A practical checklist for product reviews

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Run through this the next time product reviews comes up.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

The checklist

• Reviews answer the questions your copy avoids
• A few critical reviews make the positive ones believable
• Reply to bad reviews in public, calmly
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

Why it matters

Reviews answer the questions your copy avoids. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The short version

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Three things worth confirming about product reviews before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Reply to bad reviews in public, calmly — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.