaviour of consumers buying online.

According to the Deloitte study more than half of all U.S. consumers and 69% of Millennials say that reviews and ratings by other consumers influence their buying decisions more than any other type of online advertising. As a result of the study 51% of the respondents said they had purchased products based on an online recommendation, and 24% said they would like to have an online service that recommends products based on consumers’ recommendations.

An ecommerce persuasion poll, carried out by user experience consultancy, Webcredible, revealed that almost one third (28 per cent) of online shoppers are most likely to be persuaded to make an online purchase by the reputation of the retailer.

Only 50 % of the eretailers use customer reviews

Still, though, only 50% of online retailers use customer reviews on their sites, according to Forrester Research. Those who don’t likely fear what their customers might say. They shouldn’t, according to Forrester, which also found that 25% of online shoppers report that they are unlikely to purchase a product after reading negative reviews, and most don’t take those reviews seriously.
But there is another reason why retailers should consider integrating a system into their online-shops that gives their customers the opportunity to share their service experiences: It can increase their creditability with their customer base overall.

Honest and impartial reviews written by real people enable consumers to choose the right shop for a product or a service and to buy with more confidence.

The Trusted Shops buyer feedback service

In addition to the well known trustmark Trusted Shops is offering a review and rating service where online buyers can provide feedback on transactions, rate online shops in a structured way and leave comments, provided they registered for a Trusted Shops guarantee at checkout.

Shopkeepers can use these unbiased buyer feedbacks to learn what customers liked and disliked, identify potential issues and use these insights to improve the shopping experience.

Click here to learn more about the Buyer Feedbacks by Trusted Shops.

Transaction Rating and Seller Rating

A Trusted Shops Buyer Feedback is comprised of two parts: the Transaction Rating and the Seller Rating.
The Transaction Rating captures how the specific online purchase turned out: positive, neutral or negative. The buyer can also leave a brief comment to explain its choice. With the Seller Rating, the buyer can additionally rate the seller in 4 categories : website, delivery, goods and customer service. A star rating with a scale of 1 to 5 is used for each criterion, with 5 stars being the best rating.

Fig 1. Rating form for the online buyer

Buyer Feedbacks in the Trusted Shops System

Buyer feedbacks are currently displayed in the private member area of the Trusted Shops system only, i.e. online merchants view only their own buyer feedbacks and online buyers can view only their own feedbacks via the Trusted Shops system. None of these feedbacks are made public. This will be possible upon explicit request by the online merchant at a later stage.
Online merchants can identify transaction ratings quickly with the smiley icons displayed in the list of their guaranteed transactions (green for positive, yellow for neutral and red for negative rating) in the Trusted Shops system.
Online merchants can also view their seller ratings including the buyer comments as well as the average seller rating which aggregates all seller ratings of the last 12 months. Shopkeepers have the possibility to leave their own comment on a buyer feedback.

Fig 2. List of seller ratings
The Feedback Profile gives an overview of Transaction Ratings and Seller Ratings.
The positive transaction percentage is calculated as the ratio between the number of positive ratings against the sum of positive and negative ratings in the last 12 months. The transaction rating table provides also the breakdown of the transaction ratings of the last 1, 6 and 12 months.
The average seller rating is calculated as the average of all seller ratings in the last 12 months.

Fig 3. Rating profile: summary of ratings provided

Are you Trusted Shops member?

If you are Trusted Shops member, log into the system today and view the ratings of your online shop!

What’s next? The Buyer Feedback Widget

A special a buyer feedback widget will provide the ability to display shop ratings and buyer feedbacks. The Trusted Shops Buyer Feedback package will be available as upgrade to the Trusted Shops membership soon.
Unbiased buyer feedbacks help both online buyers and sellers to increase customer confidence and shopping experience and therefore complement ideally the Trusted Shops Quality Seal.

Fig 4. Example of Buyer Feedback Widget integration