Which Review Tool is Right for You? The Top eCommerce Site and Product Review Tools
When you’re trying to convert potential customers, a glowing review of your eCommerce site and products serves as some of the best data you can leverage. Few things help close the sale like seeing others rate and describe their shopping experience, as it helps affirm credibility and instill confidence that your customers are happy doing business with you.
However, there are myriad review tools you can integrate with your Adobe Commerce / Magento storefront, making it difficult to determine which is right for your eCommerce business.
To help, we’ve put together a review tool guide and comparison of the most popular site and product review tools:
- Yotpo
- ResellerReviews
- ShopperApproved
- Bazaarvoice
- Adobe Commerce / Magento's Default Tool
Review Tool Similarities—Difficult to Differentiate
One of the major difficulties in choosing which review tool to integrate with your eCommerce site is that many offer very similar functionality and features. Common capabilities include:
- Ratings provided via “rich snippets” on search engine results and paid ads
- Recommendations and suggestions based on your highest rated products
- Product-page questions and answers provided by you and your customer community
- Social media integration
- Loyalty and rewards program integration
- Review prompts (e.g., post-purchase, predefined descriptors)
- Back-end management (e.g., review moderation, responses, “sentiment analysis”)
eCommerce data demonstrates that these various points throughout the customer journey are some of the most impactful for driving conversion rates. As a result, review tools have adapted to help you reinforce your brand and your offerings’ quality, especially throughout marketing, site navigation, checkout, and post-purchase relationship building.
Given their broadly similar capabilities, our guide highlights their standout differences and also refers to the tools’ pages on Google’s G2 peer-to-peer software review platform to better compare them.
User-Generated Content (UGC) and Avoiding Negative Reviews
Customer reviews fall under the umbrella of “user-generated content” (UGC), which includes any text, images, video, or other media that people share on your site or other platforms. As a result, UGC provides substantial third-party advocacy to help convert more customers.
But beyond instilling confidence, UGC also helps better ensure happy customers to begin with.
When shoppers can refer to star ratings, fit descriptions, and videos of people using your products, they can more easily select the products and configurations (e.g., sizing) that best match what they’re looking for. Meeting their expectations inherently cuts down on potential complaints, which is crucial when it takes roughly 40 positive customer experiences to recover from a bad review.
Top Review Tool #1: Yotpo and its On-Page Widgets
Yotpo’s Platform
Yotpo’s review platform comprises four different packages that may be purchased all together, in partial bundles, or individually:
- SMSBump – Enables you to engage customers via SMS messaging campaign building, A/B testing, and analytics—however, note that individual messages for this and other review tools do carry a separate cost
- Loyalty and Referrals – Supports a rewards program (or integrates with an existing one) to provide incentives for customers to leave more reviews and upload UGC
- Reviews – Provides most of Yotpo’s widgets and Google integration functionality for on-page and search engine review placement
- Visual UGC – Display images and videos from curated galleries, direct uploads, and manage social promotions.
Yotpo Pricing
The full Yotpo plan or any bundles rely on customized pricing. The individual tools are provided via tiered monthly plans that offer some portion of the functionality described above:
-
SMSBump:
Free
Growth – $19
Prime – $59
Premium – Custom pricing
Enterprise – Custom pricing
-
Loyalty and Referrals:
Free
Growth – $29
Prime – $249
Platinum – Custom pricing
Enterprise – Custom pricing
-
Reviews
Free
Growth – $15
Prime – $119
Premium – Custom pricing
Enterprise – Custom pricing
-
Visual UGC
Free
Growth – $9
Premium – Custom pricing
Enterprise – Custom pricing
eCommerce operators should take advantage of the review tools offering free plans, like Yotpo, to explore their functionality and help find which one provides their optimal solution.
Yotpo User Rating
171 G2 users have given Yotpo’s platform a 4.3-star average rating (out of 5).
Top Review Tool #2: ResellerRatings and Syndicated Ads
One of the oldest online review platforms available, ResellerRatings has been facilitating customer feedback since 1996. In that time, ResellerRatings has created the largest syndication network for review platforms, which is amplified by partnerships with Google and Bing.
Search syndication allows your brand to advertise on third-party websites in addition to search engine results pages. If your eCommerce strategy involves casting the widest net possible around the internet, ResellerRatings might be the best choice for your review platform.
ResellerRatings Platform and Pricing
ResellerRatings’ platform is provided to eCommerce operators via five pricing tiers that increasingly offer access to features:
- Free
- Growth
- Pro
- Full Suite
- Enterprise/Local
All plans above Free are listed with custom pricing that will require a scheduled demo or call for more information.
Taking advantage of ResellerRatings’ syndication network requires at least the Pro plan’s access to product reviews, existing review imports, and rich Google snippets. With the Growth plan, eCommerce operators can only promote Google and Bing seller ratings. Also notable, community-based questions and visual UGC are not supported unless the Full Suite plan is purchased.
ResellerRatings User Rating
56 G2 users have given ResellerRatings’ platform a 4.4-star average rating (out of 5).
Top Review Tool #3: Shopper Approved and Best “All-Around”
Shopper Approved is one of the platforms that has begun dominating eCommerce ratings due to its wide-ranging functionality across all tiers. This is partly enabled by three-day review resolution, as well as Google and Youtube video syndication is made available for all plans.
Review resolution is a substantial benefit of Shopper Approved’s platform, as it allows eCommerce operators to interact with customers or dispute their comments. Other tools provide similar back-end management, but eCommerce businesses are given three days to manage a review before it’s published—the longest amount of time for the tools in this guide. The benefits of resolution are two-fold:
- Over half of customers expect a business’ reply to negative comments within three days.
- 90% of shoppers will ignore a bad review if they believe the business provided a good response.
Some platforms allow you to curate the reviews you display, which hides the bad ones from shoppers. However, demonstrating your responsiveness and customer support when responding to poor comments and criticism recovers the customer relationship and further increases shoppers’ confidence that any issues will be handled to their satisfaction.
“Review Destinations”
For eCommerce operators who implement the top tier Shopper Approved plan, the most substantial benefit provided by the platform is the “Review Destinations” functionality. This allows you to import a portion of your reviews onto third-party rating sites.
Instead of hoping your customers will share positive experiences on other sites, you can preemptively add favorable reviews to increase your average ratings across the internet.
Shopper Approved’s Platform and Pricing
Shopper Approved offers its platform via four monthly pricing tiers:
- Rating & Review Optimizer – $124
- Rating & Review Optimizer Pro – $199
- The Traffic & Conversion Stack – $294
- Ultimate Traffic & Conversion Stack – $449
Although Shopper Approved doesn’t offer a free plan, eCommerce operators can evaluate the platform during a 45-day free trial.
Shopper Approved User Rating
107 G2 users have given Shopper Approved’s platform a 4.9-star average rating (out of 5), making it the highest-rated platform on the site covered in our guide.
Top Review Tool #4: BazaarVoice for Visual UGC and Social Promotion
Bazaarvoice’s platform specializes in promoting image and video UGC that reviews your eCommerce brand and offerings, particularly on social media platforms. If your business relies on social promotion, as many direct-to-consumer (D2C) businesses do, you can leverage Bazaarvoice to grow your presence and generate more traffic to your digital storefront.
Bazaarvoice even allows eCommerce operators to provide UGC on third-party marketplace sites like Amazon to help boost your conversions.
Influenster and Product Sampling
To expand their UGC and social media optimization capabilities, Bazaarvoice acquired Influenster. This platform enables them to connect better with social media influencers who better enable consumers’ product discovery, reviewing and promoting what they’re provided as samples.
To best leverage this acquisition, Bazaarvoice offers a “Sampling” service to help boost your reviews. If you’re releasing a new product, you can even provide limited samples so that you already have reviews displayed for its official launch. Reviewed samples can also be used to refresh your ratings with more recency.
Bazaarvoice Pricing
Bazaarvoice doesn’t provide public pricing, so eCommerce operators will need to contact them about a free trial and to set up a demo.
Bazaarvoice User Rating
281 G2 users have given Bazaarvoice’s platform a 4.3-star average rating (out of 5).
Top Review Tool #5: Commerce Product Reviews
To bolster your product pages with reviews, you don’t need to integrate—or pay—for another platform to access basic functionality. Adobe Commerce / Magento provides configurable product reviews and on-page moderation.
Adobe’s native review functionality lets customers provide written reviews and ratings on a 5-star scale. The default star ratings are for quality, price, and value, but store owners can also add their own custom options.
The native review functionality is enhanced with simple back-end management to moderate published reviews. This allows eCommerce operators to prevent any reviews that aren’t acceptable for public display from being published.
eCommerce businesses should note that Commerce Product Reviews are enabled by default but must be configured for optimal functionality.
The Best Integrations, Whichever eCommerce Tools You Choose
Regardless of which review tools or other platforms you’d like to integrate with your eCommerce system, partnering with DotcomWeavers will ensure seamless functionality.
For over 14 years, we’ve developed custom eCommerce integrations for Adobe Commerce / Magento that our clients’ thriving digital storefronts rely on.
Set up your free consultation today to discuss your eCommerce goals or challenges with our Adobe-lauded integration experts!
