Feedback Q&A: Andrew Brown of DualMedia

Andrew Brown heads DualMedia, a company who create ecommerce sites specialising in RWD and SEO. One client recently sold their ecommerce store for millions of pounds after a redesign using his service.

He also runs his own ecommerce sites such as Le-Beau lingerie. With experience of good and bad feedback we asked him for his tips on the best tools and practices for ecommerce.

Questions devised by Martina Mercer

What feedback tools do you recommend for ecommerce sites?

There are a lot of automated systems available at the moment that allow customers to write a review of their experience once they have made a purchase.

We prefer Trust Pilot for Le-Beau as it sends an invite to the customer approx. 4 days after a purchase has been made, this allows only the sites genuine customers to leave honest feedback. However if your site and service are not up to scratch, this tool could do more damage than good.

How do you suggest ecommerce get over bad feedback?

Feedback is never going to be 100% for any site, and we know this, sometimes things are just out of our control, once the item is dispatched it’s in the hands of the courier and items sometimes do get lost, damaged or arrive late, especially in winter when the weather stops couriers getting around the country. No matter what courier you use, you face the same problems.

One of the biggest factors we used to see with E-commerce sites that was driving complaints or negative reviews was in-accurate or non-existing stock control systems. Sites would offer 48 hours delivery but items would not say whether or not they were in stock. Le-beau Lingerie had this problem back in 2010.

So we built a live-stock control system that showed live stock information for the products and would only let you “Pre-Order” out of stock items specifying a realistic delivery time, this reduced their complaints and enquiry rates by over 80% literally overnight.

To get over negative feedback it’s important to respond quickly, solve the problem and let the customer know that you’ve listened. Refunds or discounts can also help a reviewer remove negative feedback.

We advise our clients to start afresh, to cover bad feedback by ensuring service and products are 100% from that point while encouraging customers to leave reviews. Many people only read the most recent reviews while one bad piece of feedback can actually improve a site as long as it has been resolved.

When building sites how important is the ability for customers to leave reviews?

I think it’s very important that sites show genuine reviews for not only the company, but the products too, if you are a good company with nothing to hide, then surely this can only install confidence in the visitors and increase their chances of buying the most suitable product and therefore leaving a satisfactory review.

We recommend E-commerce sites to receive and publish both company and product reviews. The company reviews can be dealt with by a 3rd party company such as trust pilot which show people “This is a trustworthy source of goods” and show their abilities for their customer service.

Then I think sites should also show individual product reviews allowing the customers to share their experience of the actual purchase. Buying from a company with a good company rating for price and delivery is one thing, but it does not guarantee that the product you are buying will be as good.

Do you think ecommerce marketers should moderate reviews?

I think it would be fair to moderate them as far as to replace / blank out offensive words or banned words, and possibly to correct spellings but other than this, absolutely not.

How has feedback helped Le-Beau?

No company enjoys receiving bad reviews but for us they really helped us streamline our offerings as we found out through feedback what the customer liked and didn’t like.

For instance, sizes can be an issue when buying online, customers know that when shopping in the High Street a 12 that may fit them in Top Shop won’t necessarily fit them in Miss Selfridges. We had returns due to sizes and so added more detailed guides to help people choose the right size first.

We also realised that there was a very high demand for plus sized lingerie as customers would complain that we only offered up to a size 14. With the average woman being a size 16 it was imperative that we added more sizes and now offer lingerie up to a size 22.

Along with this, we also include plus sized models in our advertising. This has received excellent feedback while allowing customers to see what products looks like on a real person rather than a supermodel.