How many times has it occurred to each one of us to abandon our shopping cart because the site we were buying from did not inspire complete confidence. According to data from the Beymard Institute, 17% of shopping cart abandonment cases have to do precisely with the fact that users consider an eCommerce site to be unsafe. A problem that eShoppingAdvisor proposes to solve through a system that is today increasingly indispensable for both users and businesses that sell online and want to increase their online reputation. We’re talking about reviews.
eShoppingAdvisor, however, is much more than that. To better understand what it is and how it operates, we interviewed Andrea Carboni, CEO and Co-founder of what he defines as “the guide to safe and sustainable shopping”.
Andrea, let’s start with a curiosity. How did the idea of eShoppingAdvisor come about and what needs does it aim to address?
The idea was born from a provocation I made to Andrea Ghiani, a childhood friend and current CFO and Co-Founder, to whom I asked: “Can’t we come up with an idea that has a positive impact on the lives of people and businesses?” The next day he came back and told me: ‘I just bought a sailboat and I am trying my patience by wasting no small amount of time in finding reliable eCommerce, which saves me money and from which I can safely buy my first equipment. We need a TripAdvisor of eCommerce’. I was immediately enthusiastic about the idea, since after an initial market survey we did not find any such solution, so we decided to continue with more in-depth analysis and found some obvious macro-problems.
It still takes too long for users to find niche products or services on the web, they do not trust little-known eCommerce, especially if it is small or medium-sized, and they tend not to trust customer reviews either as they suspect they may be fake or in what way guided and manipulated. These problems are also reflected in the eCommerce world, which therefore needs innovative tools to increase revenues and enhance its visibility and credibility in the eyes of customers. In this context, it finally emerges that some 300,000 small and medium-sized physical shops are still unable to use the tools to complete their digitisation process on the web. We therefore set to work immediately, identifying as our first solution a real ‘TripAdvisor of eCommerce’, i.e. a single portal in which we surveyed all Italian eCommerce shops with an information showcase, reviews and security rating based on the analysis of the reviews collected on eShoppingAdvisor and on the web, but also on the analysis of the technological infrastructure of the site. Today, we are working on making the rating even more robust by analysing the health of the company owning the eCommerce, so as to guarantee a completely safe web shopping experience.
Over time, we have also started to import products from the stores by creating a reference guide for safe, sustainable and quality online shopping, dedicated to small and medium-sized eCommerce, i.e. a portal that helps people find any product on the web and then buy it safely and review it, as well as a set of tools that helps shops to constantly improve their visibility and credibility on the web with a strong impact on sales, thanks to a search engine and a SaaS for the automatic collection, management and analysis of reviews from their customers and others.
To summarise, on the B2C side, those who already know where to buy a product online search eShoppingAdvisor.com for the eCommerce, consult the reviews and rating and decide whether to complete the purchase, while those who don’t know where to buy do a search by product from which it emerges who sells it, comparing the various eCommerce. On the B2B side, our target audience is small and medium-sized eCommerce businesses that are unable to stand out on the web and are looking for ways to increase their visibility and credibility on the web in order to sell more.
According to your estimates, how many eCommerce shops are active in Italy that, in percentage terms, invest in online reputation?
With our Marketing and IT department, we have over the years carried out a real census of Italian eCommerce stores in order to put them all on the portal to help users find them easily and review them. Each store has its own dedicated page, i.e. a real public showcase with reviews, its reputational rating and, if registered, with available discount coupons and all the eCommerce’s contact information. Users can then review any online business, acting as a warning to anyone about to buy from a scam eCommerce and directing online purchases towards the best eCommerce.
With respect to the percentage of shops that invest in online reputation, our data confirms that which emerged from the Casaleggio & Associati survey. In fact, we note that at least 28% of eCommerce shops active in Italy periodically invest in increasing awareness thanks to reviews, aware that these are a fundamental factor in pushing users to purchase by increasing the percentage of trust and fully exploiting the lever of social proof.
What are the advantages, both for the consumer and for a seller, of using the platform?
The advantages are manifold. Consumers get free access to a real guide to safe, sustainable and quality online shopping. In fact, the entire eShoppingAdvisor team works every day to guarantee users the most serene online shopping experience possible, drawing the boundaries of a unique place within which the user feels protected without any fear of being subjected to scams or inefficiency.
In addition to reviews, users who pass through our portal before purchasing online can find thousands of coupons made available by thousands of registered eShops. These are real discounts on products made available by the best eCommerce shops, which, in short, over time have generated a sort of Black Friday active all year round.
Finally, with eShoppingAdvisor, users become part of a real community of reviewers – the first in Italy – following an internal career path that allows them to accumulate points and receive more and more coupons. A virtuous circle that helps both users who want to save money by buying online and eCommerce to make a name for themselves by acquiring new customers.
With regard to sellers, our business solution pursues a clear direction: to increase the visibility and credibility of deserving eCommerce by constantly improving their web-reputation, with a strong impact on sales. To pursue this goal, we have designed a certified protocol called “VR-CREA” (acronym for Visibility, Collect, Certify, Respond, Expose and Analyse), successfully tested with the more than 7000 eShops that today use the eShoppingAdvisor services and that every day collect, manage and analyse reviews from their customers to emerge and prosper in their target market.
In a recent interview you stated that ‘eShoppingAdvisor aims to become the reference guide for safe and sustainable shopping’. What are the main tools and technological supports that eShoppingAdvisor offers merchants?
Today we offer a solution that can be easily integrated with just a few clicks on the eCommerce site through our plugin, which generates countless benefits through specific features. Among the main ones:
- Getting eCommerce products seen by the users – thousands of them – who use the eShoppingAdvisor portal every day;
- Receiving qualified traffic and positioning in the top positions of Google/Bing searches;
- Enrich the eCommerce storefront with all the details and information needed to gain credibility and more visits;
- Automatically collect customer reviews through our automated system of sending relevant post-purchase invitations, not only via email but also via SMS and WhatsApp;
- Having an advanced aggregation system of third-party reviews (Facebook, EBay, Google, etc.) that allows you to consult from a single place all the reviews received on the web and to be able to respond by obtaining the relative publication both on eShoppingAdvisor and on the platform of origin;
- Retain customers with our automatic post-review and post-purchase discount coupon sending system;
- Publish specific discount coupons by making them available to the ESA community to attract new customers;
- Have an advanced review management and moderation system that includes validation and certification as well as automatic response;
- Generate more trust in users visiting the eCommerce site by displaying badges with the latest user reviews helping the eShop to increase conversions;
- Have a detailed analysis system on strengths and weaknesses from the analysis of reviews in order to improve the entire sales process over time;
- To be accompanied step by step by a team of eCommerce experts who offer excellent assistance by constantly helping the eCommerce on its growth path.
“Proximity’ is a term close to our heart, it is part of our very name. eShoppingAdvisor can also be of great help to proximity commerce. Can you explain how?
eShoppingAdvisor is a vertical project on small and medium-sized eCommerce. This means that our entire business revolves around activities that, like GEL Proximity, have made proximity their mission. In fact, in our technology roadmap we have included the implementation of solutions capable of helping these eCommerce businesses manage proximity sales through Click&Collect. Thus, we want to ensure that an eCommerce can use proximity services, such as those provided by GEL Proximity, to deliver goods and allow users to collect them at the shop or its physical proximity points. In addition, we are engaged in joint projects aimed at helping the more than 300,000 SMEs that still do not sell online to complete the digitisation process.
In a recent in-depth article, we talked about Online Reputation and the importance of reviews. Based on your experience, how important is it for users to be able to use alternative delivery solutions such as Locker and Pick-up Points? How much can logistics services at the check-out affect the reputation of an online store?
Over the years, by consulting and analysing user reviews on a daily basis with the team in charge, we have noticed that the presence of a customised delivery option is crucial, as it is quite welcome in the eyes of users as it fulfils a real daily need. For an eCommerce business today, however, it is vitally important to customise services to meet everyone’s needs, accommodating the particular needs of users. It is no coincidence that the reviews are mostly positive in cases where the eShop offers proximity shipping services and especially if the delivery times and methods are satisfactory. Including in the checkout the possibility of having a product also shipped to a Pick-up Point means in fact allowing even those who do not have well-defined time availability to be sure of receiving the parcel exactly where they want it, without fear of being absent when the courier arrives for delivery.
More generally, what aspects do users most take into account when evaluating an online store?
Customers of an eCommerce store base their evaluation on the purchasing experience and the subsequent order management process (delivery and possible return). Specifically, we have detected and mapped over time six specific evaluation parameters, which are the result of our long-standing experience in the industry and for which we ask the user for a rating, which then generates the overall rating, called the ‘ESA SCORE’, as the average of the reviews and additional factors that our algorithm considers, such as the number of reviews and their historicity. The six parameters whose individual average rating generates the overall rating are: the clarity of the website, the quality of the product or service, the payment service, the delivery, the customer service and, finally, the intention to recommend to other users the eCommerce site from which the purchase was made.
On average, how many reviews does an eCommerce ‘collect’ and how can they be managed?
There is no real average as the amount of reviews received is more or less directly proportional to the number of orders placed. Therefore, the amount of reviews depends in principle on the size of the eCommerce.
In terms of managing reviews, what eCommerce companies are most concerned about is undoubtedly the possibility of receiving criticism. The advanced services of eShoppingAdvisor allow access to a complete system of management and moderation of reviews, which first of all allows to “freeze” critical reviews for 7 days, inhibiting their immediate display on the portal in order to give the eCommerce Manager time and opportunity to resolve or clarify the issues that generated this type of feedback, through a public and private messaging system. After the seven-day waiting period, regardless of whether the issue is resolved or not, the review will be published, unless the user has directly decided to delete or edit it. Ours is in fact a strict line of transparent feedback management.
Finally, eCommerce providers and users themselves can report the presence of any distorting elements to identify fake or otherwise dubious reviews, for which our intervention is immediate and as resolving as possible.
Among our next priorities is also the integration of artificial intelligence systems, digital identity analysis and online registration of reviews certified via blockchain, so as to ensure that reviews and reviewers are as safe and reliable as possible.
A topic we have recently addressed on our blog is mobile couponing, one of the services offered to users by eShoppingAdvisor. For an eCommerce, what are the benefits of applying this strategy?
For eCommerce, coupons are a very useful lever for building customer loyalty and generating new sales. Through the use of our advanced services, eShops can send a coupon to the user immediately after receiving their review, thus generating further growth in terms of visibility, credibility and online reputation. In addition to automatically sending dedicated coupons to users who write a review, eShoppingAdvisor also provides access to a catalogue of hundreds of public discount coupons, which can be used to incentivise the first purchase as well as subsequent purchases by users.
The credibility and veracity of reviews are crucial to gaining the trust of consumers. So how can you distinguish a genuine review from a ‘fake’ one?
The eShoppingAdvisor infrastructure has several parameters and control systems, both automatic and manual, to distinguish a genuine review from a fake one. Our strength, therefore, lies in subjecting each review to both checks, with the aim of validating and certifying reviews that are issued by real users who have had an authentic shopping experience. For example, some of the elements that our systems analyse to detect a fake review are the presence of an isolated review with a tenor opposite to (almost) all the others; excessive particularism; professional photographs of the product, often taken from the web; excessive enthusiasm in the user’s tone; too few reviews; discrediting the eCommerce in favour of a competitor; misspelled phrases repeated several times. For all these reasons, we believe that, to date, eShoppingAdvisor is the most complete and innovative solution for eShoopers seeking online safety and for small and medium-sized eCommerce businesses that need to emerge and thrive in an increasingly competitive market.
We would like to thank Andrea Carboni and look forward to the next GEL Proximity interviews, always on our blog!
If you run an eCommerce channel and want to find out more about our services and how we can help you, contact us! We are ready to answer all your questions.
