It is crucial for any e-commerce merchant, whether they use Shopify, WooCommerce, Square, Wix, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce (Magento), or Squarespace, to display product reviews and customer testimonials early and often on their online storefront. Why? Let’s think about the fundamental difference between a brick-and-mortar store and an e-commerce store. With a brick-and-mortar store, a customer can physically walk in, talk to a salesperson, ask questions, and hold a product in his or her hands. If the product is a clothing item, for example, the prospective customer can try it on to see how it looks and how it fits. If it runs small, they can purchase a size up. In an e-commerce store, however, a potential customer essentially has to trust that the product description and product images are accurate and that the product they receive will match their expectations in terms of quality. Ultimately, every e-commerce customer has to make a purchase decision based on much less information. The threshold for building trust and giving a potential customer the confidence to place an order is, therefore, much higher. Product reviews and customer testimonials are, hands-down, the best way to build this trust. They create what is known as social proof. Authentic product reviews and testimonials from customers’ verified purchases demonstrate and serve to validate and substantiate the product.
Likewise, based on data from Storeleads.app, Instafeed is currently installed on 210,922 Shopify stores. Personally, I love this app, and I recommend it almost universally to clients. In the modern digital landscape, there are a variety of channels through which to reach a potential customer, and the more of these channels an e-commerce merchant utilizes, the better they will be. For some customers, email marketing is the best way to communicate. For others, it is through social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, or Pinterest.
If a merchant is using Instagram, then integrating their feed directly into the online storefront is exceptionally valuable. When we think of e-commerce conversion rate optimization (CRO), we think in terms of orders placed. Ideally, every visitor to our online store would place an order. Obviously, this is not realistic. However, a conversion can be thought of in a broader context as any action a visitor takes that increases the likelihood they will place an order in the future. So, if someone visits your site and does not make a purchase but starts following your Instagram account, this could be considered a conversion. Now, you have another channel via which to reach them. I consider these indirect conversions as opposed to direct conversions, which are purchases, and they have value as well.
By utilizing the Instafeed app, a visitor to Parchevita is made aware that they have an Instagram account. They can then choose to follow the Instagram account, and, as we did in this case, it can be incorporated directly into the design of the site itself. Parchevita has great content on their Instagram, and we used Instafeed as a design element to show it off.
