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Education

Merchants' online reviews are Merchants profit by claiming

their free online listings
impacting your residuals If you could spend half an hour

teaching a merchant a simple method
By Peter Shenk that had the potential to increase the
merchant's annual revenue by six
Womply figures, would you do it? Of course
you would.
erchant level salespeople (MLS) are familiar with merchants'
complaints about the "Yelp factor," whereby online review sites The study shows that merchants
have given dissatisfied customers an unprecedented amount of that have claimed their free business
M power over a small business's bottom line. Indeed, one of the listings on at least three of the major
main asks for agents as they move into a more consultative role with merchants review sites process $107,000 more
is often: Can you help me manage online reviews? in transactions annually than the
average business. And they process
But how much impact do online review sites like Yelp, Google My Business, $179,000 more than merchants
and TripAdvisor have on small business revenue? To find out, Womply's who haven't claimed any listings,
data science team analyzed transactions and review data for nearly 210,000 representing a whopping 60 percent
merchants across dozens of industries in all 50 states. What we learned is swing in revenue.
this: online reviews have a very strong correlation to transaction volume and
revenue performance – and by extension, large effects on processors, ISOs, and Replying to online reviews
MLSs – but it's not as straightforward as you might expect. correlates to increased
transactions
The data suggests that the best way MLSs can help merchants increase
transaction volume (and agents' residuals) is to educate them on the relevant A Harvard Business Review study
points of online review management. I'll go over a few key findings from the (https://hbr.org/2018/02/study-replying-
report, including some that might surprise you. to-customer-reviews-results-in-better-
ratings) showed when businesses start
replying to reviews, they increase
both the total number of reviews
received and their overall rating.
And according to "Google Confirms
Responding to Reviews Improves
Your Local SEO" by Chatmeter.com,
Google confirmed the positive impact
responding to reviews has on SEO.

Womply's study takes it one step
further, showing that merchants who
merely respond to customer reviews
make more money. According to the
data, merchants that reply to at least
25 percent of their reviews process 35
percent more in annual revenue than
the average business. This means
processors, ISOs and MLSs can profit
from educating merchants about the
correlation between employing online
reputation management techniques
like responding to reviews and an
increase in transaction volume.
More customer reviews
means more residuals

In addition to merchants replying to
more of their reviews, agents should
also encourage them to work for a
regular supply of authentic, recent

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