The value of customer reviews shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s important to get feedback from your customers, learning the things they enjoyed about your products. And what about negative reviews? How to handle them? And what actions should TemplateMonster authors take to improve their rating in the marketplace and get more positive reviews? Let’s find out more about Reviews & Ratings.
How Reviews are Managed in the Marketplace
In the TemplateMonster marketplace, we use the Reviews module to establish better communication between authors and customers. The module plays an important role in terms of managing authors’ ratings and ranking them in search results. Reviews also help clients choose the right products in the marketplace. Due to the presence of both positive and negative user reviews in the marketplace, one may judge the reliability of such platforms. The latter may encourage more clients and authors to join.
Where Reviews Come From
In the marketplace, we encourage customers to review the products they buy. Every client can write a review right in the personal account. All the needed functionality is already provided. Also, a person receives an email asking them to publish a review in 5-7 days after an order was placed. What’s more, the marketplace offers discounts for those clients who publish reviews.
How a Client can Publish a Review
To publish a review, a client needs to fill in a form like this:
Once done, he gets an email with a discount code that he may use for the next order in the marketplace. As you can see, the marketplace does its best to encourage customers to review your products and improve your ranking.
How to Find Your Product Reviews
Navigate to author cabinet > Reviews & Ratings
Using the built-in filter, you may list reviews based on the date when they were added, product type, and rating.
The Reviews & Ratings section in the Author Cabinet has been changed and improved. Some time ago, all reviews were grouped based on the product type. Now, an author sees a general list of product reviews. It’s set as the default settings that the newest product reviews are placed higher in the list. However, you may feel free to manage how the reviews are displayed all by yourself.
The author can reply to a review. The response will be also published on the product page.
How to Handle Negative Reviews
There will always be people who are not completely satisfied with the product or service that you offer. Negative reviews shouldn’t be neglected. Take a closer look at them to learn what features your customers would like to change so that you will be able to provide them with a better online shopping experience.
There are several ways of how an author can handle negative reviews.
- An author may try to fix the situation while replying to the review.
- If an author disagrees with the things that are written in the review, they may write a report. The moderator may reply to the author’s report or leave the negative review published if the arguments in the report are not weighty enough.
In the marketplace, we remove ratings and reviews that:
- Are not directly related to the item or support services that are delivered by the author.
- Speak about item support, therefore the support is not provided by the author of an item.
- Include abusive, threatening, or discriminatory content.
- Violate the privacy of another person or ethnicity’s privacy rights.
- Are hateful or offense races, nation, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
- Force a person to do something they are not obligated to.
- Are written as support requests. Such requests should be done using the methods that are specified by an item’s author.
It should be noted that negative reviews are only deleted in case of a refund. In other cases the author has an option to reply in reviews and give the case details.
How a Client Can Edit Reviews
The review editing option is available for 14 days since the moment when it was published. If a customer changes his mind about your product, he or she may apply all the needed changes to the review that had been already published. Professional support provided by a vendor may also be one of the reasons why a customer changes his mind. That’s why it’s important to keep a hand on the pulse and reply to use reviews, especially to the negative ones. By doing so, you can change the users’ minds about you, get good feedback, and improve your rating.
Top Reasons Why You Should Reply to User Reviews
It’s up to every author in the marketplace to make his or her own decision on how and when to respond to customer reviews. Writing professional replies to all reviews that people leave on your product pages brings you a number of benefits, like:
- People will see that you care about their opinion and listen to their feedback.
- It shows that you are responsible for the items that you sell.
- Customers and other bystanders will see that you stand by your offers.
- Replying to customer reviews lets you establish a reliable and trustworthy reputation as an author.
When replying to customer reviews, consider using the following techniques to achieve better results:
- Start with a Thank You. Only a small percent of customers publish reviews. Thank your buyers for their effort.
- If it feels like your customer was struggling or had a bad experience with your product, emphasize it even if you disagree with the feedback that you received. You may reply saying “sorry to hear that” or “it’s a pity you had to…”.
- Let the client know that you want to continue the conversation in private messages and do your best to offer the right resolution.
- Replying to customer reviews, you should always sound polite and professional. Your response is the reflection of your seller’s reputation and customer service.
Can an Author Remove Reviews?
With the purpose to show an honest spectrum of customer feedback, authors are not allowed to remove customer reviews in the marketplace. However, an author can make an attempt to improve a client’s shopping experience while replying to the review. When the issue is solved, the person can edit the review within 14 days. An author can also write a review report if the feedback content is proofless.
Customer reviews play an important role in the marketplace. This is one of the proven ways to establish communication with your buyers, improve your reputation as an author, and strengthen your positions is the TemplateMonster search ranking. Be attentive to your clients’ feedback and never miss the chance to deliver a better online shopping experience to your audience.
In case of a refund, the author cannot require the client to first delete the negative review, and then return the funds. First, the author returns the funds, and then the marketplace deletes the review.
The review is deleted only in case of refunds. That is, if the author returned the funds and there was an inappropriate review, then this review is deleted.