How product reviews increased Legeakademiet’s revenue by 4.43%

Founded in 2005, Legeakademiet.dk (the playing academy) are a big family of 9 passionate and ambitious people in Denmark, who devote their time to help kids become smarter through play. Their online educational toy store is now present both in Denmark and Norway.

Legeakademiet has been using Trustpilot for more than 9 years. In 2019, they decided to start collecting Product Reviews to help increase sales.

"As an online business, we can’t look our customers into the eyes, which is why transparency is of great importance to us. Trustpilot makes it possible for us to show what we stand for, and to focus on delivering great customer service."

How Product Reviews were A/B tested

Legeakademiet worked with their digital marketing agency S360 to conduct an A/B-split test in order to validate that adding product ratings to their website could increase sales. To simplify the test implementation, Legeakademiet chose to implement the product star rating elements, and not the full written reviews which could have boosted sales even further.

One challenge they faced was that they didn’t have product reviews on all products. In fact, they only had product reviews on less than 20% of their products. Even less when the split-test started.

As no one can control which products a customer looks at, and whether or not it has product reviews, we could only measure if the customer could see product reviews, if available, or not at all.

This puts the variation with product reviews at a great disadvantage, and the split-test is not an apples-to-apples comparison, but the test went ahead anyway.

“I was initially really concerned that products without any reviews and ratings would hurt our sales because 80% didn’t have any, but the split-test numbers really proved my fears wrong.”

Adding their product rating throughout their customer journey

S360 had some great ideas on how they could add the product rating throughout the customer journey on Legeakademiet’s website.

First of all, they thought adding the product rating on any of the product listing pages would help shoppers find the right product for them. This is both on the product category pages and recommendation elements on both the category and product pages.

Second of all, they decided to add the product rating on the product page, just below the price and close to the add-to-cart button, to demonstrate value and create social proof for their own products.

“In order to keep the edge in a competitive market, we wanted to add Product Reviews to Legeakademiet’s online store. Instead of just implementing the function, we wanted to identify the potential payoff through a split-test. The split-test clearly showed that implementing the function would help increase conversion rate and increase basket size.”

Finally, they also added the product rating in the shopping cart, therefore reducing customer doubt and boosting confidence at a crucial point in the customer journey.

The results: A 4.43% revenue increase

The split test ran for 91 days and initially, as with most split-tests, there was no clear takeaway, but in the last 30 days, the version with product reviews (the straight line) clearly emerged as consistently performing better than the original version without.

When we dived into the specifics of average basket size and conversion rate impact, we found the below:

For both Mobile and Desktop shoppers, the average basket size was about the same or slightly higher, but for Tablet shoppers, it was an impressive 5.39% higher.

When we look at the conversion rate we saw that both Mobile and Desktop shoppers converted about 5% better, and Tablet shoppers about 5% lower.

The net change in revenue was about 5% for Mobile and Desktop shoppers, and just slightly higher for Tablet shoppers.

As 86% of Legeakademiet’s traffic comes from Mobile and Desktop shoppers, they saw a 4.43% revenue increase from displaying product reviews on their website, which is more than a 200,000 EUR turnover increase for them.

“We were really surprised product reviews increased sales even though only 20% of the products had them. And the data shows the results should only improve over time!”

Only 20% of Legeakademiet’s products currently have product reviews, and the full reviews were not shown on the product page. This means that as soon as they start getting more product reviews and fully implement them, they should see their revenue climb a lot higher!

Collecting insights from Product Reviews can help optimise the product selection

Legeakademiet benefits from Product Reviews in other ways too. The business understands that reviews are a form of customer communication, and the team is committed to reading all reviews and replying to any 1-3 star product reviews. This helps them understand what the customers like and don't like, and improve in the long run.

When it comes to optimising their product portfolio, this information is pure gold. Products that are poorly rated are being tested according to the specific feedback given by customers, and it helps Legeakademiet weed out products that they should stop selling, and understand which products, manufactures or categories of products they should get more of or expand to continue to grow and increase customer retention.

The recent addition of Product Attributes to Trustpilot Product Reviews takes this insight to a new level and Legeakademiet hopes that in the near future, they can incorporate more of their DNA into these ratings by collecting more detailed insights on how the products improve kids’ learning abilities.

“Through product reviews, customers tell us which products to get more of and which to remove. They [product reviews] help us pick the right products just as much as they help our customers.”

What’s next for Legeakademiet?

With the initial test being such a success, the next steps are collecting more review and product reviews, implementing the written reviews via API on the product pages, and adding Product Reviews to their Norwegian site - Lekeakademiet.no - too.

If you’d like to find out more about how your business can see similar results, request a free Trustpilot demo below.