How to Leverage the Reputation of your Online Marketplace with a Two-Way Review System

A good review is a valuable asset to any online business. It’s not just building a reputation, but it also helps to drive profitable business.

You may have a good service, your website/app maybe designed with flashing user experience or facilitating a good payment process, but if your marketplace gets a series of bad reviews, people think twice or thrice before using your (online marketplace) platform. The reputation is the central stage of building a successful online marketplace.

The review system of the most popular online marketplaces designed where providers and customers can review each other. This post is all about how a two-way review system helps to build the reputation of your marketplace.

Why two-way review system is important?

Builds trust among providers and sellers

According to a recent poll conducted by the Internet Association, asking users whether online reviews felt safer. More than 70% polled positively to feeling much safer seeing reviews in ridesharing and vacation rental websites.

Having a two-way review system builds trust among providers and consumers as each are aware of the other.

Makes the marketplace transparent

A two-way review system provides transparency by helping customers aware of the provider’s service. A provider’s service gets reviews based upon the quality of service, service time period, and the money charged.

When a customer books a service, they look for a provider matching their expectations. A transparent review system benefit in finding the right service to customers, freedom of choosing their required service.

Likewise, a provider has the option to choose their customers based on the ratings/reviews of the users. A customer gets rating based upon their behavior, payment to providers, etc. If a customer got rated rated poorly, providers have the liberty to decline the service.

Consciously makes providers act well

As the review system is transparent and providers can view their ratings or reviews done by the customers, this sometimes makes obligatory for providers to act nice to customers.

Rating provider’s service poorly can cost them to go down and out of the marketplace. In order to rebuild their status and get good ratings, they have to be nice and make a conscious effort to provide a satisfactory service to customers.

There are instances where providers ask customers to rate them 5-star for their service. Some politely request, but some don’t.

Popular online marketplace currently in the market has strict policies to behave and be nice to customers. Reviews less than 5 taken seriously by questioning the providers about the quality service.

This is the happening scenario for most of the marketplace systems.

Identifies misbehaved user and providers

Not all apples are good. Some taste bad, some smell foul and some have to be thrown away. In a marketplace, not all users custom to good social behavior and manners. Due to a few bad apples, it shouldn’t spoil the whole barrel.

A two-way review system helps in identifying users who don’t respect others and engage in inappropriate behavior conduct applying to both provider and customer. It helps in judging the situation fairly by weighting concerns of two sides — Providers and customers.

Present marketplaces take the step of blocking the concerned provider or customers out of the platform if consistently reported poorly. Sometimes users given a warning or temporarily blocked for a while.

Building a two-way review system for your online marketplace

The rating system can be implemented by using star ratings, text review or using binary rating — like/dislike, thumbs up/thumbs down. Designing a two-way review that takes a quick time and concisely explains user experience is appreciated.

Choose the type of review system

In the present online marketplace, there is a combination of both star and text review system.

Airbnb offers a text review system, where a user and host can leave a review within 14 days after the checkout. Therefore allowing both providers and users to express their love or dissatisfaction clearly.

Etsy offers a start review system ranging from 1 to 5 stars. Hence, take the low star rating as bad service and 5-star rating as a outstanding service.

Uber has a star rating system. An average is calculated from the last 500 ratings from your rides. This gets frequently updated, a slight chance to rebuild the reputation.

Two-way review system in RentALL

RentALL provides the two-way review system feature which can be customizable to the user needs.

It tailored to any sharing economy ideas matching to requirements, quickly setting the platform to launch in the market.

Winding-up

Many online marketplaces stumble upon managing and retaining providers and customers to their platform. That is one of the biggest challenges of running a marketplace. This blog post throws important facts to overcome that challenge by a two-way review system, hence hoping to help entrepreneurs.