One of the more simple, yet neglected methods of improving a merchant’s ROI is in gaining customer feedback.

Say a potential customer, who we’ll call Red, was looking for a picnic basket to transport food in to deliver to her sick Grandmother.

She hops onto Pricegrabber, enters the term “picnic basket”, and ends up with a list of 10 sites that has the exact brand that she was looking for.

While Red is known to be highly trusting of others, at the same time she is aware that she can read about other customers’ experiences with each of the 10 merchants on Pricegrabber. With each of them having similar landing pages, pricing being similar across the board, and little else to differentiate the merchants from each other–she ends up eliminating the ones with little or no feedback, and purchases a shiny new picnic basket from the merchant with the most positive feedback ratings.

In our experiences, clients who had minimal feedback all saw their sales increase by a considerable amount after the amount of their feedback increased–due mainly to mindful consumers such as Red.

So how does a merchant go about increasing their feedback?

Generally each comparison shopping engine will provide merchants with a code that can be embedded onto their site that will pop up a window at the end of the transaction session where feedback can be given–and some will email a customer and ask for feedback once the order has been received.

For merchants on multiple engines we recommend taking advantage of this feature and embedding the code in cycles of two weeks or so–so as to maintain feedback diversity across the engines.

Alternatively, we at CPC Strategy provide some of our merchants with a rotating banner code, which randomly pops up a window from one of the shopping engines that merchant lists on during the checkout process.

Merchants who use this code have generally noticed greater amounts of feedback posted to their accounts.

This post assumes of course, that by increasing the amount of feedback received that the feedback will be positive overall–as having negative reviews will be much more harmful than having no reviews at all. This is particularly important for merchants who list on Amazon, who can suspend accounts for going other certain positive feedback thresholds.

Of course, we anticipate most merchants reading our blog to have the highest standards of business practices and have few issues with maintaining positive feedback

And with that we’ll see you on the engines with all your great feedback.

-Tien