Revamping Customer Reviews
Context
On a refurbished marketplace like Back Market, trust is essential. Users often hesitate to buy due to concerns around product quality and reliability. While reviews should help reduce that friction, our existing system had major weaknesses:
Reviews were too generic, tied to full orders rather than specific products.
They lacked structured insights on key concerns like battery or screen condition.
The experience wasn’t SEO-optimized, limiting organic acquisition.
Problem
User pain points
The absence of item-level reviews reduced user confidence and hurt conversion.
Non-SEO-optimized reviews missed opportunities for organic acquisition.
Business challenge
The lack of detailed, item-level reviews lowered conversion rates
Reviews are not optimized for search engines, missing an opportunity for organic growth.
Impact
+10% Time spent on product pages (engagement)
+3% Add to Cart rate (conversion)
+12% Organic traffic (via SEO-optimized review landing pages)
Learnings
The first iteration failed due to too much focus on precision (seller-specific reviews) at the expense of visibility.
20% of pages ended up without reviews, which hurt trust and conversion.
We course-corrected by aggregating reviews per product, which restored performance.
Monitoring KPIs quickly post-launch was essential to catch and fix the issue.
Key Takeaways
Don't over-design the system too early. Focus on the core value first — in this case, visibility and relevance of reviews.
Validate with data before scaling. Monitoring KPIs early helped us catch issues quickly and adapt.
Balance trust and completeness. Seller-specific reviews made sense in theory, but hurt perceived transparency when reviews were missing.