SEPTEMBER 16, 2020—CHICAGO—An overwhelming majority of US consumers will not let uncertain market conditions stop them spending this holiday season. This is just one of the key insights from the latest consumer survey from PowerReviews, a leading provider of ratings and reviews and solutions to improve consumer engagement and customer experience.

But consumers will spend earlier and be much more focused on buying products online, with price and customer reviews being the two most critical factors driving their purchase decisions, followed by ease and speed of shipping.

The PowerReviews Holiday Consumer Survey draws on insights from more than 5,000 active consumers across the country, surveyed in August 2020. Key findings include:

• Overall spending levels will be in line with previous years
  • Almost three-quarters of consumers (73%) said their overall holiday spending will either stay the same or increase this year.
• Price and customer reviews will drive purchase decisions
  • Consumers say pricing (87%), existing customer reviews (70%), shipping costs (68%) and ease/speed of shipping (60%) will be the most important factors affecting gift purchase decisions.
• Holiday shopping will start earlier than usual
  • Around a quarter of consumers say they will start holiday spending earlier than they typically do. Most significantly, around 4 in 10 of those who say they will spend more this year than last will start shopping early.
• Huge shift to online shopping
  • Online shopping volumes look set to be the highest of all time: 64% say they will spend more online than last year.
• Consumers are not discounting the store
  • Despite the surge online, some consumers will still do holiday shopping in stores — 30% say they are not concerned about visiting stores.
• Blended cross-channel purchase methods will be a big deal
  • Buy Online Pickup in Store (BOPIS) and omnichannel has been trending for years now. But this holiday will be seminal for these shopping models. In fact, 55% of consumers in our survey say they will use curbside pickup more this year than they did last.
• Big spenders
  • Almost four in ten 18-24 year olds say their spending will increase this year compared to last — a significantly higher proportion than any other age grouping. Consumers in Arkansas, Alabama and Louisiana had the highest percentage of respondents expecting to spend more this year than last.

Carol Krakowski – Director, Insights at PowerReviews, says:

“Almost three-quarters of consumers (74%) said their overall holiday spend will either stay the same or increase this year. This is perhaps surprising given the shape of the overall economy. However, it proves there are significant opportunities for brands and retailers to generate revenue this holiday season.

“As they have been all year, eCommerce volumes will be higher than they’ve ever been this holiday shopping season. A way more significant proportion of spending than usual will take place online. Brands and retailers need to be ready for and expect this.

“Price will impact purchase decisions more than any other factor — our survey shows around nine in ten consumers said it would have an influence. Brands and retailers will need to benchmark effectively to ensure they price their products at a level that makes sales most likely, while preserving profit levels.

“With more shopping taking place online this year, customer ratings and reviews will be vital to drive sales this holiday season. They offer exceptional validation and credibility — regardless of whether a brand or product is well known or not — and particularly this year, when shoppers are less inclined to visit a store to physically interact with products.”

Read the full Survey results on the PowerReviews website.

Research Methodology

The PowerReviews Holiday Consumer Survey draws on responses from 5,383 active shoppers across the United States who have opted in to offers and discounts from retailers. The survey took place in August 2020. We asked respondents about their anticipated shopping preferences in the build-up to Thanksgiving, through the Cyber 5 (Thanksgiving and Black Friday through Cyber Monday) up until post-Holiday New Year sales.

FURTHER INQUIRIES

ABOUT POWERREVIEWS

PowerReviews (PowerReviews.com) helps leading retailers and brands generate customer product ratings and reviews in larger volumes to significantly increase sales and then analyze and benchmark all this data to improve product quality and customer experience, while also delivering store experience feedback to help them optimize their retail network.

PowerReviews is headquartered in Chicago, IL, USA.

We recently launched UGC Analytics, the number one UGC-dedicated analytics platform on the planet.

This powerful and game-changing technology – powered by AI and Natural Language Processing – enables you to optimize your product catalog, benchmark product and website performance, and understand, dissect, and improve consumer path to purchase.

Join us for this 60-minute webinar to explore:

• What makes UGC Analytics the best on the planet
• The background on why we built UGC Analytics
• A first glance at this new technology in action
• And much more

Webinar Speakers

Carol Krakowski, Director of Insights at PowerReviews

Carol Krakowski partners with the Customer Success and Analytics teams at PowerReviews to maximize client value using PowerReviews data. With a passion for telling stories with data, she has more than eight years of experience analyzing ecommerce companies and datasets to power insights for internal and external audiences.

Brandon Matthies, Head of Product Management at PowerReviews

Brandon is focused on building products that help brands and retailers solicit, showcase, analyze and manage UGC content to improve consumer path to purchase and drive more sales.

JUNE 30, 2020 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS— PowerReviews today announces the release of UGC Analytics, the market-leading user-generated content reporting and text analytics suite powered by AI and Natural Language Processing.

The new platform enables brands and retailers to understand, benchmark and improve consumer sentiment through deep analysis of customer-submitted content (ratings, reviews, imagery, video, Q&A and consumer consumption of and interaction with this) on product pages. 

“Our team is thrilled to launch what we can say with confidence is the number one UGC-dedicated analytics platform on the planet. This is a powerful suite of products we’ve been perfecting for over a year now,” said Brandon Matthies, head of Product at PowerReviews. 

“We’ve been working closely with our customers to build products that drive insights that help ecommerce brands and retailers achieve what they are most focused on – selling more products online. The feedback we’ve received so far is exceptional and we are so excited to offer this new suite of analytics products more broadly. We are thrilled that our customers will now be able to back major product, merchandising and marketing decisions with data, as well as understand how they are performing against their competitors.”

Amanda Everse, SEO Manager, Gardener’s Supply Company, comments:
“UGC Analytics enables me to aggregate our customers’ opinion. This has armed me with critical evidence to go to our merchant and say “look at what our customers are saying, you need to fix this”. This insight is such a time saver for us.”

Jessica Donoghue, VP Marketing, PROFOOT, says:
“[With UGC Analytics], we discovered that we have more reviews—and generally longer, more interesting, and higher- quality reviews—than our competitors. It was reaffirming to see how much our customers love our products.”

For more information and further customer endorsements, visit the PowerReviews website.

Contact Andrew Smith, Director of Product Marketing at PowerReviews, for further comment at andrew.smith@powerreviews.com.

ABOUT POWERREVIEWS UGC ANALYTICS

UGC Analytics – our market-leading reporting and text analytics suite powered by AI and Natural Language Processing –  is designed to enable brands and retailers to understand and improve consumer sentiment.

UGC Analytics is a collection of real-time reporting solutions combined:

• Product Sentiment Analytics: Enables brands and retailers to analyze the performance of individual products and their entire catalog to understand where to make improvements that drive the biggest impact.
• Benchmarking Sentiment Analytics: Enables brands and retailers to benchmark against competitors by product, brand, and product category by scraping all UGC data from across the entire internet to understand and improve product sales performance.
• PDP Site Analytics: Enables brands and retailers to gain visibility into exactly how consumers interact with their product pages and their path to purchase to drive more conversions.
• Operational Reporting: Everything brands and retailers need to understand and optimize the performance of their UGC program.

UGC Analytics draws on analysis of more than 53M consumer reviews from across the internet. It has uncovered over 2M unique discussion topics through consumer feedback and 150K unique adjectives to ensure effective and accurate benchmarking.

ABOUT POWERREVIEWS

PowerReviews (PowerReviews.com) is a software and data company that works with 1000+ leading brands and retailers to bring authenticity and transparency to commerce.  The PowerReviews Customer Content Platform has three solutions that help our customers collect and manage customer-generated content to improve the product and customer experience across the customer journey. We help clients meet the evolving need for social proof, accelerating the path to purchase and brand advocacy.

PowerReviews is known for innovation, consultative partnership, and actionable insights, supported by our open platform and approach. Our dedicated team of experts provides thoughtful analysis and turn-key service. PowerReviews is headquartered in Chicago, IL, USA.

Introducing the Number 1 UGC-Dedicated Analytics Platform on the Planet

By now the value of User-Generated Content (or UGC for short) on website product pages is well known. Ratings, reviews and consumer imagery/video are all highly valued social proof points for shoppers as they progress through the customer journey on the path to purchase.

But despite the extensive positive impact the UGC they capture has on sales and traffic, and even the more qualitative benefits like shopper confidence, few brands and retailers analyze UGC on a deeper level. Either as insight to drive product portfolio improvements or enhance their customer experience.

Why?

They haven’t had access to an intelligence engine powerful enough to take all of the rich sentiment data (from the thousands of UGC they’ve collected across the web) and turn it into clear, actionable insights.

Well, we at PowerReviews can very confidently say: all that has changed now.

The High-Potential Analytics Power of UGC

UGC offers a ton of context-rich and actionable insight voluntarily provided by your customers. The sort of information organizations otherwise have to go to great lengths to capture through surveys or other methods. What makes UGC so powerful?

1. You can easily map consumer feedback to specific products. Think about that for a second: most brands and retailers have extensive catalogs of hundreds or even thousands of products. Monitoring customer sentiment accurately across this sheer volume of items is literally impossible via any other methodology.
2. Reviewers often provide demographic information (be this age, location, gender and – in some cases – use case). Being able to factor this insight in provides a highly valuable extra layer of context. No other type of customer feedback data captured digitally provides that level of specificity. With UGC, you can very precisely map product feedback and information about those who bought it to the actual product itself.
3. Unlike other forms of customer feedback, UGC is almost always constructive and meaningful in its focus – whether it’s related to a specific product or your entire customer experience. Whether positive or negative, it typically includes extremely powerful, actionable and context-rich recommendations and suggestions for improvements.

UGC is a datasource with incredible potential but has up to now been completely underutilized. It’s time to unleash it.

What makes UGC Analytics a big deal?

We built UGC Analytics with input from today’s top brands and retailers. Over the past year, as we were building and improving upon this suite of analytics products, we asked for feedback from our customers — who also knew their review data was a goldmine of incredible insights just waiting to be discovered.

In fact, we did a thorough analysis of what other vendors in the space are able to offer. UGC Analytics is superior for a number of reasons. Check out our capability comparison chart for a deeper dive.

Here are a three things UGC Analytics does that no other UGC vendor does:

• Benchmarking: Enables consumer sentiment comparison at the product, product category and brand level. Any product, any product category and any brand.
• Product-Level Sentiment: Understand sentiment at the individual product level. Analysis of your entire product catalog in granular detail.
• Potential Syndication Partners Insight: Provides exceptional guidance on who you should partner with to ensure you maximize the reach, value and impact of your UGC content.

Keep reading for more on that.

What does UGC Analytics allow you to do?

UGC Analytics is a reporting and text analytics suite powered by AI and Natural Language Processing that enables you to drive positive change across your business. These include:

Optimize your overall product catalog and drive individual product improvements

Brands and retailers typically have extensive product portfolios. Knowing exactly where and how to make adjustments – both to individual products and at a more holistic level – to drive meaningful business impact is a huge challenge.

More specifically: how do you know how each product resonates with shoppers? What exactly do they like about each of your products? What don’t they like? Is the information provided at point of sale both accurate and detailed enough to generate realistic expectations?

UGC Analytics enables you to mine all the insight-rich customer feedback captured via your UGC program for the most actionable and impactful improvement opportunities. Our pilot customers used it to build specific evidence for their merchants about modifications they needed to make, make adjustments to product descriptions on their site and considered dropping entire product lines.

Benchmark product and website performance against competitors

To become a market leader, you need to know what you’re up against. How exactly do you compare to your competition?

But most brands and retailers are unable to compare product and brand performance in the detail they need and with the precision required to make the desired impact.

This information – in the form of UGC – is all over the internet. It’s on your site, your competitors’ sites and a whole host of big box retailer and ecommerce marketplace sites. And trying to combine all of this data (which is usually structured differently depending on its source) gets overwhelming very quickly.

UGC Analytics enables you to analyze all this UGC data from your site, your competitor’s sites and any other third-party site this information exists on. It then enables you to compare consumer sentiment at the product, product category and brand level.

For example, say you make razors and Gillette is your main competitor. UGC Analytics enables you to see how your brand stacks up against the overall Gillette brand, as well as compare any of your models to any Gillette model. Extremely powerful stuff.

Understand, dissect and improve consumer path to purchase

As we mention above, User-Generated Content (ratings, reviews and visual media from customers) is proven to have a huge impact on the online shopping journey. Often, it’s the driving factor in converting browsers to buyers along the path to purchase.

But most are unable to size or even define this impact. They have no way of knowing the extent of consumer interactions with UGC content and the precise nature of it.

What type of UGC content results in better outcomes? Does consumer imagery or video make purchasing a product more likely? What about product Q&A content? How big an impact do different star ratings have on purchase decisions?

UGC Analytics enables you to answer all these questions and more. How? By capturing very precise insight about how consumers interact with this content, along with their subsequent actions (i.e. do they go on to purchase or not).

For example, across all our data, we have established that online shoppers that interact with some form of UGC are 103% more likely to convert. Q&A is the most impactful content (153% increase in conversion), followed by reviews (115% increase in conversion) and imagery (81% increase in conversion). UGC Analytics enables you to understand UGC’s tangible impact on your specific buyer journey.

Understand how your customers talk about your products so you can ensure your messaging and branding is on point

UGC Analytics analyzes every single piece of ratings and reviews content submitted about each of your products anywhere on the internet.

Due to its NLP-powered text analytics capabilities, it’s therefore able to take all this data and then surface very specific trends and insights to the forefront.

As a result, you can very quickly understand how your product and brand messaging is resonating with shoppers. Are there expectations of your products accurate? Or do your products end up disappointing more often than not? What exactly is it that doesn’t hit the mark?

UGC Analytics enables you to establish answers to all these questions and more. In doing so, it delivers highly actionable insights that drive informed and strategic improvements – whether for an individual product or on a broader basis.

How can you credibly say it’s “the best UGC-dedicated analytics platform on the planet”?

Put simply, because it is. We knew this was a huge gap in the UGC marketplace. As we talk about above, UGC is an incredible datasource that most brands and retailers are simply not leveraging as they could for maximum benefits. But there’s no other vendor in the space that is enabling them to fully realize this incredible potential.

UGC Analytics stacks up favorably to all other analytics platforms offered by our direct competitors. Here are the main reasons why:

Today is a proud day for us at PowerReviews. We are excited to offer brands and retailers the opportunity to maximize the huge potential impact of their UGC data to drive broad and meaningful business change.

For more information on UGC Analytics, check out the dedicated section on our website, or see it in action by requesting a demo.