Impact of Bad Reviews on Online Businesses and Websites

Impact of Bad Reviews on Online Businesses and Websites article cover

Thousands of online businesses and websites have been reviewed on Sitejabber.  While many reviews are positive, there are also the negative reviews – consumers who received defective merchandise, felt wronged by bad customer service, discovered that website content is inaccurate or deceptive, and so on. For businesses, even bad reviews can be helpful:

1) For every unhappy customer, a good website will have many times as many happy customers and this will eventually be reflected in the reviews on Sitejabber

2) Consumers are smart. They know even the best businesses and sites will have detractors, and they take negative reviews as just a single data point

3) Negative reviews can provide useful data for site owners to improve the services they provide, leading to more positive reviews, and eventually more business

This topic was covered recently in a piece by Forbes, which points out that bad reviews can help business owners improve products, build customer trust, and even properly set customer expectations as to reduce requests for refunds.  So to all the online business and website owners out there, we ask for your patience. Even if you’ve had a few bad reviews which you consider unfair, if you run a good site, people will take notice, and you will win in the end.