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How to use customer feedback to grow your ecommerce store
Your customers know more about shopping on your online store than you do. By giving them a simple way to leave feedback, you’ll gain valuable insights to improve their experience and the metrics that matter to your ecommerce business.
In this guide, we give you an easy way to collect feedback on your ecommerce store and show you how real stores put feedback into action and use it to drive increased conversions, sales, and customer satisfaction.
We cover:
Start collecting customer feedback on your store today
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What is customer feedback and why is it good for ecommerce?
Customer feedback is any information customers share about their experiences with a website, product, or service. You can actively solicit it, for example by sending a survey after a purchase is made; but customers also leave feedback independently on social media and review sites, or through a feedback survey, form, or button.
Close- and open-ended feedback questions and results collected with Hotjar Feedback
Collecting customer feedback on your ecommerce store will help you:
How to collect customer feedback on your ecommerce website
One of the simplest ways to collect feedback on your ecommerce site is to add a feedback button or embed a feedback box so visitors always have the opportunity to share their comments without being interrupted by a survey popup.
Here’s how to add a simple feedback widget to your store using Hotjar in 5 minutes or less (if you’re not already using it, welcome! 👋—get started with our free plan or free trial here).
1. Set up Feedback
Hit the Feedback icon on the left sidebar menu, then click the ‘Set up Feedback’ button or the ‘New widget’ button in the top right.
2. Choose a feedback widget type
Button: shows a permanent feedback button as users scroll—clicking it opens up feedback options
Embedded: can be added inline anywhere on a page.
3. Customize your feedback widget
Appearance: modify the widget label, colors, and emoji types to echo your brand’s style and color palettes
Steps: edit the feedback question and thank you message. Choose if you want to allow users to tag a page element and send it with their feedback—this gives you more context when reviewing comments.
Targeting: choose which devices and pages you want the widget to show
Forward Feedback: (optional) get responses sent straight to Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, or other tools via the Zapier integration
Hotjar Feedback responses sent straight to Slack with our integration
When you’re happy with the setup, click the ‘Start Feedback’ button—your widget is now live and ready to collect customer feedback!
💡Pro tip: when you’re ready to view feedback, you’ll find a summary of your average score in the Hotjar Dashboard. Click the ‘responses’ link to view individual comments from the open-ended question field. Filter by ‘hate’ to quickly find issues, or by ‘love’ if you want to hear the good stuff first!
More ways to collect customer feedback
Create surveys: ask ecommerce survey questions to online store visitors and customers before, during, or after the point of purchase. Common post-purchase examples include Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES).
Collect reviews: email existing customers a link to a popular third-party review platform like Trustpilot or remind them to use your internal review system once products have been shipped
Run 1-on-1 interviews: conduct user interviews with customers or your target user personas in-person or online and hear their thoughts as they navigate your site. It’s more time-consuming than feedback buttons, but you’ll get detailed responses and the chance to ask follow-up questions.
4 easy ways to use customer feedback to grow your ecommerce store
Now you know how to collect feedback from customers, it’s time to put the responses to work. The examples below will show you how other businesses have been using feedback to grow conversions and revenue on their ecommerce stores by focusing on customer needs.
1. Improve customer experience by finding and fixing issues
Have you ever had a problem using a website but didn’t have an easy way to let anyone know? Adding a sitewide feedback button lets any visitor leave a comment (e.g. “Help, the coupon code box doesn’t work!”) and tag a page element for context, making it easy for you to troubleshoot and fix website bugs.
For example, UX/UI agency Turum-burum placed the Hotjar Feedback widget on Ukrainian fashion ecommerce Intertop to identify usability problems and spot technical bugs that were getting in the way of conversions. By using Feedback alongside some of Hotjar’s other tools (heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys), the team increased checkout conversion rate by almost 55%.
Hotjar Feedback helped Turum-burum identify bugs on fashion store Intertop
2. Benchmark customer experience on key pages and track performance over time
Tracking quantitative customer feedback over time (like your NPS or CSAT scores) gives you an internal benchmark of success to measure performance against—and also helps you make informed decisions to optimize the user experience, especially if you notice your scores dipping.
For example, leading UK fashion and homeware retailer Matalan used Hotjar Feedback to quickly identify a bug in the checkout process. The fix improved checkout conversion rate by 1.23%. The team then integrated Hotjar Feedback ratings and responses into a Google Data Studio dashboard, giving everyone visibility into the site’s customer experience performance over time and making sure new issues got spotted quickly.
💡Pro tip: you can achieve a similar visualization (without needing technical knowledge!) in the Hotjar Dashboard, a customizable hub of your top metrics and insights. Use it to benchmark and track your average customer feedback scores over time so you can celebrate successes and solve issues before they become bigger problems.
3. Increase conversions by learning what visitors need
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) increases the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, like adding items to the shopping cart, signing up for a promotion, or completing the checkout process—but you cannot successfully optimize your ecommerce website without first understanding what is working, or isn’t, for your customers
For example, CRO agency eShopWorld used Hotjar Feedback on client checkout pages: if they tracked a change in conversion rate, they looked at feedback responses first to understand why it happened. The team then used Google Analytics and session recordings to get the full picture of what was going on and make data-driven A/B test hypotheses.
We love Feedback because it gives us instant feedback from shoppers. It doesn’t interrupt the checkout flow, and it allows us to fully understand our shopper’s experience, in real time. This helps us study performance trends and identify shopper concerns.
4. Use feedback to create better content
Not all customers land on a product page and buy right away: shoppers take many paths to conversion, and content like blog posts and guides help educate and inspire them along their journey. Collecting feedback on your content pages will help you determine if they are providing people with the information they need to convert—and, as an added bonus, might even give you ideas for new content to create.
For example, at Hotjar we use our feedback button on all our blog posts and guides. Any reader (yourself included!) can leave comments and we can track if our content is truly delivering value—try it out now by clicking the red tab on the right.
Combine feedback with other insights to see how customers interact with your store
As you can see, feedback on its own provides plenty of insight into what’s going on in your customers’ minds. But combining it with other website data—both qualitative and quantitative—gives you a more complete picture of how customers are experiencing your store.
If you’re using Hotjar to collect feedback and a companion recording has been captured, click the play button icon to replay the session recording and see how the visitor browsed your store before and after leaving a comment.
By looking at a visitor’s thoughts (their comment), actions (their browsing session), and the macro trend (i.e. what analytics data tells you about the page, product, or segment they represent) at once, you’ll know exactly what, why and how to optimize your store to reach your goals.
Start collecting customer feedback on your store today
Sign up for a free Hotjar trial and learn what makes shoppers convert or click away
