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The Positive Side of Negative Product Reviews
By Vangie Beal
March 3, 2010

You happily launch your online user-reviews section and wouldn’t you know it — waiting for admin approval is a customer‘s negative product review.  Before you hit delete and pretend you didn’t see it, there is positive news about negative reviews.  

It may sound a bit counterintuitive, but a negative product review can actually be helpful to your online business.

How Customers Perceive Negative Reviews

When it comes to online customer reviews, Pehr Luedtke CEO of PowerReviews knows a thing or two. Currently PowerReviews hosts more than 10 million user reviews in its database — you can get an in-depth look at those on the consumer site, Buzzillions.com.

Luedtke says that both Forrester Research and Market Live research show that Web sites with negative reviews have higher conversions than Web sites without them.  "A well-written negative customer review on your Web site provides credibility and tells customers that the retailer is confident enough to show that review," explained Luedtke.  

When you consider negative product reviews from the customer’s perspective, you can better understand why these should not be considered a bad thing for a small retailer.

"Most negative product reviews,” Luedtke said, “usually concern flaws based on a specific usage of the product, and is often not even relevant to the consumer reading the review as part of their purchasing decision.”

For example, one consumer might post a negative review of a digital camera that didn’t produce low-light images to the customer's expectations. If the camera boasts excellent still life capabilities, a consumer looking specifically for that will read the negative review and still purchase the item since low-light photography is not a part of their actual purchasing criteria.

Luedtke recommends that online retailers — especially smaller Web shop owners — never hide negative product reviews.   "When you hide a negative product review, you will lose customers,” Luedtke said. “It's even more important for small retailers to be credible with shoppers.”

Improve Your Ecommerce Site with Negative Product Reviews

Negative reviews certainly help your customers, but they also help your business.  Luedtke sees using negative product reviews to guide future product development and vendor management as an emerging merchant trend.

For example, a PowerReviews apparel client uses negative product reviews posted by its customers to guide seasonal clothing line development. The company uses the reviews as a real-time focus group and it considers the negative comments on current products when developing future products.

Using those negative reviews shows your customers that you are listening, and it helps you to create better consumer products and better marketing messages.

For smaller Web shop owners, the same information from a negative review can help you figure out which items are not on par with manufacturer specifications and can assist you in deciding which products to keep in your online product catalog.  Some retail shops, according to Luedtke, may even use a system where products that get a lower than a 3-star rating automatically go back to the vendor.

For retailers holding back negative product review data, Luedtke also suggests you can use the information in other, simpler ways — for example you could contrast points from negative and positive reviews to offer your customers a side-by-side pro and con comparison of a product to help them make a more informed purchase decision.

A small business can learn a lot about its products and merchandising tactics when it uses those negative customer reviews, and being viewed as a credible ecommerce site can be a big boost to smaller Web shop owners.

Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG.

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