It’s nearly 2 years since we opened up the eSpares website to ratings and reviews. All of our customers can share their opinions about the products they’ve bought. Since then we’ve had tens of thousands of reviews of the parts we sell.

The reviews are moderated before they go live on the site, just to make sure that there’s no swearing or anything offensive. But so long as the review relates to the product and your experience of fitting or using it, it goes up on the site; irrespective of whether it’s positive or negative.

Now, you might think that negative reviews are something that we’d not welcome. After all, everyone prefers praise to criticism (even if the disapproval is of the products and not us!). But it’s probably the negative reviews that have had more of an impact on our business than the positive ones. Here are some reasons why:

Credibility
If all the reviews of a product are glowingly positive then people can be a bit suspicious about their authenticity. A mix of positive and negative reviews shows that they can be trusted.

The More Information the Better
There may be important information in those negative reviews that will inform other customers about whether it’s the right product for them or whether they can fit it themselves. For instance, if a customer can see from other customers’ reviews that a part is particularly difficult to fit, they may choose to call a professional repair person rather than tackling it themselves. We’d much rather that than have a frustrated customer.

We Know What Videos to Shoot
The eSpares website is now packed with great videos that show you how to fit spare parts yourself. We read all the reviews and this informs us of where to focus our efforts in producing new videos. If we see that customers are frustrated with fitting a certain product, we’ll go and shoot a video to help show other customers how to do it.

Product Quality Issues
Although we check all of the spares we send out, it’s usually only with use that quality issues come to light. Customers don’t always return items that have manufacturing faults, but they do tell us through reviews.

If a product gets poor reviews then we’re able to see that very quickly and can work with the manufacturer to improve the quality. This happened recently with a batch of dishwasher cutlery baskets that had a manufacturing fault. We were able to identify the faulty batch and get them replaced quickly because of the prompt feedback from our customers.

So, I’d like to say a huge thank you to anyone who has taken the time to leave a review on the eSpares site. It helps us to make the site better every day. We really appreciate it.

You can, of course, leave a comment about this post. All reviews are welcome – positive and negative!

Tags: Customer Reviews, eSpares