MyDeal.com.au is an Australian retail marketplace, connecting millions of consumers with thousands of Australian retailers. Brimming with over 250,000 products and more than 3,000 lifestyle departments, their sellers compete to provide you with the best prices across an extensive range of Furniture, Home & Garden, Fashion, Tools & Equipment, Electronics, and Baby & Kids products.
To celebrate their amazing 5,000+ reviews and 8.5/10 TrustScore, we spoke with John Barkle, Head of Marketing at MyDeal.com.au, to better understand how they leverage Trustpilot reviews throughout the business.
Trustpilot: How long have you been using us for?
John Barkle: We have been using Trustpilot for almost a year. We conducted a thorough research process to select the right partner for our reviews gathering process. We were looking for a system which was mature and stable enough to handle our large requests through API, and flexible enough to accommodate our custom-built CRM’s demands.
TP: How do you use the Trustpilot platform?
JB: We use the slider widget on most of our category pages. A very UX balanced widget - it fits well with in any type of page.
We also take a critical approach to our reputation management. It is common for marketplaces to get both positive and negative feedback in form of service reviews. We make sure we cater and reply to all feedback we receive. For this we use the service reviews section, which makes it very easy for our customer support team to respond back to customer’s concern through Trustpilot.
Product reviews and ratings are an integral part of our marketing strategy. We now have a product/seller rating prerequisite for all products/sellers to be eligible of any type of promotion. For the first time in the platform’s history, products within their respective categories are no longer ranked purely by popularity (i.e. sales volume). A weighted algorithm now exists to promote products with high ratings and good sales volume to the top.
TP: Are there multiple departments or teams using Trustpilot?
JB: Trustpilot reviews are regularly monitored by our customer service team for any concerns reported by our customers. Our marketing and inventory teams also regularly monitor these reviews to siphon out poor quality and promote high quality. The management team also takes a keen interest in these reviews as they provide unfiltered anecdotal information about how the MyDeal brand and its product offering is being perceived by its customers. Our reviews primarily come from the customer’s experience with a seller on the marketplace. We have rewarded sellers with outstanding review history by giving top spots in our various marketing channels – providing more exposure and sales volume for them. We hope this creates a culture in our seller community to provide the best to our customers with the incentive of being rewarded with enhanced marketing opportunities.
TP: How do you use your reviews on your website and in your marketing?
JB: We take a multi-layered approach to the application of Trustpilot reviews.
The paramount function of product reviews is to help our customers select the right product. Being a marketplace, we are agnostic when it comes to the products that sellers list on our platform and therefore reviews help us to identify and take down substandard products and sellers. Conversely, the reviews also help us identify products to put in lights and showcase as the very best MyDeal has to offer.
From an operational point of view, product reviews give all departments and indeed our seller network a deeper insight into the customer experience including customer service, order fulfilment, delivery and product experience.
Trustpilot reviews serve an important marketing purpose for MyDeal. We strongly encourage our customers to leave product reviews as part of a comprehensive remarketing campaign designed to deliver repeat purchases.
Additionally, unique user-generated content (UGC) produced through customer reviews has provided an uplift in traffic generated through long-tail keywords. Our organic sessions have doubled in the last 6 months on the product pages where we are publishing these reviews.
Finally, Trustpilot is a trusted Google Partner for reviews. This means that on our Google Shopping Campaigns, the very important star ratings feature on our product listings providing better click through rate and increased sales volume.
We are currently in the process of enhancing our use of UGC by introducing it to category pages.
There was a challenge though: keeping the content unique, fresh and relevant. Having hundreds of thousand pages to promote, it was complicated.
However, we devised a strategy to overcome this challenge. Trustpilot API’s additional tags really came in handy for this. We tagged each deal with its most relevant category and then published reviews as content onto the respective category page.
TP: What are the biggest advantages the business has seen from switching to Trustpilot?
JB: User-generated content and aggregated ratings (Gold Stars on Google SERPs) have provided a boost to our organic sessions direct to deal pages. On Google Shopping, we have seen click through rate improve significantly on products attracting good reviews and displaying the star ratings on the Google SERPs.
From a branding perspective, trust is a fundamental feature to a marketplace’s value proposition. These reviews have gone a long way to achieving that objective and now underpin the overall brand strategy.
We love the way Trustpilot’s navigation is setup: the entire UX speaks for itself, and onboarding a new user on our account is very easy. With Trustpilot’s intuitive layout we don’t have to provide any training at all.
As MyDeal’s needs and infrastructure is both unique and bespoke, Trustpilot were pure gold in their support of our internal development team. Their years of experience were brought to the forefront and made what could have been a very tricky integration process a lot less painful than it could have been.
I would describe Trustpilot as a best-in-class solution for receiving critical customer feedback underpinned by a mature and sophisticated technical infrastructure which is perfect for bespoke solutions.
TP: What are your challenges going forward as a business?
JB: The Australian eCommerce space is as crowded as it is competitive. It is also one of the most challenging verticals to inspire customer loyalty. MyDeal believes that by offering complete transparency in its product offering, it can differentiate itself as a marketplace of trust. Trustpilot reviews go a long way to achieving this objective and to improving customer retention.
TP: Thank you for your time! It was great to learn more about your business.
To learn more about MyDeal.com.au, head to their website. If you’d like to find out more about Trustpilot reviews, request a demo below.