\ Executive Summary About the Research The Spiegel research team partnered with PowerReviews to analyze ABOUT POWER REVIEWS millions of customer experiences from two online retailers featuring primarily lower-priced product categories and a third online retailer PowerReviews works with global brands and retailers of high-priced gifts. We looked at how customers’ exposure to and to collect and display customer ratings. PowerReviews interaction with online reviews affected their purchase behavior for partners with more than 1,000 global brands and up to a year. retailers to increase conversion and improve products and the customer experience with ratings and reviews • Lower-priced consumer products: Spiegel analyzed ratings and and Q&A software. reviews data in the consumer packaged goods industry from two online retailers; the research covered 22 product categories with a total of 111,460 SKUs. • High-end gift retailer: Spiegel analyzed approximately 15.5 million page views for 1,800 unique products from 7.8 million users over the course of one year, tracking the number of page views and sales as each product accumulated reviews. • Prompted vs. unprompted reviews: Spiegel analyzed 57,000 reviews from anonymous consumers and 65,000 reviews from verified buyers for about 13,500 unique products in a number of categories, including health and beauty, electronics, and home and garden. 3 \ How Online Reviews Influence Sales \ spiegel.medill.northwestern.edu