A short guide to product reviews

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Everything we would tell a client about product reviews in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Why this earns attention

Reviews answer the questions your copy avoids. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

How to approach it

A few critical reviews make the positive ones believable. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

The mistakes we see most

Reply to bad reviews in public, calmly. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• Reviews answer the questions your copy avoids — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.