Social Commerce Explained: Product Ratings, Products Reviews, and Comments

Social commerce is all about customers engaging each other helping online stores and webshops sell more by leveraging the high degree of credibility inherent in personal recommendations and getting the word out to a wider audience. Social commerce is available in many guises: At Ucommerce we tend to think about it as internal- and external social commerce.

Reviews, Ratings, and Comments

The very first step in adopting social commerce is to enable customers to post reviews. As such we’re dealing with internal social commerce as everything happens in the webshop and doesn’t involve interaction with sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Even in online stores stores with product lines changing frequently there’s value to adding reviews to products as customers tend to skip past product information and dive straight into the user generated content to see whether or not a product is worth any further the attention.

Social commerce is many things to many people, but in the end a good place to start is by enabling user generated content like ratings, reviews, and comments on your e-commerce site to increase conversion rates.

Keep in mind that while user generated content will help sell more there are caveats associated with it.

It’s important to ensure that only proper content makes it onto your site either by using an approval workflow like the one previously described, by requiring user login to be able to review, or by letting customers report abuse.