Coming soon! More trust & dollars via reviews

Thanks to the help of our buying community, adoption of Kaleidoguide has gotten off to a smashing start, and it's time to start reaping the rewards.  As of our next site update, we'll be increasing the visibility of buyer reviews on the standard item page:

33 reviews already?!  Great work, TallulahSoaps!

We have been running A/B tests on this idea for the past couple weeks and the results have conclusiuvely shown a meaningful benefit in conversion for sellers with great products.  Especially when a buyer is deciding whether to buy an item from a smaller merchant (such as one participating in our Seller Brands program) whose brand they don't recognize, seeing 4 or 5-star product reviews is a crucial boost to getting new buyers to click the green button ("Add to cart"). 

Some of the questions we expect you might ask:

When do reviews show up under an item?  When do they not?

This is actually a trickier question than you might think, because we need to be wary of showing a lackluster product review unless we are certain the review is relevant to the product being sold.  Thus, we have created a number of safeguards to minimize the likelihood that product reviews will be shown with items to which they shouldn't apply.  The exact recipe we use to determine whether to show reviews is a trade secret (the longer we can slow down the marketplaces wanting to copy us, the better), but suffice it to say that we expect there to be very few situations in which a product for sale is shown with incorrect+negative product reviews.  Of course, there will still be some situations where accurate but negative reviews may be shown.  Speaking of which...

What can I do if I don't want to show accurate but negative reviews of my products?

Firstly, you can rest easy knowing that the vast majority of the product reviews we've recevied to date have been positive.  There is a lot of great stuff being sold on Bonanza! 

But if buyers don't like your products, you have a few options.  The first option is to do what you would do with poor feedback -- reach out to the buyer to make them happy.  For instance, if the product they received was defective, you can offer them a replacement to give them a more positive impression of the product.  The second option is to listen to their feedback and use it to improve.  Many of the negative product reviews we've seen so far have been for custom-made t-shirts that are either smaller than expected, or printed with methods that wear off quickly.  Both of these should be solvable problems, which will lead to better product reviews and more repeat buyers.

The final option is that members can use the "Hide Catalog" option under "Edit booth options" -> "Booth appearance" to turn off the catalog and the embedded reviews on the product page.  If you've set catalog to be hidden and there are reviews available for the product, we'll replace the standard review stars with a small text link that mentions there are reviews available if the buyer wants to click through to see them.

What are the rules for which products I can review again?

Currently, product reviews are limited to past purchases that you've made on Bonanza.  Within the next week or two, we are hoping to update our system such that we can also allow reviews to be submitted for arbitrary products.  We plan to allow arbitrary reviews for users that have demonstrated (1) past excellence in reviewing products and (2) trustworthiness in what they review.  Because positive product reviews will generally increase conversion and selling price, there will be a strong incentive for unscrupulous folks to "game the system," so we're currently working through all the scenarios to prevent false reviews from being submitted.  When a product has a 5-star rating on Bonanza, we want buyers to feel confident they're buying a great product.

Feedback always welcome

As always, do let us know if you have any ideas for improvements!  Nothing at Bonanza is done until we see it in action and hear the ideas of our selling community.