Product Reviews Update: Now It’s A Party

Following up from our most recent update of product reviews two weeks ago, we have some brand new features and updates to announce today.

And as you would’ve seen from the title of this blog post, the theme of these new features is party time. Which, in our world, at least means that we’ve built features that span the social spectrum and encourages good, party vibes. 🙂

Let’s dive into the new features.

Google Rich Markup & Improved SEO

You have been asking for this, and we finally listened found a solution.

If you are using CM Commerce’s Product Review widgets, then we will automatically add rich, semantic markup to your product pages which the Googs can then index. In layman’s terms, the rich markup will make your search results (for your product pages) look like this:

You’ll note that along with the meta data that Google displays for search results, they can now also show the product rating and reviews for that product. Showing this richer information on your search results will increase your visibility amongst other search results (that don’t have this data), as well as add credibility (via social proof) to your listing. Overall you can expect a bump in your general SEO strategy. 🙂

Learn about how you can get the benefit of better Google Search Results right away.

Social Sharing For All

If you live on an island and nobody knows about you or the island, then what use does it have owning an impressive island? (This sounds philosophical, but I have not even convinced myself.)

My point being: The first step with product reviews is to get them from customers and display them on your website. As you know, this helps with the social proof of your products and ultimately will improve the conversion rates on purchases of those products. But if your product reviews and ratings only live on your website, you are limiting its awesomeness to people that visit your site.

We have built new social sharing features that enable you to share any review to Facebook or Twitter quickly.

You can do this as the store owner or marketing manager, where you can use these reviews as part of your social media strategy. Or you can ask your customers to share their reviews after they have submitted it. Either way, you are extending the reach of the reviews and hopefully putting your products’ awesomeness in front of a new audience.

Dashboard Update

You’ll also notice that we have started shifting things around within the Reviews section of your CM Commerce dashboard. The biggest change is that there is now only a single screen to show both the reviews that still need moderation, as well as all of your other reviews. We have also changed the way you activate new widgets to make that process easier.

Both of these changes are part of a bigger project to overhaul the Reviews section entirely to make the initial setup, as well as the experience of using reviews significantly easier, more enjoyable and more valuable. You can thus expect more announcements like these in the coming weeks. 🙂

Photo by Kevin Curtis on Unsplash