How to Protect your eCommerce Brand from Negative Customer Reviews

As an eCommerce brand, online reviews are inescapable. 99.75% of online shoppers now read online reviews before purchasing a product, while Shipup’s own research has found that ¼ of shoppers leave a review directly after purchasing a product.

With customer complaints on social media rising by 45% over the past decade, the consequences of a negative review are increasingly devastating for your business. Just one bad review can cause a 22% drop in purchases, according to research from Moz. Examples of online fashion brands that have faced online backlash about their unethical practices include Shein, Temu and Fashion Nova. 

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Here are our 5 tips to protect your eCommerce brand from negative reviews:

‍1. Ask for feedback

‍‍‍First and foremost, encourage your customers to share their experience with you – good or bad.
By seeking out their opinion, you’re showing them that their experience– and business– matter to you.

Fail to listen to your customers, and you risk facing severe public backlash. Take luxury influencer Erica Williams (@ericasgirlyworld): after a negative delivery experience with LANVIN, the influencer– who boasts 75K followers on Instagram and 500K on TikTok– shared the incident with her masses of followers.

When is the best time to ask for customer feedback?

It’s important to ask for feedback about a product directly upon delivery. In doing so, you allow customers to let out their frustrations about common issues such as broken packages, late deliveries or ill-fitting items before they are able to to complain about it publicly.

Post-purchase tools empower allow online retailers to automatically send surveys in ‘Package delivered’ emails. However, it’s one thing to ask for feedback, and another to make it easy for customers. Your customers are already frustrated: make sure that you make the feedback process as fluid as possible.

Giving customers the ability to upload photos of damaged products, or having your customer support team reach out to them directly, will help seal the deal in making your customer feel heard, deterring them from leaving a bad review.
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2. Resolve issues privately when possible

‍‍‍What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. The same applies to eCommerce: negative experiences with your brand should be resolved privately. 50% of consumers trust recommendations as much as personal recommendations from friends and family: it’s essential that you take control over bad word of mouth.

Tools like Typeform or SurveyMonkey are great for gathering user feedback. However, to truly scale your problem resolutions, post-purchase solutions such as Shipup are essential. With surveys sent directly to customers’ email upon receiving their package, customers are prompted to give their delivery experience score, easily flag any product issues (ex: wrong item) and add any comments.

By the end of the survey, it is essential to reassure the customer that their feedback has been taken into account, and that the customer support team will reach out to them where necessary. 

And it’s not just for your brands’ sake that issues should be resolved privately: 24% of customers would rather direct their review to the company itself. This tells us that a large proportion fo customers don’t want to have to post a negative review about your business in public; so don’t let them.
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‍3. Incorporate UGC into your delivery experience

‍‍‍At their core, your eCommerce store boils down to how customers relate to your products, rather than the product itself. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that UGC (User Generated Content) marketing has grown in popularity over the past decade: consumers consider UGC 50% more trustworthy and 20% more influential than other media types. UGC is particularly impactful among the younger generations: more than  half of Gen Z prefer UGC over other content formats. 

Examples of UGC include:
- social media posts about your product

- before-and-after videos
- unboxing videos and how-to guides

Post-purchase emails and order tracking page are prime real estate for your UGC, as costumers are particularly engaged as they anticipate their parcel: order tracking pages are visited 4 times per shopper on average, while delivery emails see open rates that are 17% higher than the average email automation.

By implementing UGC in your post-purchase experience, you humanize your brand and foster community, reinforcing brand trust. By exposing customers to UGC, you detract them from leaving negative reviews particularly when there is mistake on behalf, for example, as they empathize with your brand. In fact, UGC can not only protect brands for negative reviews, but actually drive positive word of mouth: ¾ of consumers say being a part of a community makes them more likely to recommend the brand's products/services to others.
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4. Encourage customers to leave positive feedback publicly

‍‍Resolving negative reviews in public is one thing. But it’s not enough to drive sales and protect your brand reputation. For prospective customers to trust your business enough to buy, your public reviews needs to be a. substantial and b. Positive (but not too positive).

The figures speak for themselves: 54% of shoppers avoid online business with an online rating of less than four stars, while 59% of consumers expect a business to have between 20-99 reviews to trust the average star rating. However, ensure that you don’t have any fake or biased reviews, from friends and family for example, because ratings that are too good (yes, there is such a thing!) can actually negatively impact business.

Spiegel research indicates that purchase likelihood peaks when star ratings fall between approximately 4.0 and 4.7, but as ratings approach 5.0, purchase likelihood decrease.
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So, how can you encourage customers to leave positive feedback publicly?

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In order to get customers to leave raving reviews on public review sites, it’s important to keep your feedback process simple, timely and personalized. Post-purchase tools offer a branded survey experience after purchase, sending customers directly to reviews such as Trustpilot when a customer leaves a positive review via the private platform. By encouraging satisfied customers to share their experience publically, Withings, a major HealthTech e-tailers, improved their rating by 2.5 stars and increased the number of review X3. 
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‍5. Respond to public customer reviews

‍‍Negative online reviews are inevitable. And as we’ve seen, when balanced out by a majority of positive reviews, they can actually be good for business. But once a negative review is posted, it’s essential that you respond to it. Why should online business reply to negative reviews?

Beyond showing professionalism, dissatisfied customers expect a brand to respond to their negative reviews – and fast. Research shows that 20% of consumers expect to receive a response to their reviews within just 24 hours, and 52% believe brands should respond within 7 days. Beyond responding promptly to a negative online review, is it best practice to:
- Apologize sincerely
- Provide a solution
- Offer to continue the discussion privately, for example offer an email address where they can contact you


The top platforms to monitor for public online reviews include:
- Google Reviews
- Trustpilot
- Amazon customer reviews
- Yelp - Capterra

The leading social media platform to check for public reviews include:
- Twitter
- TikTok
- Instagram
- Facebook

Combatting negative reviews will set the foundation for long-term success for online businesses, establishing customer loyalty and increasing revenue. Not only can protecting your brand from negative reviews prevent you from losing customer trust and revenue, but with an effective strategy, you can even turn your decorators into promoters.