For years, Bazaarvoice has been helping brands and Marketplace sellers optimize conversions on Walmart.com product description pages with user-generated content (UGC). In this guest blog, you’ll learn the significant impact of UGC, such as ratings, reviews, and visual content, and get a detailed look at which solutions are available for Marketplace sellers of all types and sizes.
Get started at www.bazaarvoice.com/walmart.
Why UGC matters in the e-commerce landscape
Earning a place on Walmart shelves isn’t just about having the best products. Walmart is committed to creating a seamless, omnichannel shopping experience that captures customers’ interests and empowers them to make confident purchase decisions—and there’s no online content shoppers trust more than other customers’ opinions. About 92% of customers say they trust peer recommendations over traditional advertising.
High-quality, relevant UGC like ratings and reviews, questions, and visual content validates product quality and customer affinity. It also has a significant impact on purchase decisions. Bazaarvoice has found that when shoppers engage with reviews on best-in-class sites, brands see a 138% conversion lift and a 159% lift in revenue per visitor.
UGC shouldn’t be an afterthought for Walmart Marketplace sellers. A UGC strategy done right will increase the discoverability of your products, boost sales, reduce return rates, and create a valuable dialogue with your customers.
What this partnership means for sellers like you
Walmart and Bazaarvoice help Walmart suppliers and Walmart Marketplace sellers alike enhance their UGC programs and increase conversions on Walmart.com. Bazaarvoice works with the largest network of retailers, brands, and shoppers. The company leads the industry with best-in-class UGC solutions and services, as well as unparalleled content authenticity standards.
With this partnership, Walmart Marketplace sellers have the opportunity to leverage Bazaarvoice’s effective solutions and syndication capabilities. Syndication refers to the distribution of collected UGC to the websites of retail partners in the Bazaarvoice network that sell your products, including Walmart.com. Review syndication helps ensure your review content is discoverable wherever people are shopping and helps retailers deliver an exceptional shopping experience.
When Bazaarvoice clients syndicate reviews to retailer sites, the median increase in product pages with reviews on retail sites is 37%, resulting in a median of 83% more reviews per product than those without syndication.
Reviews play a crucial part in achieving a good Listing Quality Score, Walmart Marketplace’s official way of scoring your catalog and items. The numerical score is comprised of four factors: content & discoverability, offer, ratings & reviews, and post-purchase quality. Customer feedback is integral to improving your search rankings and conversion, and participating in Bazaarvoice’s programs can help you garner reviews faster.
1 Sample with Influenster
Targeted review seeding programs help get your product(s) into the hands of your ideal customers, drive trial and awareness, and increase the collection of valuable UGC.
Sampling with Bazaarvoice’s Influenster program offers Marketplace sellers the opportunity to send product samples to our global community of 8M+ members in exchange for honest and authentic reviews. Sellers can begin seeing authentic reviews on Walmart.com in as little as 3 weeks once products are shipped to members, making this an ideal solution for those needing to boost review volume quickly for high-priority products.
If you’re unsure what products to sample, think about those that are new to market, recently reformulated, hero SKUs, seasonal or evergreen pages that need a content refresh! Once items are selected for sampling, Bazaarvoice will help guide you through community targeting and fulfillment.
2 Collect + Distribute
A successful ratings and reviews strategy enables sellers to increase high-quality review content collection for their products and optimize review coverage across retail sites where their products are sold.
Bazaarvoice Collect + Distribute equips sellers with the tools necessary to proactively collect review content from their customers post-purchase and syndicate reviews to their Walmart.com product description pages, after the reviews have been authenticated and moderated by the Bazaarvoice team. Once reviews are syndicated to Walmart.com, the original source and publish date are included for complete transparency.
This solution allows sellers to easily optimize UGC on Walmart.com without any e-commerce software implementation. It’s ideal for sellers who rely heavily on retail channel sales and do not wish to display reviews on their own website (either because they don’t sell directly to consumers or simply because their own website sales are not a key focus).
3 Collect + Display + Distribute
About 86% of brands and retailers consider ratings and reviews key drivers of online sales. If you want to boost UGC on your own website as well as on Walmart.com, Collect + Display + Distribute is the best solution. This program equips sellers with tools to collect authentic review content from their customers post-purchase, display review content on their website, and syndicate reviews to Walmart.com.
Again, the published reviews on Walmart.com will display the original source and publish date. This strategy amplifies your website user experience, automates review collection, drives higher UGC volume, and ultimately optimizes conversions on your Walmart.com product description pages.
For Walmart Marketplace sellers with a Shopify e-commerce platform, Bazaarvoice offers a seamless integration solution to support UGC. Through the integration, Bazaarvoice and Shopify customers can collect, display, and distribute UGC content on Shopify stores and Walmart.com in just a few clicks.
4 Distribution-Only
Whether you have organic reviews already collected on your website or currently collect UGC through another provider, Distribute-Only will help you make these reviews visible on Walmart.com. Bazaarvoice partners with several other UGC providers to help sellers drive maximum retail success by accessing syndication capabilities within the Bazaarvoice network. You’ll reach more customers by increasing the places your shoppers can find ratings, reviews, and user-generated visual content for your products.
All reviews still go through Bazaarvoice’s unparalleled content moderation and authenticity process to ensure UGC is genuine and compliant with Walmart’s strict content policies and standards.
Get access to actionable insights
With every Bazaarvoice solution, sellers can access insights to propel their business on Walmart.com and get visibility into how shoppers feel about products.
Bazaarvoice Insights helps sellers easily examine and understand their UGC performance across channels, understand common areas of praise and complaint from customers, compare their performance against competitors, and improve programs with recommended actions. With this information, sellers can determine where and how to prioritize resources to continuously optimize their UGC strategies at scale.
These insights can offer invaluable information to multiple departments within a seller’s organization, including product, marketing, sales, and customer service. About 72% of Bazaarvoice clients use UGC to improve customer service, 66% use it to improve products, and 50% use it to improve marketing tactics and messaging.
Now’s the time to optimize UGC on Walmart.com. Tapping into Bazaarvoice’s best-in-class solutions gives you the competitive advantage to serve the needs of your shoppers and ultimately to drive sales on Walmart.com.
Get started at www.bazaarvoice.com/walmart.
Provider Spotlight
This is a guest post from Amanda Awad, Marketing Manager at Bazaarvoice. Bazaarvoice helps brands and retailers connect with customers through authentic user-generated content (UGC), such as ratings & reviews, visual content, and shopper questions and answers. With best-in-class solutions and actionable insights, Bazaarvoice has a program to fit every seller’s needs.
