Shopper Approved

About Shopper Approved

Shopper Approved is an online ratings and review platform that specializes in helping ecommerce websites increase organic search traffic and website conversions. 

Their robust product suites allow businesses to automatically collect and manage reviews from actual customers post-purchase and promote them on their website and throughout social media and other third-party sites, effectively building trust, traffic and conversions throughout the conversion path—from search engine to your checkout page. 

After more than a decade on the market, Shopper Approved has established a track record of innovation in their product offerings and successful outcomes working with large brands like B&H Photos, 1800Flowers and Vividseats.com. Their experience has earned them top scores from their own customers, with 4.8-star ratings on Trustpilot, BBB and Google.

How it Works

To get started with Shopper Approved, you can fill out an online contact form to book a free demo, or opt to sign up for a free trial of Seller Ratings, the company’s core ratings and reviews product. The generous 45-day trial is the longest offered in the industry, and gives you a chance to familiarize yourself with the Shopper Approved platform and start collecting reviews and ratings from your customers.

Getting started with Shopper Approved is straightforward and user-friendly, allowing you to quickly harness its powerful review collection tools. To kick things off, you’ll need to set up your merchant and product accounts. The merchant account is your brand’s general account, while the product account allows you to explore and configure options for collecting reviews. The Shopper Approved team is available to assist you through this process, and setup and support is included with your subscription. 

Once your accounts are set up, you can start exploring the review collection tools and customizing the templates to reflect your brand’s voice, personality and needs, by changing the questions to better reflect experiences your customers have when making purchases on your site.

Before you go live, you’ll be able to complete a test run of your settings and customizations to make sure everything is running smoothly and looking the way you want it to.

Your Shopper Approved dashboard provides a control panel of customizations and alerts to effectively manage your reviews and settings. You’ll have the ability to read and respond to reviews before they become public, get instant alerts to respond to negative feedback and monitor reviews after they go live.

Once you start collecting reviews, you can decide how to display them on your site using easy-to-install widgets. You can also add reviews to your product pages as well as a dedicated review page on your site. After you collect 30 reviews, Google will begin displaying your ratings. As an official Google Reviews Partner, Shopper Approved will automatically start connecting your reviews to strategic locations in Google, such as organic search results, Google Shopping and more. 

The tools in the Shopper Approved platform are easy to use and designed to give you maximum exposure and significantly increase discoverability and conversions.

Official Google Reviews Partner

As an official Google Reviews Partner for more than eight years, Shopper Approved works directly with Google to display your seller ratings in several prominent locations online, including organic Google search results, Google Seller Ratings, Google Shopping and Google Ads.

​​When seller ratings are collected by an official Google Review Partner like Shopper Approved, they are often referred to as Google Seller Ratings, because the ratings are syndicated to Google so they appear in search results throughout the conversion path.

The advantage of this is that your search results are eye-catching and trustworthy, which translates to a higher click-through rate and more traffic to your site. A higher level of trustworthiness in search results also helps “pre-convert” your traffic, meaning that the customers who make it to your site are more likely to make a purchase.

Plans & Pricing 

Shopper Approved offers two robust product suites, the Traffic & Conversion Suite and the Enterprise Suite. Here’s an in-depth overview of each:

Traffic & Conversion Suite

The Traffic & Conversion suite is an all-in-one tool that maximizes traffic and conversions, improves your online reputation and builds more trust throughout the various touch-points that customers have with your brand. This suite includes five innovative tools:

• Seller Ratings & Reviews: This powerful tool collects ratings and reviews from your verified customers after they buy, and distributes them to strategic places online, including Google, Bing, Yahoo and your own website, where they appear as star ratings that can increase your click-through rates and lower your overall cost per click.
• Product Reviews: This tool functions similarly to Seller Ratings & Reviews, collecting reviews on specific products from your verified customers and syndicating them to Google Shopping, where they appear as star ratings that help your products stand out, increase click-through rate and help convert traffic to sales on your website. 
• Video Reviews: Video is extremely search engine-friendly, dominating search engine results pages both in size and visual appeal. The Video Reviews tool works like Seller Ratings and helps you harness the power of video by optimizing your four- and five-star video reviews to appear higher in search results, on YouTube and on your website and Shopper Approved page.
• Q&A: One of the most effective ways to appear on page one search results is by using a search-optimized Q&A tool. Shopper Approved’s Q&A tool is powered by AI and can dramatically increase your click-through rates, conversion rates and more by search-optimizing answers to consumer questions to help them appear as “featured snippets” above position one in organic search results.
• Website Security: Website security seals are trust badges that show potential customers that your website is safe and that their personal information is secure and protected. Trust Guard seals are powerful conversion tools that help maximize customer trust and can increase regular orders, recurring orders and revenue per sale. 

Enterprise Suite

The Enterprise Suite builds on the tools from the Traffic & Conversion suite with two additional products for enhancing your company’s reputation and customer experience. This package includes all of the tools in the Traffic & Conversion suite, plus:

• Review Destinations: A proactive reputation management tool that allows you to redirect a portion of your customers to leave reviews on any open review platform of your choosing, like Trustpilot, Facebook, Sitejabber, Google My Business, BBB and others, further enhancing your online visibility and reputation. This builds credibility and can ultimately lead to increased traffic and conversions.
• Social Evidence: This social proof tool displays real-time information via widgets in strategic locations on your website to help inform potential customers about what other shoppers are doing, including recent five-star ratings, what other customers have purchased recently and how many shoppers have visited a certain page. Widgets can also be used to promote call-to-action prompts, announcements and special offers.

It’s good to know that some of the products within the Traffic & Conversion Suite and the Enterprise Suite are available à la carte, with the caveat that Seller Ratings must be activated for any other services to be added. While this flexibility is nice, it should also be noted that you’ll get the best value for your money when choosing one of Shopper Approved’s package options.

Shopper Approved’s pricing is a paid subscription model that’s based on order volume tiers, which is similar to most other competitors in the industry. This means your pricing is set according to the number of surveys that are sent out. The benefit to this pricing model is that your ongoing costs remain fairly consistent, making it easier to work it into your budget. Most of Shopper Approved’s services follow this pricing model, with the exception of Q&A, which is based on total number of pageviews, and Website Security, which is a fixed-rate cost, no matter the size of your company.

Free Trial

Shopper Approved offers a 45-day, risk-free trial of their Seller Ratings product, which is one component of the Traffic & Conversion Suite. This is the longest trial period available in the industry, and there is no credit card required to sign up.

During your trial, you’ll be able to try out the tool and start collecting reviews from your customers. You’re able to keep any reviews you receive during the trial, along with a Shopper Approved “search optimized” certificate page, review syndication to Google Ads and a high domain authority backlink to your website. 

This is a fantastic way to get acquainted with the Shopper Approved platform and find out whether it works for you and your company. 

When comparing Shopper Approved to competitors like Trustpilot, Yotpo and PowerReviews, you’ll notice a few key differences:

About the Company

Shopper Approved was started by Scott Brandley and Garrett Pierson in 2010 with the goal of creating a ratings and reviews company to help online businesses effectively compete against Amazon. Shopper Approved made the Inc. 500 list two years in a row as one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S. and over the years, has gained a reputation for developing highly effective tools to help businesses grow their companies online.

Bottom Line: Why We Love It

Shopper Approved stands out as a top choice for ecommerce businesses looking to boost their online presence and credibility. They have a complete suite of innovative tools that make it easy for you to collect and manage reviews, many of which are fully automated and customizable to match your brand’s voice and personality. We love that Shopper Approved is an official Google Reviews Partner, because it streamlines the process of getting your positive reviews to appear in organic search results, across Google and any other third-party platforms you choose. It takes the guesswork out of growing your business online and ensuring your web presence is pristine, so you can focus on what you do best—everything else.