Product reviews for small teams

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Most advice about product reviews assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

What to keep

Reviews answer the questions your copy avoids. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

The practical version

Reply to bad reviews in public, calmly. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What this looks like day to day

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. 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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.