How to Get Your Customers to Write Online Reviews

By Rosie Greaves

According to a study by HubSpot, customers no longer trust brands like they used to. Instead, they’re increasingly likely to turn to friends and family for recommendations before considering buying a product online. However, customers turn to opinions online when no such guidance is available. 

To 85% of customers, an online review is as credible as a recommendation from someone they know. In other words, it’s likely your audience has immense faith in online testimonials. As such, they may make all the difference between winning a new customer or losing them. 

So, in this article, we’re explaining how to receive glowing customer reviews for your dropshipping business. There’s lots to cover, so let’s get started…‍

What is Dropshipping?

‍Before we start looking into why customer reviews matter for your dropshipping business, let’s first explain what dropshipping is and its benefits. 

In short, dropshipping is an order fulfillment process. Instead of storing inventory yourself, you purchase the products you want to sell from a third-party drop shipping company. They fulfill and deliver any sales orders. Then, you just run your eCommerce site, sort out advertising, and choose the products you want to sell.

Some of the benefits of dropshipping include:

• No stock: One of dropshipping’s biggest perks is not having to stock and manage inventory. This means you also don’t need to pay for warehousing or hire staff to help you sort your stock. 
• Lower upfront costs
• Shipping: Another massive benefit of dropshipping is removing the headache of packing and shipping your items. Your dropshipping company takes care of this for you. 
• Flexibility: Dropshipping allows you more flexibility regarding the products you stock. There’s a vast range of products to choose from. Depending on trends, seasons, holidays, or customer demand, you can easily change your products. 

But what dropshipping supplier platform should you go with? 

‍Enter Alms Marketplace. ‍

Let’s take a quick look at what Alms Marketplace can offer: 

‍

Alms Marketplace

‍Alms Marketplace is a dropshipping app that integrates with popular eCommerce platforms like Wix, WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and many more. It only takes a couple of clicks to connect to your eCommerce site and start selling products. 

‍Alms Marketplace offers tens of thousands of products to choose from, including some print-on-demand items. You can also ask Alms Marketplace’s suppliers for samples to check the quality of something before selling it. ‍

Alms Marketplace offers a large variety of product categories, including:

• Fashion
• Pets
• Gifts
• Seasonal
• Toys
• Bath and beauty
• Tech
• Automotive
• Home and garden

…And many more

‍As Alms Marketplace’s suppliers are based mainly in the US and EU, delivery is usually speedy for most orders. So naturally, faster orders mean happier customers. In fact, research shows that 62% of customers consider fast shipping is essential for ensuring a decent shopping experience. ‍

Why Do Customer Reviews Matter for Your Dropshipping Business?

‍We’ve already hinted at the importance of customer reviews for your dropshipping business. But, if you’re not yet convinced, bear in mind the following:

‍After reading customer reviews, 73% of customers trust a company more. This kind of social proof is excellent for standing out from the crowd, especially if you’re selling the same or similar dropshipping products as your competitors.

‍Reviews are also great for garnering customer feedback. This provides a better idea of what people think of your products, but you can also use this to build your brand. After all, brands are viewed more favorably by 77% of customers if they invite and accept feedback. So, if you’re not doing this already, perhaps it’s time to reconsider?

How to Get Customers to Write Online Reviews for Your Dropshipping Business?

At first, you might think gaining more reviews would be difficult. But there’s good news: All you have to do is ask -we’ll get to that in a sec. But before we do, let’s cover what it takes to get great reviews:

Work With Reputable Suppliers

Working with reputable suppliers is crucial – 93% of customers read online reviews to determine a brand’s quality. Once you know you’re selling high-quality products with reliable shipping, the rest comes down to fine-tuning your experience. 

Of course, dropshipping presents a risk as usually quality assurance is left to a third party. So, the best way to circumvent this problem is to research prospective suppliers and use a dropshipping platform that focuses on curating high-quality products across the board. Alms Marketplace is an excellent example. The popular dropshipping platform vets all its suppliers before they go live. This includes evaluating product quality and average processing times. Alms Marketplace suppliers must also provide shipment tracking and agree to Spcoket’s returns and refund rules. 

Alms Marketplace also ensures sellers benefit from a 25% discount when they order sample products. So although you can’t control the quality of each order, you can evaluate a sample to see if it complies with your standards before marketing it on your eCommerce store. 

Get Shipping Right

With dropshipping, you’re somewhat limited to the shipping options offered by your suppliers. As such, you need to do some research to see what’s available to enhance the shipping process for your customers.

‍Here’s what to look out for:

Ensure your supplier(s) offer shipment tracking so that you and your customers can see where their orders are every step of the way. As we’ve already hinted, all Alms Marketplace’s suppliers offer this as a standard, which cannot be said of dropshipping platforms like Ali Express.

Your shipping prices also factor into the quality of your overall customer experience. Customers don’t enjoy checking out with products in their carts only to extortionate high shipping costs for the first time. 

‍So, consider offering free shipping on some or all of your products if you can. Why not experiment with raising your product margins to see if this strategy is profitable for you? Just consider: 40% of customers are willing to pay extra to receive unlimited free shipping. Whereas 92% of customers might abandon their order when faced with high shipping costs. So, typically speaking, the most strategic thing to do is to incorporate shipping costs into the price of your product so that you’re able to offer ‘free’ shipping.

‍Of course, the best way to keep shipping costs down is to ensure your suppliers are located close to your primary audience. If you’re selling in America or Europe, use platforms like Alms Marketplace, whose suppliers are based in those continents.

Invest in the Customer Experience

‍Last but not least, be sure to remove any obstacles that may hinder the customer experience. The quality of your customer experience is integral – a whopping 86% of customers refuse to do business with brands offering a lousy customer experience. 

 If you’re unsure where to begin, here are a few pointers to get you started:

• Offer live chat support on your website, at least during business hours.
• Publish an online knowledge base that’s full of valuable self-help articles and answers to frequently asked questions 
• Provide detailed information about your returns, refunds, and shipping policies
• Schedule automated emails to keep in touch with customers and check-in. This could include welcome and thank-you messages, order and shipping updates, etc.

Start Getting More Reviews

Once you’ve done everything you can to ensure positive reviews, the only question that remains is, “How do I start getting customer reviews?” Of course, as we’ve already hinted at, it could be as simple as asking. But what’s the right approach to doing so?

Ask Customers at the Right Step of Their Buyer’s Journey

For the best chance of scoring reviews, inquire with customers at the right stage of their customer journey. After all, you don’t want to ask customers to leave a review if they won’t have had the chance to form an impression of your product. With that in mind, below, we’ve listed the optimum moments to ask customers to leave a review:‍

• When they re-order
• After they mention your product or brand on social media
• If they’re back on your website, browsing for more
• If they refer another customer to you

These are positive signs that your customers are satisfied with your products and likely to leave a good review!

Automate Review Requests

The best way to never miss an opportunity to ask customers for a review is to automate the process. You can find third party softwares online that enables you to send automated emails asking customers for reviews. You can send emails at specific times and optimize emails using customizable templates. There are even premade templates in different languages to reach global audiences on their terms. 

Ask Customers Conversationally

Asking for review requests during online interactions with customers is also an effective way to score consumer reviews. For instance, when talking with customers via email, live chat, responding to social media comments, etc. It stands to reason that customers are more likely to react positively to a personal request. 

However, you don’t have to jump the question on them. Instead, why not begin with an open-ended question like “How are you liking the product?” or “are you ready to purchase again?”. This allows you to gauge the level of satisfaction before asking for a review.

Create Plenty of Opportunities for Customers to Leave Reviews

‍Make it easier for customers to leave reviews by offering plenty of opportunities to share their opinions. You can utilize tons of channels- Yelp, Facebook Pages, Google, and even Amazon.

Optimize Your Content for Reviews

Whenever a customer interacts with you online, ensure they can leave a review. For instance, use a review plugin or widget to start gathering reviews on your website and blog posts. Or publish a badge that directs traffic to a third-party review site like TrustPilot.

‍Similarly, you can encourage users to leave reviews on your social profiles and even utilize email. With the latter, again, you can redirect customers to external review sites like Trustpilot, Yelp, or Facebook. Keep it short and sweet if you’re asking for reviews via email. Remember to optimize content for mobile to create the smoothest possible experience for your customers.  

Offer Incentives 

‍Finally, it’s wise to respect that for customers, leaving a review is a time-consuming task that’s doing you a favor. So, providing an incentive is a great idea. For example, a discount code on their next purchase, the chance to enter into a contest to win a bigger prize, a gift card, etc. However, remember that you’re not trying to sway your customers’ opinions with these incentives. Instead, you’re looking to encourage honest reviews from customers who have already expressed satisfaction with your product.

Are You Ready to Receive Excellent Review for Your Dropshipping Business?

So, there you have it; our advice on how to get customers to write online reviews.

The main thing to remember is that rave reviews rely on two things:

1. Great products, reliable shipping, and a sterling customer experience
2. Proactively asking customers for reviews‍

Satisfying these requirements is made much easier by partnering with the right software. When it comes to sourcing reliable dropshipping suppliers, working with a platform like Alms Marketplace goes a long way to guaranteeing customers receive high-quality products from reputable suppliers.

Then, once you’re sure you’re offering the best possible customer experience and product quality, start asking customers for reviews at the right moment.