E-commerce, online trading and marketplaces have become increasingly popular over the past decade. Sales in online commerce, boosted by the strong upward trend, have continuously increased every year since 2000. Especially, the pandemic has shown many companies how important online retail and the marketplace world are. Retailer and direct-to-consumer sales (D2C) are now playing a major role in many companies. This goes hand in hand with bazaarvoice!
Reviews and Ratings on Platforms & Web Shops – The Challenge for D2C & Retail
Along with the triumph of e-commerce, the customer experience on marketplaces and online stores is becoming increasingly important. To a large extent, this consists of usability, the user experience, support and advice during the entire customer journey, and the product itself. Through reviews, ratings, and questions, customers share their experiences and look for interaction.
The challenge in this context is that the reviews are widely spread across a variety of online stores and marketplaces on the Internet. Especially for a manufacturer or a brand, customer reviews on marketplaces are thus often “lost” because they cannot be displayed on the company’s web shop. This is not ideal, as reviews contribute significantly to the purchase decision. Therefore, a Bazaarvoice connection can remedy this in various ways.
Bazaarvoice for D2C and Retailer – What is Bazaarvoice?
Many Bazaarvoice solutions are used by a huge number of brands and merchants to integrate user-generated content into their own brand online stores in the form of ratings, reviews, questions, or photographs (D2C). Bazaarvoice’s “Conversations” module is also applied to online stores of retailers who sell multiple brands. Its’ extensive global retail, social network, search services, product-enthusiast community, and enterprise-level technology provide brands and retailers with the tools they need to create smarter shopping experiences across the entire customer journey.
In this guide, we take a closer look at the Bazaarvoice Connections and Conversions tools, as they are particularly interesting for D2C and retailers.
Bazaarvoice Connections – Bazaarvoice for D2C
Nowadays, long-term success in e-commerce is strongly related to the customer experience in online marketplaces. Successful companies are those who are available to both, potential and existing customers on many channels and guide them along their customer journey. This works best by providing and embracing user-generated content in online stores. More specifically, it involves ratings, customer reviews, and questions from interested customers or customers about specific products.
This is where Connections can help. Connections make it possible to answer and manage customer questions and opinions on the company’s website. As the consulting and support function has shifted heavily to digital platforms in recent years, it is enormously important to help these customers navigate and support them in their needs.
Bazaarvoice Conversations – Bazaarvoice for Retailers
In addition to the offer for D2C brands or manufacturers with their web shop, Bazaarvoice also offers the embedding of User Generated Content (UGC) for online retailers who sell several brands in their stores with the “Conversations” module. This means that prospective customers or buyers can also submit reviews on the merchant’s product detail page or read existing reviews from other buyers.
Especially in Europe and the U.S., Bazaarvoice is very widely used as a tool for retailers and thus offers a far-reaching network of manufacturers and retailers. By the way, the merchant (retailer) or manufacturer can also edit individual customer votes in the backend. However, the extent can vary from package to package.
Review Syndication Guide
Customer testimonials such as reviews are often distributed across a wide variety of platforms. The challenge is to display this collection of review sources in one’s brand web shop or platform of choice to display as many meaningful reviews and therefore social proof as possible. Because: Nothing attracts buyers more than positive reviews, and nothing deters more than negative reviews. Except for perhaps no review at all.
That is exactly what Review Syndication is for. Review Syndication aims to optimize the display of user-generated content so that reviews, for example, are displayed wherever they are wanted. For example, reviews can be distributed from one website to several other websites. From one’s web store to the marketplaces or online stores of other retailers, since Bazaarvoice for D2C and Bazaarvoice for Retailers offer a wide range of opportunities.
Usually, the review generation process starts with the manufacturer itself. The brand itself or service providers ensure that customers write new reviews about their products. This can happen through a lot of tools, such as social media or after-sales newsletters, through which customers are asked to submit a review. The customer testimonials gathered in this way are then aggregated and distributed to the desired websites. Through this synergistic effect of the network of web stores and marketplaces with reviews, it is possible to reach significantly more consumers.
Review Management with gominga and Bazaarvoice
The review management solution of gominga covers all relevant e-commerce platforms worldwide in the context of online reviews, ratings, and questions. Many of these e-commerce platforms use Bazaarvoice Connections for their own Brand Webshops (D2C) and Bazaarvoice Conversations for merchants and their online stores or marketplaces. In addition, big players like Amazon have of course developed their own rating functions. gominga therefore, offers all customers to also manage reviews from Bazaarvoice, due to the widespread use of it. Here we are talking about reviews, ratings, and questions on D2C stores as well as on retailer sites and marketplaces.
With the gominga Review Management Software, all reviews accumulated through Bazaarvoice can be centrally managed, analyzed, and processed. This makes it easy to see which product is the customer’s favorite, where there are weak points, what exactly these weak points or problems are, and how they can be fixed. It is also helpful to see which channels generate the most reviews.
You are using the Bazaarvoice solution for D2C or the Bazaarvoice solution for Retailer and would like to finally get an overview of the user-generated content of your customers?
More about review management with gominga
Learn more about how the gominga review manager can help your brand delight shoppers and create a better customer journey across every channel. Or request a demo here.