As part of the Spring Seller Release, eBay are officially announcing that product reviews are now live on eBay UK, which can help increase conversions on your eligible listings.
From now, you’ll see product reviews linked to listings and eBay are gradually rolling product reviews out across supported products over an initial 2-month period. Product reviews are launching desktop and mobile sites first, with the mobile app to follow at a later date.
Reviews are associated with a specific product, rather than a listing or a seller. Reviews will also carry the username of the person that wrote it visible to everyone who reads the review. You will be able to report inappropriate and offensive reviews, as well as those for completely different products on your listings, and eBay will check and remove these where necessary.
To ensure that buyers use product reviews appropriately, there is no link between this feature and your Feedback rating. So, for example, if a buyer does not like a particular product, this will not affect your seller performance rating.
The two types of product reviews
Verified reviews
From buyers who have purchased the item on eBay.
Unverified reviews
From buyers who have purchased an item elsewhere.
eBay will display a star rating at the top of eligible listings. This is an average of all the scores submitted for both types of review. Buyers can then choose to click for more information about what other buyers have said about that product.
Product Identifiers and Item Specifics
If you want buyers to review your products (even if they’re unique to you) then you much complete eBay’s Product Identifier and Item Specific fields. eBay need to be able to identify your product is the same as another to collate reviews, or to establish that yours is a unique product so that the reviews are unique to your item.
Why are eBay doing this?
eBay had reviews a decade ago and dumped them. It was the same with user blogs, about me pages and a ton of other content ideas. Someone looked at reviews, mistakenly decided they weren’t worthy of the modern eBay and scrapped them.
Now the Internet has come full circle, search engines like Google love unique content and adore user generated content so reviews are back in vogue.
I’m willing to bet that someone somewhere in eBay there is a long term employee who mourned the demise of the original reviews and is now thinking “I told you it was a bad idea to scrap them”.
7 Responses
Reviews are all well and good but they need to be targeted at the product.
I sell spare parts for some very expensive two way radios on eBay.com where they have had reviews for a while. Given I ONLY sell parts and not complete radios it seems crazy that ebay have scattered a listing of the radio over about 20 listings. It says..
“Great product. Pricey, but if you’ve got the funds it is tops.
The radio is simply the best two way handheld radio available today. I’m not a Motorola Employee, but simply a satisifed user.
I bought this product to use in my Public Service/ADES duties. It also interfaces with the ham radio repeaters quite well.
The only problem with the radio is it’s price. Other than that, if you’ve got the money, go for it.”
Now can someone tell me why that review is of any use on my listing for replacement volume knobs to fit those radios?
eBay say that you can report reviews. We’ll see how that pans out in the UK but in the US the options are as follows
“Why is this review inappropriate?
– It’s spam, or has links
– There are copyright or trademark issues
– It’s offensive or has profanity
– It includes feedback about the seller
– Something else”
If you select something else, there is nowhere to say what that something else is. How can one get across the eBay that the problem is irrelevancy?
Can anyone link me a live example on the UK platform?
(already tried looking at the usual biggy’s (iphone, ipod etc))
Many Thanks,
Carl
All well and good but the reviews are been shown on the genuine products and the cheap copies and also the items sold as faulty.
It does not make sense to see a review saying “wrks great does the job fine quality original item etc” when the item in the listing is faulty or a cheap copy.
Al that will happen is the seller will get the backlash when the reviews mislead the buyer through no fault of the seller
eBay is 100% user generated content. I don’t think the reason for this is SEO. It’s customer experience.
When I want to know if what I’m buying is any good, I don’t go to eBay, I go to Amazon, because of their excellent and well-used product reviews. eBay at the moment makes it very difficult to choose items unless your only criteria is price, or you already know the exact item you want. This addition will help the buyer pick the right product, as well as picking the right seller.