Today, the digital association Bitkom published new survey results on the importance of customer reviews on the Internet. According to the results, reviews are considered the most important decision-making criterion for 54 percent of German consumers when shopping online.
For this representative study, Bitkom Research on behalf of the digital association Bitkom conducted an online survey in October 2021 with a total of 1,109 people in Germany aged 16 and above, including 1,048 online shoppers, about how they find out about a product before buying it online.
These are further details:
- Most German online shoppers (54 percent) said they checked relevant product reviews before making an online purchase.
- Information on retailer or manufacturer websites was considered the second most important decision-making criterion for 44 percent of respondents.
- Other sources of information and decision-making aids when shopping online were price comparison sites (42 percent), conversations with friends, family, or acquaintances (39 percent), test aggregators, i.e. websites that compare the results of various product tests (36 percent), test reports on TV, online or in print media (32 percent) and social media (17 percent).
- Only 11 percent of consumers gathered their information in a local store before buying a product online.
Bernhard Rohleder, Bitkom CEO, commented: "When buying online, people rely primarily on the experience and opinions of others. Transparent, comprehensible and independent reviews make a very significant contribution to trust in online retailing. Customers benefit from this, as do retailers and platforms: Those who receive many good independent reviews make themselves attractive to new groups of buyers and can thus prove the quality of their offers more successfully than through professional advertising. The common belief that the local retailer has the consulting work and the online store makes the sales is wrong. Much more often, customers are led from the Internet to the store around the corner than vice versa."
Source: Bitkom
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