Understanding Incentivized Reviews

Today’s eCommerce shoppers are looking to understand pretty much everything about a product before they purchase it. And the more reviews you have for a product, the easier it is for your shoppers to manage their expectations.

Our Reviews Consumer Survey found that 85% of shoppers are more likely to purchase products that have anywhere between 50 and 500 reviews. Why? The more reviews your shoppers read, the easier it is for them to determine whether a product is the right fit for them.

To increase the number of submitted reviews, you’ll first need to understand how useful an incentivized review could be.

In this article, you’ll learn about incentivized reviews and the applicable rules and regulations.

What are incentivized reviews?

Incentivized reviews are customer reviews or feedback that are given in exchange for some form of perk, such as discounts, free products, or other rewards.

This practice helps encourage customers to share their opinions and experiences about a product or service. While incentivized reviews can provide valuable insights, there is a potential for bias as reviewers may be influenced by the offered incentives. Many platforms and review systems have guidelines or policies regarding incentivized reviews to maintain transparency and authenticity in customer feedback.

Why incentivize eCommerce reviews?

Reviews play a huge role in the buyer’s journey — besides the product itself, reviews can make or break a purchase as they’re the ultimate deciding factor. Therefore, encouraging shoppers to engage with your brand by sharing their feedback via a product review can help to strengthen your relationship with them. This is especially true in today’s competitive market where many eCommerce brands push to drive customer retention.

When it comes to reviews, sometimes shoppers simply forget to leave one or think of it as a time-consuming task. But if you offer a bit of encouragement as an incentive and create a seamless review collection process, it could benefit both you and your customers - they will receive a reward for sharing their experience and you will have more robust customer feedback to strengthen your brand’s reputation.

What to avoid when incentivizing a review

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), in the United States and the European Union, via Omnibus Directive (EU) 2019/2161 both have regulations in place for both marketers and eCommerce platforms when it comes to collecting reviews from customers.

While offering your customers incentives for submitting feedback be sure to avoid the following;

• Paying shoppers for reviews. In addition to this practice not being aligned with FTC’s regulations, it’s also unethical to pay shoppers for their feedback.
• Adding conditions to any incentives. When you incentivize reviews, you may hope that it’s a positive one, but there’s a chance that it could be negative. Brands should not incentivize reviews under the condition that the reviews be positive.
• Overusing incentives. Offering incentives is a great way to initiate more interactions with your shoppers, but if you overuse them, it could skew your shoppers’ reviews.
• Incentivizing site reviews. To obtain your Google Seller Rating, you are not allowed to offer your customers financial incentives to write reviews of any kind. Google will not count incentivized site reviews as the reviews needed to achieve your rating. To learn more about these requirements, see Seller Rating Partner Requirements

With these regulations in mind, and our experience in the eCommerce world, we put together a few types of incentives brands may want to use next time they ask customers to review their products.

• Offer loyalty points. Not only does this motivate customers to provide feedback, but it also encourages repeat purchases.
• Use discounts or coupons. Our survey revealed that 47% of eCommerce shoppers would leave a product review if they were offered discounts or coupons.
• Get creative with social. Incentivize your shoppers to include photos in their reviews by rewarding them with an opportunity to be featured on your Instagram account.

However you choose to encourage your shoppers to share feedback, make it clear that you’re offering an incentive and explain what that incentive is.

Next steps

Now that you better understand what incentivized reviews are, you can go ahead and mark your reviews.

To learn how to mark your reviews in Yotpo, see Marking Reviews as Incentivized.