Here is a quick note about a piece I read in the Ottawa Citizen written by Daniel Drolet about a month ago.  We’re often faced with coming up with ideas for customer websites that will help make them improve the utility of the site, or generate sales leads, or in many cases sell products and services.  With the explosion of social marketing tools, Web2.0 interactivity can often be applied blindly without much thought to the potential outcomes or value to the site.  So which tools are the right ones to use?

I won’t try to solve all of these for you in this post, but Drolet’s article was focused on the use of customer to customer interaction on online shopping sites.  A study quoted in the article by Sam Decker of Bazaar Voice noted that 3 out of 4 visitors to online shopping sites seek out reviews when shopping, and a whopping fifty (50) percent now demand a review before buying!

While further research should be done, and I’ll post further notes as I find them on this topic, its hard to ignore this information when building an online shopping site in the future.  Amazon.com is likely one of the earliest adopters of this type of system, and while there are risks that people may post negative reviews, it would seem the risk may be worth it if in some cases a full one-half of visitors won’t buy from your site if you don’t have a feature like this.

We’re just about to launch a few sites with some of these features in place, I’ll report back after those sites have been running for a while to comment on our experience on this.