How to choose the best WooCommerce rating plugin.

The world is moving, as we are. Everyone is too busy nowadays. Between work, studying, exercise, family, and all kinds of activities, we don’t have much time to take decisions while purchasing a product or watching movies. That’s why most of us go through online ratings & reviews to make the process easier.

With the emergence of the internet around the world, online platforms like e-commerce stores and blog sites are also blooming. Now users and customers can share their experiences by clicking on stars and their thoughts with some worlds. While talking about online platforms, WordPress is clearly dominating this arena, According to W3Techs, WordPress powers 43% of all the websites on the Internet, in other words, WordPress powers over one-third of the web! 

Now, if you are a part of this web world, means you have a WordPress site, If you want to increase traffic to your WordPress site, boost your SEO and more user engagement on your blogging site, or bring in more sales from your WooCommerce products, you will benefit from installing a WordPress rating plugin on your website. In this article, we will show how you can choose a rating plugin for your WordPress site which will be the best fit.

What are customer/user ratings and reviews in WordPress?

WordPress does not have a built-in star rating feature, but you can easily add this with a WordPress plugin. A rating system is a quantitative system that is represented by symbols like stars/ like-dislike, that are used to judge the quality of things like articles, products, services, etc. User reviews will accompany the ratings to elaborate on how and why they have a positive, negative, or neutral opinion.

How do ratings create an impact on your business?

There are many similar products, services, and content on WooCommerce stores and WordPress blog sites, but ratings and reviews can make them stand out from the competition. With ratings and reviews, product or service-based WordPress sites, help visitors make an informed purchasing decision, whereas readers can easily identify the most popular content based on ratings on a content-rich blog site.

Think of yourself as a customer, last time when you purchased a headphone from an online store what you did do before buying? You may be asked your friends about that headphone, and also checked the rating of that product by previous customers. According to  Invesp, 90% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase and 72% of the consumers will be prompted to take an action after reading positive reviews.

Brands will obviously try to highlight every feature of the product in the best way possible, but it is the customers who will give honest feedback on the product. Here, ratings and reviews become even more important in the absence of the ability to ‘trial’ products prior to purchasing online. When a customer leaves a review for the product, he is helping others understand what they can expect from the product, how is it performing, and what are its advantages and flaws. 
A survey conducted by Bazaarvoice, shows that the majority (88%) of customers use reviews to discover and evaluate products. From food and beverage and apparel to health and beauty and hardware to everything in between, ratings and reviews play a crucial role in the buying process.

What to look for in the perfect WordPress rating plugin?

There is plenty of WordPress rating plugins to explore, but choosing the best one can be tricky. Some of the plugins have different functionality, some plugins have similar features among them. Based on your WordPress site and your business types, rating plugins choice may differ. Let’s explore some specific features that you should consider while selecting a rating plugin.

Rating based on criteria:

Ratings can be called the universal language, no matter what language, font size, or font color your site uses, consumers can recognize and understand a rating system. With this rating system, consumers are also able to see what other users/readers think of your product or content at a glance.

Now you can offer your customers to give ratings and reviews in easy and different ways, like getting reviews based on different criteria. For example, if you have an online store, and you allow to collect ratings on price, quality, delivery, etc with specific statistics of those criteria, It could help both ways for a customer and store owner. Say, a product has a good rating in terms of price & quality, but the delivery time is not satisfactory. So now other customers will get an idea about this and also based on this feedback, the store owner can take necessary action where he needs to.

Automated review reminder email:

In this competitive business world, the power of personalization plays a vital role in your business growth. Now in this scenario, how can you personalize your review requests, well, a review reminder email is a tool in this personal communication. Usually, a customer gives a rating or review after or during the use of the product. Now, in his busy life, he may forget to share the good experience of that product. By using an automated reminder email from a plugin, you can send it to your specific customer to give a product review.

Options for uploading visual content  (Photo & video) with rating:

Reviews with photos can give a genuine experience to the customer, or a quick video about the product just from his mobile can make the review more realistic. Photo & Video can be particularly helpful to your new customers, as they show what the product looks like in real life.

Make the review more trustworthy with verified badges:

If you have an e-commerce store,  where you’re trying to build a brand. Trust is a key point of your brand building. If your customers think that your store has fake reviews, that may cause a negative impact on your business growth. A verified purchase badge can isolate the real customer from others. The verified badge is given to that product review that is purchased from that store.

Studies show that more than 60% of customers don’t purchase simply because no verified badges are visible in the store. Verified badges are a simple symbol reassuring the customer they’re heading in the right direction, giving them a sense of trust.

Admin notification & reply to review option:

Responding to every review and also habitually thanking every reviewer is a very good practice for business. According to  Review Tracker survey 53% of customers expect businesses to respond to reviews within a week. 1 in 3 have a shorter time frame of 3 days or less.

For your WordPress site, rating with reviews can be a platform for customers to share their experiences not only with fellow consumers but with your businesses. How you respond to these reviews can have just as much impact on your brand reputation.

Your time is valuable, and so is your customers, so make sure you’re responding to your customers with thanks to your customers for their review. A notification to your mail inbox for a new review will be very useful, for a quick response to your customer’s reviews.

A clean dashboard for viewing and moderating the reviews that come in.

 Your eCommerce store or WordPress site may have thousands of reviews, and if a WordPress rating plugin has the option where, all review information is displayed in brief with the search, edit, delete option that will be a great feature for site owners.

By analyzing statistics from the dashboard, if you are a store owner, you can understand the behavior of the customer about the products in your store. Again a WordPress blog site owner can set rules for review approval for the site administrators or customer service team. If the review is libelous or uses obscene language, they can moderate or block it.

Review import-export feature:

Earning ratings is a hard job for a store owner. Now for some valid reason if you want to migrate your site from one to another, then you don’t want to lose these valuable ratings, the ratings and reviews import feature is helpful when you’d like to migrate reviews and ratings from one WordPress site to another. While choosing the best WordPress rating plugin, you should check which plugin offers ratings and reviews the import-export option in an efficient and quick-mannered way.

Provide valuable SEO insights:

As a site owner, you must want to make your WordPress site search engine friendly. A WordPress rating plugin can help you rank higher on search engines through schema markup. If your customer rate a certain item on your site using a review plugin, this information will serve more context to search engines, thus making it more SEO -friendly.As per the Brightedge survey, 53% of all trackable website traffic comes from organic search, marketers would be wise to capture some of that share with customer reviews. By leaving customer reviews on your site, your customers are helping Google better understand what your WordPress site is all about. This is free keyword-dense content creation that has the potential to significantly affect your website’s SEO.

Options for displaying reviews on your website’s other pages:

Your WordPress site is considered your digital storefront, so making a good first impression is imperative. Showcasing customer reviews on your website should attract attention and increase time on staying on your site. So, to display your collected ratings and reviews on other locations of your site,  in addition to the product or blog page, shortcodes, and widgets can be options. By using shortcodes, you can properly highlight reviews without seeming too overbearing, yet leveraging their influential and SEO value.

Coupon for review:

Coupons encourage your customers to write product reviews. Offering coupons for review is a great way to make first customers to repeat customers, now if your WordPress rating plugin has the feature, it will give you that advantage.

In such a scenario once your customer leaves a review, the system will automatically send an email with a discount coupon code. It will Increase your review numbers and engage your customers, drive repeat purchases, up-sells, and new sales.

Conclusion: 

Displaying ratings and reviews from customers/ visitors on your WordPress site is great for marketing and establishing trust with your audience. So, you need a good strategy to choose a review plugin that is going to work seamlessly on your WordPress website. Along with the plugin-rich features which were discussed above, you also need also keep in mind the plugin review, active installations, and compatibility with the latest version of WordPress.