The Online Buying Journey

Marketers are used to talking about the online purchase process as a fun­nel: consumers are driven through the broad opening by ads or other stimulus, whittle down their choices, and then drop out the narrow bottom with a purchase. It’s a very linear way of thinking.

Things are changing…ZMOT happened. ZMOT is that moment when you grab your laptop, mobile phone or some other wired device and start learning about a product or service (or potential boyfriend) you’re thinking about trying or buying. I’m sure you know what I mean — you probably do web searches like this every day. Shoppers don’t always move through a funnel, narrowing choices as they go; at ZMOT, they can actually widen their choices. The more they learn the more options they consider.

71% of online shoppers read reviews; making it the most widely read consumer-generated content. (Forrester)

eCommerce Ratings and Reviews
Ratings and Reviews allows you to enable, encourage, and analyze customer ratings and reviews on your eCommerce website. You can empower your customers to share honest opinions and influence each other to make more informed and rewarding purchase decisions. You benefit by creating a credible and reliable customer-to-customer community without having to delve into complex IT work or the laborious process of content moderation.

58% of online shoppers prefer sites that feature ratings and reviews. (Marketing Sherpa)

Business Benefits

• Engagement of your most loyal, active and influential customers and the ability to leverage their input to drive overall conversion
• High buyer confidence and lower return rates
• Moderated consumer-generated content that can be leveraged on the site and in multi-channel marketing assets, product development activities, and customer support
• Positive brand awareness, as average product rating is over 4.3 out of 5 stars!
• Increased natural search traffic via keyword-rich consumer-generated review content

Shoppers who read reviews had a 21% higher purchase satisfaction and an 18% higher loyalty score versus other survey respondents. (Fore See Results)

SEO Benefits

To help unlock the substantial amount of search engine optimization (SEO) potential that is associated with user-generated content (UGC), BazaarVoice includes Smart SEO Basic as a standard feature. Smart SEO is the next-generation version of Search Voice Inline (SVI), the method that was used previously to index UGC on product pages. By using a patent-pending combination of client- and server-side technologies, Smart SEO increases the amount and freshness of rich content that resides on the product and category pages of your website.

Who is BazaarVoice?

Along with key industry partners, BazaarVoice is building next generation social commerce applications that deliver immediate success by minimizing implementation risk and maximizing the strategic impact of consumer-generated content.