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Sucharita Mulpuru and Forrester Research recently released a report called Myths And Truths About Online Customer Reviews. The report covers a lot of ground, but I want to hone in on customer behavior after reading negative reviews. Many retailers have avoided adding reviews for fear negative reviews will hurt sales, despite the proven conversion benefits they deliver. From the report, here are 7 actions consumers take after reading not-so-shining reviews (customers may take more than one action)

Customer reviews certainly help shoppers, but they are not substitutes for weak or generic product descriptions. Unique product descriptions help your search engine optimization, help overcome your customer FUDDs and ultimately sell more product! I want to share a few tips for creating unique, compelling product page copy using customer review content - even when your site has few or no reviews.

One of the more popular features with customers on many ecommerce Web sites is "customer reviews." They allow insight into products and help consumers feel more comfortable making purchases. There are several ways online customer reviews are implemented on ecommerce Web sites, some better than others. In this post we look at how different retailers implement reviews.

Since its release in 2007, the last volume of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, has garnered 3,286 reviews from Amazon.com customers. While response has been overwhelmingly positive for the book, several hundred Amazon customers rated the book as mediocre or worse. Because of a very subtle yet clever feature, Amazon makes the best of both the positive and negative reviews easy to find. And that feature, based on our calculations, is responsible for more than $2,700,000,000 of new revenue for Amazon every year. Not bad for what is essentially a simple question: "Was this review helpful to you?"

See video product reviews by owners. Discover new products, watch product demonstrations, compare prices, and get unbiased shopping advice from people just like you.

The IAB Ad Unit Guidelines are intended for marketers, agencies and media companies for use in the creating, planning, buying and selling of interactive marketing and advertising. The IAB's Ad Sizes Working Group meets on a bi-annual basis to review proposed new ad units and issue updated voluntary guidelines as appropriate. The process whereby these new units are reviewed and considered can be downloaded here.

I've been a big fan of Crutchfield's marketing for a long time - I consider them to be one of the top retailers in that regard. Here's a perfect example of why: Crutchfield recently ran this email incorporating ratings and reviews (an effective and underused tactic for retail email), and includes content that speaks to various buying modes effectively.

Trust in word-of-mouth recommendations is at an all-time high. Public relations firm Edleman says in its 2008 Trust Barometer study that "a person like me" is still the most trusted source for information about a company and its services or products.

Facebook recenly released a guidebook for businesses titled: Facebook Insider's Guide to Viral Marketing. Don't get too excited about the title, just because you set up a Fan Page for your business and buy a few social ads does not mean you'll unleash a profit-virus, or even make a ripple in the pond. But the guide does help you understand what Facebook has made available for you and how to get a Page all set up.

If you've added an item to Amazon's cart without purchasing in the same session, Amazon remembers. For a long time. On my last trip to the Amazon, I added a couple new items to buy. Not realizing I had left some products in my cart, I was greeted with this notice on the cart review page:

To follow up our recent post on customer motivation and optimizing your website for hunters (e.g. moms armed with Christmas lists), I want to show you some examples beyond the search box and navigation menu. I'll use a personal story - I'm in the market for a car GPS. Previously knowing nothing about them (features, brands, prices etc), so I started off a howser. I decided I want to check Crutchfield (great product filters and product descriptions), Amazon (access to more products, the seller marketplace and more customer reviews) and Best Buy Canada (Canadian pricing, option to pick up in store).

So, it wasn't exactly Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood ("I've abandoned my CAAARRRRRRT!!!"), but when Jeffrey told me today that he still hadn't bought his nephew the Fisher Price Grow to Pro Basketball hoop after two weeks of putting it off, I assumed he was being dramatic. Jeffrey claimed to be sticker shocked from shipping cost inflation, a common reaction while shopping online. One minute, you think you know the whole price. Then - bam - you proceed to checkout, only to find that the price has shot up as much as 25%. Was Jeff being cheap? Probably. But it's understandable. The truth is that online shopping has spoiled us. When Amazon ships for free - at least it feels that way if you buy into Amazon Prime - and when Zappos wants you to return those shoes (yes, really), anything less feels like a cheap plastic substitute for the real thing. ToysRUs.com does so many things right. The product image views are clear and show multiple angles. The customer reviews are helpful and thoroughly integrated. I could go on, but the important thing - the reason they still haven't sold Jeffrey a Fisher Price Grow to Pro Basketball hoop - is that they set a poor expectation of total cost before checkout.

Yesterday, I posted the Missing Google Analytics Manual. That was relatively easy to put together since there are so many wonderful resources already written about it. However, as I tried to put together this post, I realized a real gap in the knowledge base available. I'll be posting this as an ongoing series, that I might turn into a best practices whitepaper. The "Voice of the Customer" (VOC), can be obtained in many ways: surveys, reviews, customer requests, interviews, focus groups, field reports, etc. In order to find those golden nuggets that can lead to improvement you need to start with the segment of customers that like you the least.

Many retailers allow site customers to sort site search, category and sub-category results by price, average customer review, top sellers, new arrivals to name a few. While this is great for usability, it's also an opportunity to glean information about your customer which you can apply to merchandising and personalization on home pages, product pages, promotional banners and even email campaigns.

Here are 5 key, unanswered questions (beyond shipping costs) of the shopping cart: 1. Do you offer alternate forms of payment (aside from credit card)? 2. Are you safe and secure? 3. Why are you asking for this information? 4. Do I have to set up an account to buy? 5. Do I get to review my order before we transact?

One of the most important pages on your ecommerce Web site is the customer service landing pages. This page often has contact information, and maybe even FAQs. The idea is to make it easy to find, and ensure that the information on the customer service landing page is easy for the customer to use.

In online shopping, it is common to sign up for an account. Often, an ecommerce Web site will send you an email welcoming you to the site. But it doesn't always happen. And while it can seem annoying to have an inbox cluttered by welcome emails, I think it's a good thing to send a "welcome" email. And not just because I had to register on 36 Web sites in order to get the 20 examples I provide here.

Many good ecommerce Web sites know that the product details page can have a material say in whether customers stick around - and even whether they come back. Customers like to learn as much as possible about a product before buying, and product details pages can allow customer to explore a product.