53 Online Reviews Statistics Entrepreneurs Need to Know in 2022

If you’re managing a Shopify store, you know that building a strong connection with online shoppers is crucial for your success.

In 2022, it’s more important than ever…

Talking about rising customer acquisition costs and delayed shipments.

Trustworthy brands will survive.

The more you can prove that your business is worth the time and money of your customers, the more likely they are going to make a purchase.

Visual online reviews are an easy yet effective way to gain and grow your customers' trust.

That’s why you’ll get all the statistics you need to be equipped for a strong ecommerce year of 2022!

Online Review Statistics #1: What You Need to Know

If you have only a couple of minutes to read today, this section is for you.

Let’s start with the shocking ones:

If your ecommerce brand disappoints a customer, they will share this bad experience with 9 to 15 people. 

That’s not what you want to happen, right?

Okay, but what happens if this person doesn’t only talk to their real-life friends, but also shares this experience online?

Well, according to Inc.com, it takes around 40 positive reviews to compensate for the impact of a negative one.

That’s tough. But there’s hope:

Almost all the people who take the time to read reviews (97%), also read the responses of a brand…

And 56% of customers also said, the response to a review made them change their mind. That’s your chance!

This basically means one thing for you: Respond to reviews. Whether they’re positive or negative. You can only win.

Talking about winning:

81% of customers will wait longer for their order to arrive if the product has reviews.

This can be super helpful if you want to reduce customer support requests or running a dropshipping or print-on-demand business.

Thing about this is that many customers consider five stars only reviews as “too good to be true”. Best-selling products have an average rating of 4.2 to 4.7 stars.

If you now think that you’ll need tons of reviews to impress your customers, let me tell you that you’re wrong. And that’s a good thing!

According to Brightlocal, 57% of online shoppers expect at least 11 online reviews.

Online Review Statistics #2: How Reviews Affect Your Sales

Visual reviews and reviews in general don't only look good on your Shopify store, but can also heavily impact your sales. In a very positive way.

Let’s take Volant - a Shopify Plus store selling aroma diffuser - as an example here. They collected 4,700 visual online reviews in just 1 year and went from $0 to $2 million in sales in the same period of time.

One of the two co-founders, Daniel, said: “This success wouldn’t be possible without Loox’s world-class solution. We’ve collected thousands of reviews [...]”.

That being said, it’s no wonder that a hundred reviews displayed on your store can increase the conversion by 37%.

But that’s not the end of the good news.

Research shows that photo reviews convert at an average of 91% more than text-only reviews.

And nearly 60% of all customers would pay more if the company has good reviews.

In fact, 31% of consumers spend even more on products that have excellent online reviews.

Are you selling higher-priced products? Great!

According to research, expensive goods convert better by 380% if they have reviews. 

If you’re brave enough to combine negative reviews and positive ones, you can increase sales by 85%.

Negative reviews are not necessarily a bad thing. Everyone has them. But trying to turn the bad ones into positive reviews can be worth the effort. Even if it’s a long and slow process.

Increasing the star ratings of your products by 0.1 can already increase your conversions by 25%.

<a href="https://loox.io/app/website" class="link-to-button" target="_blank">Increase Your Sales With Social Proof Now</a>

Online Review Statistics #3: It's All About The People

Depending on your target audience, online reviews will affect your business differently.

First things first, gender doesn’t matter at all. Male and female shoppers are equally likely to write a review.

Let’s say you’re selling products to 25 - 34 year olds.

More than 50% of that particular audience writes online reviews about businesses or products. That’s a lot. For every two sales you’re making you’ll get one review.

Something interesting:

Around two thirds of all Americans trust online reviews from strangers more than a personal recommendation from their ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend. Ouch.

If you want to learn more about reviews vs. personal recommendations, you will learn more about this later in this post.

Online Review Statistics #4: How Your Customers Act

As an ecommerce store owner/manager, it’s crucial to know how online shoppers will behave to review-related actions.

First, if you don’t have any reviews, 15% of all online shoppers won’t give you a chance. They just won’t trust you.

Considering that Statista forecasts a total online shopping revenue in 2025 of more than 1.3 trillion dollars, a 15% default-loss means a lost opportunity that costs you a market size of 195 billion dollars.

And that’s just the data for the United States. Think about that for a second.

If you decide to show reviews on your product pages, make sure to have at least five reviews. Why? Well, consumers are four times more likely to make a purchase then.

In a similar study, Brightlocal found that 70% of all consumers will read at least four online reviews before making a purchase.

For 90% of all shoppers, less than 10 reviews are enough to form an opinion about an online store.

And almost all of them read these online reviews very early in the buying process.

So far, so good.

But how do you ensure that you have reviews to display? The easy answer: Just ask.

72% of all shoppers said that they will review a product or business if they were asked.

It gets better!

Almost 24% of all customers said that they leave multiple reviews (up to four) per year.

If they leave a review, they’re most likely to leave it for excellent products. No one has time for bad products.

In fact, 47 percent of all internet users, which are 2.29 billion people worldwide, said that they write reviews about products, companies and services every single month.

As you can imagine, not all of them will leave positive reviews. Some will complain about products, services, shipping times and anything else that they didn’t like.

Which is totally fine. It’s normal and makes a product and store more trustworthy.

You just need to know that 94% of consumers avoided a company because of negative reviews.

Meaning, in 2022, customer satisfaction is more important than ever.

The behavior of customers is one part. Now, let’s take a look at the expected behavior of a brand (yes, that’s you).

Online Review Statistics #5: How You Need to Act

If you display product reviews in your store, you expect a customer to behave in a certain way. But the customers also expect a certain behavior of your brand. This section will give you insights about what you should (and shouldn’t) do.

First, we can’t stress enough how important it is to respond to reviews.

30% of shoppers are going to trust a company more, if they respond to reviews.

In fact, businesses will grow the amount of reviews they’re getting by 12% if they respond to their customers.

If you fail to respond, 15% of your customers might churn away. Bye-bye.

I know, I know…

Sometimes it’s hard to respond nicely to negative reviews. That’s why many people stay away from it and ignore them at all.

That’s also what this study found out. Businesses are just more likely to respond to positive reviews.

Here’s a fact: 62 percent of shoppers even said that they won’t support companies that engage in review censorship. 

This means that it’s expected that brands don’t respond to negative ones which gives you the chance to stand out from the crowd.

Actually, people are not leaving reviews without a reason. They don’t just want to complain. They want to give real feedback. 

Unfortunately, 63% of consumers who left negative feedback said they never heard back of a brand.

Convinced that you even need to respond to negative reviews?

Then hurry up! 53% of consumers expect a business to respond to negative reviews within the first week.

All of these online review statistics show you that reviews are no longer a one-way path. It’s about engagement and brand building.

<a href="https://loox.io/app/website" class="link-to-button" target="_blank">Be An Engaging Brand With Loox Now</a>

Online Review Statistics #6: Bye-bye Expensive Ads

Rising customer acquisition costs are scary. No doubt about that.

Here are two frightening quotes:

“Digital marketing is more expensive and less lucrative than ever before.” - Hailey Ho, Content Marketing Lead at Shopify

and…

“Some brands are seeing ad costs go like five times higher than it used to be to drive the same amount of traffic.” - Leon Hughs, Associate Partner at Piper Private Equity.

2022 won’t be a cheap year.

The solution? A customer acquisition channel that doesn’t rely on expensive advertising.

With that being said, 83% of all online shoppers don’t trust advertisements anyway. But they do trust online reviews.

That comes at no surprise.

A brand can brag about their product all day long. But that doesn’t mean it’s actually good. A customer, however, will only tell good things about a brand or product, if they REALLY liked it.

That’s the power of reviews.

Also, 70% of consumers trust online reviews more than any ad when they want to learn more about a product or business.

Compare your customer acquisition costs on your store by trying Loox for free here.‍

Online Review Statistics #7: You Need to do This in 2022

So far you’ve read through a ton of online review statistics. 

Yes, they’re all interesting. But most of them are not really controllable by you (except from showcasing reviews on your store).

That’s why we have this section now. Here you’ll only find statistics that include facts which directly relate to you and your efforts.

It’s your “review to-do list”.

Having a “verified buyer” badge right aside the reviews can increase your chances to make a sale by 15 percent.

By default, Loox will display a badge next to reviews from verified buyers so you don’t have to hire a developer. Get the verified buyer badge that builds trust in your store here.

In case you wonder, 73% of shoppers trust written reviews more than just a simple star-rating system.

If you want to nail the reviews game and actually benefit from them, you need to constantly ask your customers to leave reviews.

85% of online shoppers told Brightlocal that online reviews that are older than three months are irrelevant to them.

Since you don’t want to spend endless hours every day sending 1:1 emails to every customer, an automated review request system comes in handy.

And if you do ask for reviews, ask for photos and/or videos.

Why?

Well, 62% of all consumers are more likely to make purchases if they see others (real customers) using/consuming the products of an online store.

Good thing that Loox does that for you.

So, try Loox for free here, offer a discount in return for a review and activate the reminder emails.

A few clicks that will have a big impact.

Online Review Statistics #8: Relevant Places For Reviews

Consumers are not only reading reviews on your store.

There are several other places where they want to learn more about a business or product.

This section will reveal these places and show you how you can benefit from this.

Let’s dive in.

The big G, alias Google, is the most popular among all the places where people look for reviews. Around 59% of all shoppers go to Google when searching for information about a product or business.

There’s another big player where people look for reviews: Facebook.

According to Revlocal, Facebook reviews account for 50% of a customer’s purchase decisions.

You know what’s great about that?

Loox automatically allows you to display your reviews on Google Shopping and on Facebook.

It’s just a matter of a few clicks.

For some people, Google and Facebook isn’t enough.

7% of shoppers reach out to blogs and podcasts in order to get more information about a desired product or service.

So you better have great relationships with bloggers. It’s important in so many ways.

Online Review Statistics #9: Get on Top of Google & Co.

By now you probably already know that online reviews have a huge impact on customer’s purchase decisions.

That’s good.

But did you know that you can also actually get more traffic from reviews?

Well, here’s how:

Most and foremost, businesses that send their customers a direct link for them to leave a review, their Google ranking improves.

Shopify stated that online reviews represent around 10 percent of Google’s algorithm for page ranking.

And… just so you can’t say we didn’t tell you:

The companies that rank at the top 3 positions on Google’s local search engine have an average of 47 reviews.

Online Review Statistics #10: Would You Trust a Stranger?

Actually, we only have one statistic in this section.

But this one is so important (and surprising), that we didn’t want it to slip through the cracks.

Now, get a pen and paper and prepare for some notes.

Almost 8 of 10 shoppers said that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family members.

This is a stunning number.

Imagine you’d run around on the streets and ask ten people whom they trust more when it comes to purchase decisions. Their parents or strangers from the internet.

Eight people will say “strangers”.

That’s crazy. But you, as the store owner/manager, can use this knowledge to grow your business.

<a href="https://loox.io/app/website" class="link-to-button" target="_blank">Let Strangers Recommend Your Products Now</a>

Online Review Statistics #11: Go Mobile!

In 2016 there were 3.7 billion smartphone users.

In 2021 this number grew to 6.4 billion.

But that’s not even the end.

Statista predicts that by the end of 2026, there will be 7.5 billion smartphone users on our planet.

That’s almost the world’s population right now.

With that being said, taking care of mobile commerce is more important than ever.

But what does that mean for your reviews?

Let’s start with a crazy one.

Google officially said that people have watched over 500,000 years of YouTube video reviews on their mobile devices from 2015 to 2017.

60% of all online consumers check social media and blog reviews on their mobile devices before making a purchase decision.

These two facts alone should speak for themselves.

But there’s more.

Compared to reading an online review on a computer, reading reviews on a mobile device increases the chance to get people to make a purchase in your store by 127%.

93% of consumers that begin their research on a mobile device end up making the purchase.

You can’t really afford missing out on displaying reviews on mobile devices.

Online Review Statistics #12: The Future of Reviews

All of the statistics from above are still true for 2022.

But there are two short trends that we’d like you to know to be prepared for a bright future.

First, 49% of all consumers believe the quantity of reviews is important. Back in 2016, only 35% of the asked people cared about the number of online reviews.

If you want to stay relevant, you need to get your customers to leave reviews.

Then, another interesting trend, the average online review is 65% shorter compared to the reviews that have been written in 2010. 

Maybe this is caused by the decreasing attention-span of website visitors.

In any way, you should account that into your considerations around online reviews for 2022.

Final Thoughts

People don’t want to be the first one to buy a product.

They really want to see other people with your product before they spend their hard earned money.

Great product descriptions and sales copy are important. But they can’t replace the real and honest feedback of a person who was brave enough to buy the product.

So get out there and ask for reviews.

And if you want to do it in a scalable way, we are here for you so you don’t have to send photo and video review request emails to each and every customer manually.