How User-Generated Content Relieves the Excess Baggage of Luggage Shopping
In another 50 years, we might be able to order a jetpack on Amazon to whisk us away to Bora Bora at the drop of a hat. Drones will deliver our passports, robots will pat us down at security, and hoverboards will take us to our terminals. The headaches of travel are being alleviated by online and technological conveniences every day, and ecommerce for your luggage is just one of them.
The necessity of shopping for luggage in a brick-and-mortar store is quickly falling by the wayside. Granted, it’s falling slightly less quickly than in other verticals, where seeing and sampling a physical specimen isn’t necessarily as important, but UGC is offering a virtual reality for the touching, handling, wheeling and lifting we once required. In a world where no one wants to leave the house except to go on vacation, here’s how modern luggage retailers are leveraging user-generated content to keeping the traveling for the trip.
Ratings and Reviews
86% of consumers say reviews are an essential resource when making purchasing decisions. With the shape of today’s ecommerce marketplace (and in order to keep up with juggernaut competition like Amazon), it pays to ensure that every possible piece of information is readily available for consumers on brand and retailer websites to increase traffic and conversion.
By offering specific tag-based review data on a per-product basis, valuable user feedback is laser-focused and maximizes the helpfulness of the display. For luggage shopping in particular, tags for pros, cons and best uses are paramount in influencing online conversion. Tumi, for instance, uses this feature to highlight how a particular bag is easy to identify, has great capacity, and is useful for weekend or business trips. It’s also a forum for expert advice—real-life users offer feedback on various topics, such as whether the bag passes new carry-on restrictions and how challenging it is to lift into overhead bins.
Syndication
In addition to conversion on a luggage brand’s website, a considerable portion of online luggage sales come from department store or speciality retailer sites. Consumers shopping for a stylish carry-on might, by habit, go to Macys.com or Nordstrom.com to search–and a wide variety of options from numerous brands will populate. Brands and products with star ratings and review content will attract eyes first. In order to ensure that the review content on those retailer sites is as abundant as possible, brands can syndicate their ratings and reviews to retailers within the PowerReviews network. More content means more conversion, regardless of the channels your shoppers are using to browse and purchase.
Visual Content
Photos and videos are ubiquitous in today’s connected world, and native visual content takes review displays to a new level of relatability. Photos and videos of the product in use in real life—not in staged advertisements—allow shoppers to more aptly picture the product in their own worlds. Additionally, the display of these products living in actual consumers’ homes will illustrate more clearly the look and feel and fit of the item in consideration. This is especially relevant for apparel, accessories, footwear, and luggage.
Q&A and Why Did You Buy
In the wide world of luggage and bags, there are countless categories, uses, shapes, sizes, and materials to evaluate. PowerReviews offers additional product features to influence high-consideration purchasing decisions in a sea of endless options—and for luggage in particular, the more content the merrier! With fast answers from verified buyers and staff experts in Q&A (which effectively acts as a virtual FAQ), shoppers convert quickly. And the new Q&A search functionality eliminates the need to ask the same questions over and over again. Additionally, with PowerReviews’ Why Did You Buy offering, instantaneous content is collected and displayed for the quickest baseline answers on…well…why the consumer bought the product.
With so much to say and so many places to say it, luggage retailers are capitalizing on user-generated content to transport their businesses into the virtual world. And PowerReviews can do just that. No matter the vertical, our best-in-class software solutions will impact your ecommerce traffic and conversions in a high-flying way. So prepare for takeoff and request a demo today!
