Product reviews: the questions we get asked most

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. The questions about product reviews that come up most often on our calls.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Do we need to care about this?

Reviews answer the questions your copy avoids. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here.

How do we know it is working?

Reply to bad reviews in public, calmly. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

How to tell if yours is fine

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Three things worth confirming about product reviews before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A few critical reviews make the positive ones believable — 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.