If you have ever shopped online at Amazon.com, you have probably noticed that customers can rate and review many of the products for sale. Why would Amazon do this? Reviews increase their conversion rate (orders per unique visitor) and add an increased level of interaction that is valued by their customers.

Independent reviews can be very powerful in determining whether or not a customer makes a purchase. It is one thing if a merchant claims that his or her products are great and quite another if the merchant’s customers take the time to write a review about a product and say that it is great! It is said that hindsight is always 20/20. If a consumer is considering purchasing a specific product, and sees that someone who has already purchased that product is satisfied or even thrilled with it, that consumer is likely to make the same purchase. Hence, positive reviews have a positive impact on your conversion rate.

It is easy to see why positive reviews can help business, but what about negative reviews? Negative reviews give positive reviews creditability. If every product review on a site is glowing, customers are likely to think that the reviews are a bunch of fluff fabricated by the merchant. By enabling your customers to write reviews, you are sending a message of confidence. You are not afraid to let customers speak their mind, be it positive or negative. You may not want to post all negative reviews, but posting some does provide creditability to the positive reviews, which is instrumental in making reviews work for you.

Although reviews are written by customers, for customers, the merchant may derive tangential benefits as well. For example, customers that write reviews may provide additional experienced-based information about products that you, as the merchant, have not included in the product description. Also, negative reviews may not help the sale of a specific product, but the information collected can be invaluable. As a merchant, if you are receiving multiple negative reviews about a product and fewer positive reviews, you may want to consider discontinuing that product. Conversely, if your customers are raving about a specific product, you might want to increase your inventory for that product and start marketing it more aggressively.

Adding reviews to a site takes web site interaction to a whole new level. Many internet surfers will visit Amazon.com specifically to read customer reviews. By offering reviews, your web site is suddenly not just an online store, but has the potential to be a destination. Just as you suspect, many of those same customers visiting specifically to read reviews often end up placing orders. As an added bonus, many customers that come back to your site to write a review, may also decide to place another order!

Before adding product reviews and ratings to your web site, you might consider the following tips:

1. Be sure the software managing the reviews enables you to edit and preview the reviews before they are posted to your web site.

2. With reviews and ratings, credibility is key. If it looks like the merchant wrote all of the reviews and rated all the products on the site 5 out 5 stars, creditability is lost and reviews can actually hurt business. As a merchant, there will be temptation to write some of your own reviews, but realize that doing so can be a dangerous road to go down.

3. Reviews are not suitable for all types of products so do not allow all products to be reviewed. For example, pretend that you are a merchant selling telephone headsets. Your customers are probably concerned with sound quality, comfort, etc. The headsets themselves lend themselves well to independent reviews. If you sell Energizer AA batteries as an accessory to the headset, no one will want to read or write a review of the batteries, so do not allow for it.

4. Ask the reviewer his or her location to help establish creditability. You might ask for other information as well, such as the reviewer’s name, but it should not be required.

5. When first launching online reviews, it may take some time for them to catch on. Consider running a promotion to jump start reviews on your site. You may want to email your customers to notify them that you have added product review capability to your site and offer a coupon to all customers who write a review. Incentives are a great way to engage people.

Reviews and ratings are helpful only if other customers can relate the information to their own needs. Post the reviews that will provide benefits and confidence to your customers. Your sales will increase and your customers will appreciate the added value.

You created your online store. You identified your target market. Now you want to start driving traffic to your web site and get the cash register rolling. Before you spend another dollar, ask yourself how you are going to measure your online marketing programs and the effectiveness of your web site.

Web analytics is more than just measuring the amount of revenue you generate. More often than not, most online marketers blindly launch web sites and initiate campaigns without the visibility they need to optimize and fully leverage them.

Why track more than just revenue? Imagine 100 people coming to your web site to buy your product. After searching your site, 54 potential customers are ready to buy. This is an excellent browse to buy ratio. However, because your site did not use an always on-screen shopping cart, 26 abandon the ordering process because they simply could not find the shopping cart, were shocked by excessive shipping and handling costs or became distracted and just forgot they had put items in their cart. 10 abandon the cart because the ordering process took too long and required the user to wait for multiple pages to load. 2 leave because your credit card authorization process failed. Thus, 16 people end up purchasing.

Being able to fix or improve any one of these metrics requires visibility into the activity of your web site. A couple of improvements will go a long way toward increasing your web site’s total revenue. By seeing how prospective buyers interact with your marketing campaigns and web site, you are now empowered with the ability to turn more of those visitors into buyers.

In order to market more effectively, consider using a tracking solution that is easy to install and provides actionable statistics in real-time. HitBox Professional combines e-commerce and visitor behavior statistics with patented pathing analysis, enabling small and mid-sized businesses to improve upon customer acquisition, retention and overall lifetime value. You can even trial the service for free in order to see how web analytics can increase your online sales in no time.

Before you begin your marketing programs, establish a checklist of revenue and non-revenue metrics you want to measure. By having clearly defined metrics, you are now in a position to begin measuring performance.

If you run an e-commerce web site, your success at the end of the day is measured by your bottom line. Now, as a merchant, we all know the most basic of rules are to build it and promote it. A very important issue that is often overlooked, however, is removing barriers to sales. Protecting your customer's privacy is a barrier to sales and something that must be addressed. If you haven't noticed, it’s an issue that is everywhere, in politics, on the net, on TV, at your bank, etc.

What's the big deal? It’s part of doing business. If these people want to buy my widgets, I'll need to know where to ship it and how to contact them, right? That is true, but the means matter more than the ends in this case. You have to be sensitive to the needs of your customers.

The plain and simple truth is that your customers need to be comfortable with the fact that they are going to share with you some of their personal information. You'll need to have a well-defined privacy policy. You should prominently display your privacy policy on your site, in the shopping cart and in any stage of the buying process in which you ask for any personal info from a customer. Before your customers divulge that all important email address or phone number, they want to be assured that you won't sell it to some wily spam company or telemarketer. They'll also want to know that you're not going to have any nasty surprises for their credit card numbers as well. Lastly, you definitely need to let your customers know that you would never do anything with their personal info without first getting the customer's consent.

So, how, you ask, do I write a privacy policy? There is no "right" solution for everyone but use the general guidelines as outlined above. Put yourself in the position of the customer and see if it meets your needs and expectations. Then, run it by some friends and family. If you have a lawyer as a friend or relative, their opinion might be helpful. You might even want to consult other company's privacy policies, but be careful. Just do that for ideas. Plagiarism is grounds for lawsuits and that is what we most certainly want to avoid, right?

Listed below is a sample. Please use it as a starting point. Good luck!

We are committed to protecting your privacy. All of your ordering information -- including your name, address, and credit card number -- is encrypted for maximum security. We further pledge to never sell this information to others.

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