According to a PowerReviews.com study (which you can download below),  11% of online merchants said that they saw an increase in conversion of over 20% by adding customer reviews to their site.

Q: What is the overall increase in conversion rate that you have seen as a result of adding customer reviews to your site?

A very interesting insight you may also pick up from the above chart is that more than 63% didn’t know if having reviews increased their conversion rates. This got me thinking about why that could be as we know that Amazon.com built much of their success on having customer reviews.

Possible Reasons:

• they have had reviews on their website since their launch, making it difficult to determine if this has increased conversion rates unless they use a 3rd party solution with management and reporting capabilities

• don’t have enough reviews on their website and generally having difficulties to get reviews from their customers. For that reason they didn’t see having reviews as a beneficial tool helping them with conversions. If you are struggling to get reviews you can read in this post how to attract customers reviews.

• or as mentioned in point 1, their review solution doesn’t have management and reporting capabilities, thus it’s difficult to measure, especially if other improvements have been make on a website at the same time, including continuously changing sales offers on their website.

You can download the full study here as pdf.