It's obvious when you come to think about it, when online grocery shoppers select products to put in their basket, a product rating out of five is always more important than the number of reviews, right?
Well, wrong actually and not just wrong occasionally, it's wrong most of the time. From our research of 3,710 online supermarket shoppers we know that when the average ratings for two similar products are different by as much as 0.3 e.g. 4.2 vs 4.5, then the number of reviews is much more important in product choice. Let me give you an example of this:
If you have two very similar products selling online and Product A has an average rating of 4.2 from 30 reviews, while Product B has an average rating of 4.5 from 10 Reviews, then you would think they'd be pretty close in terms of share of choice? Our research shows that in reality, Product A, (the one with the lower rating) is chosen twice as often as Product B. That's right, even though Product B has an obvious rating advantage, shoppers still choose Product A 67.9% of the time.
Increasing the number of reviews you have, regardless of the average ratings, will significantly improve your sales in online supermarkets.
We surveyed members of our regular promotional cash back program Smart Activation about all manner of things related to their attitude and experience of online shopping which included how they view and use supermarket product reviews.
We looked at the question of the rating score out of five vs. the number of reviews in two ways:
> Shoppers ranked in order of importance parts of a mocked up supermarket product review summary
> Shoppers chose between paired alternative combinations of product ratings & reviews for "similar" products.