What helps drive sales for an Ecommerce site? Reviews! Ebay and Amazon built their platform based on reviews. Reviews are a big factor in their ranking algorithm. Think about it. When you’re on Amazon, do you hesitate to buy products that have little to no reviews? I sure hesitate.
When a company has a low amount of reviews, they need to drop their price in order to move inventory. As reviews are collected, assuming they are good reviews, a seller can gradually increase their prices.
In this article, we will be talking about getting Google Seller Ratings for ecommerce websites and how they boost sales.
Google has approved 30 companies to participate in their Seller Rating program. The objective for these companies is to gather reviews and display them on Google CPC text ads.
In addition for eCommerce companies, Seller Ratings can show in the organic section of Google Shopping! Want free traffic coming to your ecommerce site? Then you’ll want to focus on gathering as many seller ratings as possible.
Now that you know what Google Seller Ratings are, let’s talk about how you can actually get them.
As mentioned above, there are 30 companies that are authorized by Google to syndicate your seller ratings into Google. Think of seller ratings as company ratings. These ratings are about your company, not about a specific product (we’ll talk about Google Product Ratings later).Many of the 30 companies are non-English speaking companies. Pricing is all over the place, but in the end the marketer or owner of the ecommerce site wants to automate and display the reviews on Google and their website.
Top 5 Seller Ratings Companies
In our experience, the top 5 companies that get Google Seller Ratings are
Shopper Approved – Shopper Approved is great for small to mid-sized companies. They have a calculator coming out soon where you’ll be able to get instant pricing based on what you need. For instance, if you get 100 orders per month vs 10,000 orders, the pricing will change. Shopper Approved is based out of Ogden, Utah and have been part of Google’s Seller Rating program since at least 2012. They will be around for the foreseeable future.
Shopper approved is great for small to mid-sized ecommerce companies.
Verified Reviews – Verified Reviews has a few locations. The main one is in France and the other main one is in Manhattan, NY. The reason this is important is that if something goes wrong, you’ll want to be able to talk to someone during your work hours.
Verified Reviews is great for small to mid-sized companies.
TrustPilot – TrustPilot is probably the biggest company of all the companies listed on Google’s seller rating program. These guys are fit for large well-established ecommerce companies. They’ll typically be more expensive than the others. One thing you have to watch out for is how much you’re paying per review. I call it Cost-per-Review.
TrustPilot is great for mid to large-sized ecommerce companies.
SiteJabber – Sitejabber is the newest company to be added to Google’s list. The only reason Sitejabber made this list is because they have been around since 2008. They are a reputable company and we’re surprised they are barely making Google’s list. Sitejabber starts at around $199/mo, but you can only send out 500 review requests per month. If your ecommerce site does more than 1500 transactions per month, you’ll have to get onto the Enterprise plan.
Sitejabber is good for mid to large sized companies. I don’t think they are optimal for the smaller ecommerce sites because of their pricing.
Yotpo – Yotpo is a good company and has a lot of outside funding. In addition to seller ratings, they have many other options that can help your ecommerce. Yotpo is the most expensive of the companies on Google list. Make sure that you’re not paying for things that you won’t be using. In our experience, most ecommerce sites will only want to gather reviews and have them shown on Google CPC text ads and Google Shopping (the free version). Yotpo has stuff like Loyalty Rewards programs. This is great if you have a site where people come back over and over again. If most of your sales are one-off sales, don’t get upsold into their other programs. Yotpo’ pricing starts at around $700 per month; and that’s for a small company!
Yotpo is great for large ecommerce companies.
There’s actually one more company that’s not on that list of 30. It’s Google Customer Reviews. Google has its own platform where you don’t have to pay a 3rd party review aggregator. However, you’ll need to hire a competent programmer to integrate your website with Google Customer Reviews platform. There’s also limitations since there’s no access to a dashboard.
Google Customer Reviews can be great for small companies that can afford a programmer to integrate it into their ecommerce software. Mid-sized and large companies are a great fit for Google Customer Reviews. The problem that we foresee is that anything Google makes a change, you’ll have to hire the programmer to make changes. That can get expensive.
In the end, Google Customer Reviews may actually be more expensive than many of the other companies because you’re going to pay a programmer around $10,000 to hook this up. Try to find a paid plugin. It may shave off $1000s.
Now that we’ve talked about Google Seller Ratings, it’s time to briefly talk about Google Product Ratings.
Google Product Ratings
If you are using Google Shopping Product Listing Ads (the Sponsored Ads), you’ll want to look at Shopper Approved, Verified Reviews, TrustPilot or Yotpo. Sitejabber isn’t authorized to syndicate product reviews into Google Shopping at this point.
Below is a snapshot of what Seller Ratings (on the CPC text ads) and Product Ratings (on the right hand site) look like. Remember at the beginning of the article we asked, “When you’re on Amazon, do you hesitate to buy products that have little to no reviews?” Google Product Ratings will help convert more sales. These reviews show directly on your product pages.
If you are using Google Shopping Product Listing Ads (the Sponsored Ads), you’ll want to look at Shopper Approved, Verified Reviews, TrustPilot or Yotpo. Sitejabber isn’t authorized to syndicate product reviews into Google Shopping at this point.
Below is a snapshot of what Seller Ratings (on the CPC text ads) and Product Ratings (on the right hand site) look like. Remember at the beginning of the article we asked, “When you’re on Amazon, do you hesitate to buy products that have little to no reviews?” Google Product Ratings will help convert more sales. These reviews show directly on your product pages.
Conclusion
If you have a small ecommerce site doing less than 5000 transactions per month, look into Shopper Approved or Verified Reviews.
If your site is doing 5000+ transactions per month, look into TrustPilot and SiteJabber.
if your site is doing 10000+ transactions per month, look into Yotpo.
If you’re marketing an ecommerce site, you should look into Facebook Retargeting. It’s a service that we offer. Having a Facebook retargeting strategy can be very profitable since most people do not make a purchase the first time they visit your website. Contact us if you’re interested.
