I've just read a rather interesting and counter-intuitive report from Revoo the independent review site. The essence of their conclusions is that having bad reviews on your site helps you to sell. As we've discussed in the past, consumers really want to see the opinion of other purchasers when they're looking to buy from your site. Previous research has gathered a wealth of evidence that consumers are more likely to buy from a site where they can find reviews as compared to one where there's no independent information about the product. The key statistic across all merchandise is that 63% of consumers say that they're more likely to purchase from a site that has reviews. In some sectors like travel the figure is even higher - 83% of holiday purchasers look at reviews, for exampler.

But that's not the interesting thing about the Revoo research; they dug a little deeper and compared the performance of sites with moderated reviews (i.e. where the bad ones have been filtered and are not displayed) with those using an open review system where bad reviews are also displayed. The results were quite surprising. The first thing to say is that people were very cynical. When there are no bad reviews 95% of browsers suspect that the reviews are censored or faked. 68% trust the reviews more when they see a mixture of good and bad reviews.

The other thing is customers avidly seek out the bad reviews. If you give people the choice of filtering or ordering the sequence in which reviews are presented to them you invariably find that if the customer takes that option, that the bad reviews is what they want to see. And they spend a long time looking at them. The average dwell time on the site for customers looking at bad reviews is more than five times as long as for a regular visitor to a web site. They read four times as many pages and practically none of them leave after reading a bad review (less than 1%, in fact)

So we know that people actively seek bad reviews and they'll spend ages reading them: that has to turn into lost sales doesn't it? Funnily enough, no. This is the strange thing. The average conversion rate of visitors who read bad reviews is significantly higher than that for regular visitors. Customers who read the bad reviews are 67% more likely to buy from you. How in the hell could that be?

It turns out that it's precisely the customers who are reading the bad reviews that are most interested in buying. It because they're interesting in buying that read the bad reviews. And why don't bad reviews put them off? One reason could be that one person's bad point might turn out to be another person's benefit. For example, if you were reading a review from someone who stayed in a hotel and it said that it was far too quiet, then this could actually be a good thing for you if what you're looking for is peace and quiet.

But the main reason why bad reviews are a good conversion tool is that customers are not stupid. They know that sometimes things can go wrong. They're not put off by the occasional bad review. They understand that systems sometimes don't work as expected. But they do want to see the complete picture; when it's given to them they trust the supplier and it's that trust that makes them far more likely to buy.

There is one important caveat. If all your customers see are bad reviews, then they're most certainly not going to trust you and purchase - rather they're going to run a mile. There's a very important trick that you can play here: use a prompted review system. If you're a Shopcreator customer, give us a call on 0845 12 11 400 or email us and we can add prompted reviews to your store. A prompted review is when an email solicitation is sent to the customer about a week or ten days after they've made their purchase asking them to leave their opinion.

Prompted reviews dramatically affect the mix of reviews and increase the proportion that is good. When you're prompted you're much more likely to leave feedback, good or bad. But for the unprompted, it's the dissatisfied people who are more motivated to act and leave a bad review; the happy customers are simply less motivated to take any action unprompted, even though they might be perfectly happy with their purchase. This isn't simply conjecture; the Revoo survey has some hard data. In a prompted review system on average only 6% of reviews were bad. With a passive collection system, bad reviews as a proportion of the whole were four times as high at 24%. And if a quarter of your reviews are bad, then, you're definitely getting close to the threshold when there are too many bad reviews.

So the lessons are:
• use reviews
• don't try to censor the feedback that your customers give you
• make sure that you prompt all your customers to leave feedback.

Do that and you'll sell more.

It's really disappointing when you go to all the time and trouble of getting someone to the site, they find the product that they like, successfully put the product into their shopping cart and complete the payment process and still you can't be sure that you make a sale.

Despite getting a customer all the way through the funnel right to the end, the sale is not final.

It's not all over. The customer still has to like the product and the sad fact of the matter is that very often customers do want to return their goods. It has ever been thus. Way back in the days of mail order it was always the case that the returns department was the largest supplier, with returned stock accounting for the largest workload in the Goods Inwards part of the operation.

It's clearly important that any ecommerce retailer must have a clear and generous no fault returns programme. It's not just good business sense. It's also required under the Distance Selling Directive. These regulations state that consumers " are entitled to a refund of any money they have paid in relation to the contract even if the goods are not defective is any way".

But what is a reasonable level that an ecommerce operator has to assume. Well once again, I'm indebted to the fine people at the IMRG who have produced their latest Quarterly Benchmarking Report.

On average, the ecommerce operators within their survey had to handle a return rate of 15%. Just under one in every six sales are not final and will be returned.

If you're doing better than this then you doing well, worse and you should look to the quality of you goods or the way in which they are described. Whatever the cause, it's a big number and has to be taken into account when running an ecommerce business.

We've looked at how to put YouTube videos into your Shopcreator Website and also how to promote your site on Facebook and Twitter, to finish off here's a video showing you how to pop a Google Maps link up on your Shopcreator store.

As well as being a lot easy to load YouTube videos into your Shopcreator Website we also just made it a heck of a lot easier to get your customers to like you on Facebook or Tweet about your products. And since we were in a video kind of mood we thought that we'd make a video about that too!

It just got a lot easier to insert YouTube Videos on your Shopcreator store – just look at this video.

Here's another really useful benchmark from the guys at the IMRG. And it gets to the bottom of another important question that people ask all the time – am I getting good value for money from my Google Adwords campaign?

In the end, I suppose that only you can be the judge of that. If you pick up a customer with an average lifetime value of £100 and it costs you £50 in Adwords to get him, who am I to say that the fact that his first order is only for £10 means that you're not making a return?

But the classical way of assessing the effectiveness of a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign is to measure ROI. How much you spend on getting clicks, compared to the net revenue (i.e. over and above the cost of the clicks) generated in sales from those clicks. This give you your Return On Investment or ROI.

So what sort of ROI do people get on average? It seems that the average is about £8 pounds back for every pound that you spend is the long term trend (that's an ROI of £7, being £8 less the £1 that you spent to get the £8 in the first place). Interestingly the level of return this year does seem to be slightly higher than a year ago. Today average ROI is £7.41 a year ago it was £6.54.