In the book Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini states, “We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.” In the customer journey, ratings and reviews serve as social proof in the shopper’s purchase decisions. For brands, review monitoring helps to manage their online presence and credibility across marketplaces.
Want to know more? Continue reading this article about the top 6 benefits of rating and review tracking on the digital shelf.
How Important Is Customer Ratings and Review Monitoring for a Brand?
In 2023, Amazon announced AI-generated customer review highlights to help customers shop confidently. It allows customers to easily pull reviews that mention specific product attributes and feature key product insights.
In general, customer ratings and reviews help brands to:
- Increase conversion and SEO
- Improve the brand’s authenticity
- Generate insights about products, processes, and purchases
- Analyze positive and negative reviews
- Make product improvements
Review Recency vs. Review Volume: Why Brands Need to Worry?
Findings of Psychological Science using phone cases on Amazon show that customers are more likely to favor a product based on the number of reviews.
When the reviews for a product are between 0 and 1, its conversion rate lifts by over 50%. With an addition of more than ten reviews, the conversion lift increases by 255%.
Review recency and volume go hand-in-hand. Shoppers look for recent reviews before purchasing a brand. This signals the recency bias, where people generally tend to give more value to recent reviews over historical ones.
In addition, a brand that has more frequent and recent reviews is likely to be more visible in online search results and rankings.
Read more: How Digital Shelf Analytics Transforms E-commerce Businesses?
Why Online Customer Review Monitoring Matters in E-Commerce?
In 1995, Amazon was the first e-commerce site to allow consumers to post reviews. Back then, critics felt the marketing strategy of posting reviews in public would turn against Amazon.
Today, there are more than 26.5 million e-commerce sites worldwide, and almost all include customer ratings and reviews on their product pages. Measuring customer reviews and ratings online gives an accurate picture of consumers’ perceptions of your brand. For a customer, ratings and reviews of a brand serve as signals in their purchasing decisions.
- Understand Customer Satisfaction Based on Product Attributes
- Perform Sentiment Analysis on Product Reviews
- Analyze Negative Reviews
- Monitor Verified and Non-Verified Reviews
- Identify Product Feature Ideas and Bridge Opportunity Gaps
- Help in Competitive Review Analysis
Understand Customer Satisfaction Based on Product Attributes
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) helps to classify and categorize review data by appropriate aspects. Aspects refer to the attributes of a product and vary based on category.
Sentiment analysis is performed based on the aspects of the reviews. This helps arrive at the best and worst features of the products.
The various steps in aspect-level sentiment analysis generally include:
- Extracting the reviews
- Pre-processing
- POS tagging
- Aspect selection
- Classifying reviews into positive and negative
Perform Sentiment Analysis on Product Reviews
Sentiment analysis or opinion mining involves classifying reviews as positive, negative, or neutral. It uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand how consumers feel about the product or the brand. It can be done manually, automatically or hybrid as a mix of both.
MetricsCart’s sentiment analysis serves as a barometer to:
- Gauge consumer perceptions of the brands
- Help e-commerce and product teams improve their product detail pages and search ad campaigns to better align with their customer needs
- Identify emerging market trends
- Benchmark shopper sentiment against competitors
Read more: Product Page Optimization Best Practices
Analyze Negative Reviews For Brand Health Benchmarking
Michael Podolsky, Cofounder and CEO of PissedConsumer, a review website says “A mixed bag of positive to critical reviews is certainly more useful to a browsing consumer than a handful of stamp-of-approval testimonials.”
Negative reviews help brands to:
- Track trends and implement changes
- Turn into repeat business
- Show authenticity
- Can direct brand content creation and boost marketing strategy
Additionally, it is key to understand how negative reviews work. When a shopper thinks they and the reviewer are alike, purchase intent drops if they see the one-star review rather than the five-star review.
In contrast, if they felt unlike the reviewer, the one-star review creates higher purchase intent than the five-star review. This is a scenario when consumers identify closely with the brand.
Monitor Verified and Non-Verified Reviews
Fake review brokers solicit shoppers to write fake reviews in exchange for complimentary products, money, or incentives. In exchange for a fee, the defendants leave:
- Fake positive reviews to boost a bad actor’s product ranking
- Fake negative reviews to lower the ranking of a competitor’s product
In June 2023, Amazon filed new lawsuits against users generating fake reviews. To ensure fair practices, Walmart allows review syndication wherein brands can import product reviews from their DTC sites.
MetricsCart monitors verified and non-verified reviews left by consumers across online marketplaces.
Identify Product Feature Ideas and Bridge Opportunity Gaps
Positive reviews often reveal product features and use cases that are not highlighted on the product detail page but matter to shoppers. These insights help brands strengthen their listings by reflecting how customers actually experience and talk about the product.
Plus, user-generated content in the form of images and videos within reviews adds another layer of value by building trust and authenticity, which can directly influence conversion. At the same time, negative reviews surface recurring concerns, unmet expectations, and feature gaps that point to clear opportunities for product improvement or iteration.
MetricsCart’s Ratings & Reviews solution is an AI-powered online review monitoring and analysis platform that helps brands turn customer feedback into actionable intelligence. It goes beyond simple star tracking to give teams a complete understanding of review signals that matter for product performance and brand perception.
Key capabilities include:
- Brings reviews and social feedback from all major marketplaces, YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit into one unified dashboard, so nothing is missed.
- Analyzes written reviews, unboxing videos, and product review videos to understand what customers are really saying.
- Surfaces recurring positive and negative themes, so teams don’t have to read every review manually.
- Tracks sentiment changes over time to spot early shifts in customer perception.
- Connects feedback to loyalty signals like Net Promoter Score (NPS), so you know what drives advocacy.
- Highlights feature requests and unmet expectations, so product gaps are easier to act on.
- Shows how feedback changes after launches, pricing updates, or campaigns, so issues don’t go unnoticed.
- Supports market research by revealing category trends and competitor gaps, so strategy stays grounded in real customer voice.
- Gives product, marketing, and CX teams one clear view of customer feedback, so decisions move faster.
Help in Competitive Review Analysis
With ratings and reviews analysis, brands can gain visibility into the product reviews of their competitor brands within a particular category. Brands can relatively analyze:
- Product ratings
- Customer sentiment
- Word cloud overview
- Aspect-based sentiment analysis
- Verified and non-verified reviews, and more.
MetricsCart offers a unified dashboard for brands to view ratings and reviews of competitors across retailers in one place.
When Reviews Start Doing the Selling
Ratings and reviews are signals that actively shape discovery, influence trust, and decide whether a shopper clicks “Buy” or moves on. From review volume and recency to sentiment, features, and authenticity, every piece of feedback plays a role in how a product performs across marketplaces.
For brands, monitoring ratings and reviews delivers multiple benefits, from protecting reputation and understanding what customers value to spotting issues early, uncovering feature gaps, and staying competitive in crowded categories.
MetricsCart helps brands bring all these signals together in one place. By combining review analysis, sentiment tracking, video, and UGC insights, and competitive benchmarking, it enables teams to move faster, act with confidence, and stay aligned with what shoppers actually care about on the digital shelf.
Get Real-Time insights on what customers are saying about your brand.
FAQs
Brands can detect issues well before ratings drop by tracking shifts in sentiment, recurring complaints, and discussion patterns rather than waiting for one-star reviews to accumulate.
Yes. Ratings, review volume, and recency can influence click-through rates and organic visibility, indirectly affecting how products rank and get discovered.
Many shoppers read negative and mid-range reviews first to assess risk. Reviews often influence decisions before price or promotions are considered.
No. Video reviews, unboxings, and social conversations often reveal expectations, frustrations, and comparisons earlier and more clearly than text reviews alone.
