Having online reviews is good for your store for a few reasons. Reviews:
- Help customers trust your store.
- Boost your ranking in Google.
- Help you know how you're serving your customers in an efficient manner. Receiving an online review is much quicker than taking a customer's thoughts in person or via telephone. Also, customers may be more willing to write a review vs. voice it in person.
How does our software generate review for your business?
Our software solicits reviews by contacting customers and brides.
- Soliciting customers
- After about 5 days after a registry purchase–or after 8 days for a non-registry purchase–Shop Local emails your customer asking him or her to review the shopping experience. We do NOT ask him or her to review the item. We ask for him or her to review the experience.
- The reason we send the registry customers a review request earlier is that most often, a gift registry purchase will be given in the form of a credit; there is no item that the purchaser has to pick up or receive. Therefore, he or she can submit their review sooner.
- If he or she does not reply, we email him or her a reminder 3 days later.
- In total, Shop Local sends up to 2 emails to a customer.
- Soliciting brides
- We email a bride 2 weeks after her wedding date to ask her to review her registry experience.
- We ask them to review their experience with registering at the store.
- If the bride has not submitted a review, we send a reminder request three weeks after.
- In total, a bride receives two emails.
Why ask customers for reviews?
- Reviews are a great source of content for Google and other search engines to crawl. Having reviews on your site boosts your Google ranking.
- You want a customer to write a review and have that content go on your site vs. having it be placed on a 3rd party review site. You therefore control it on your site. You are immediately notified of it and can better respond. If the review is negative, you know immediately, and if necessary, you can delete it. If this same negative review were written on Yelp, for example, you could not easily remove it. By allowing your site to take reviews, you allow customers to 'let off steam' and you can better help them with their situation.
How does Shop Local's software compare to Yelps?
Our software has the customer's email and name and knows when to ask them for a review; Yelp doesn't have that data so it doesn't know when to ask. Due to this, your software collects many more reviews than Yelp.
Can your store turn off the solicitation of reviews?
Yes, but we discourage this. If you wish to do this, you can follow the review solicitation deactivation steps here:
https://www.shoplocal.org/help-center.cfm/140/turn-off-review-request-feature