Developing a successful shopping website is often more about creating a loyal user base and credibility than advertizing. However, a lot of business owners tend to underestimate the importance of product reviews on their shopping portal. While it is important to delve into other aspects such as increasing ROI, achieving higher conversion and optimizing site navigation, customer reviews also play a major role in taking your ecommerce venture to the skies. Almost 80 per cent of customers rely on customer reviews to decide if they want to buy a specific product or not. Thus, it is critical that you allow your customers to review the products in order to encourage potential customers to buy the same product.

Here are some of the ways in which customer reviews can be beneficial for your shopping portal:

• Boost Sales: It is quite natural for online shoppers to be skeptic before buying a product. Reading genuine customer reviews can mitigate this incredulity to a considerable extent and make them confident about the quality of the product. More the number of reviews, more would be the impact on reader’s minds.

• Demonstrate Honesty: Apparently, customers are less likely to read product descriptions as they highlight only the positive aspects of an item. Customer reviews allow potential buyers to have a detailed overview of a product, while weighing up its pros and cons. It is advised to place a mix of genuine positive and negative reviews to help develop customer’s trust in your shopping portal.

• Unique Content For SEO: Search engine crawlers are constantly looking for unique, informative and constantly updated content in websites. While most ecommerce portals use similar descriptions, customer reviews add content that differentiates between various product pages. This helps to make a web page more relevant to what the user is searching for and increase the chances of higher search engine rankings. The content generated by user reviews can also improve your ranking for long tail keywords.

• Increase Click Through Rate: If the content of reviews is appropriately formatted, such as with headings and star ratings, it will be displayed in the search results and are likely to increase click through rate. These snippets can also help your product stand out from other similar ones.

By allowing and encouraging customers to leave product reviews, you can attract targeted customers, which will ultimately lead to an increased popularity of your shopping portal.

Businesses are always looking for ways to reduce overheads, improve operations and boost productivity. Achieving this target also incorporates choosing between the option to hire developers to create custom applications or to use off the shelf software solutions. Even though off the shelf software can be utilized for efficient business operations, only some of them can make the work simpler in true sense. Hence, most business owners prefer going developing customized software for their organizations.

Listed below are some benefits that you can expect for your business by choosing custom software development over using off the shelf software applications:

• Functionality: Custom built software are specifically developed to accommodate your company’s needs. While using off the shelf software, you might not be able to increase or incorporate additional functions that may be necessary to maintain the workflow. With custom made software, you can be rest assured that the application is a perfect fit for all your requirements.
• Flexibility: In a custom software application, you are the owner of the code and have complete control over future upgrades. You can upscale the software as and when required, according to your business’ needs. In contrast, this is not possible for off the shelf applications.
• Protection From External Threats: Custom software development can safeguard your business from various security threats. Majority of hacking attacks are carried through the manipulation of known vulnerabilities in off-the-shelf software. Custom made applications will be a less achievable target for the hackers for it will require much effort to breach the security codes. 
• Support And Maintenance: When you have custom built software, you can easily maintain it for as long as you need. Immediate fixes and upgrades are possible according to your own requirements. However, with an off-the-shelf application, you have to rely on the support staff of company from which you have purchased the software.

Considering the above given benefits, it is quite clear that custom application development is perhaps a better alternative over using off the shelf software applications. We, at Centex Technologies, provide customized software development services to the businesses in Dallas, TX. For more information, you can call us at (972) 375 – 9654.