Building trust and driving awareness: Trustpilot’s impact on Harts of Stur's ecommerce success
Problem
As an e-commerce business in a saturated market, Harts of Stur needed social proof through customer feedback to gain trust and momentum.
Solution
After a recommendation from leading e-commerce agency GENE, Harts of Stur used Trustpilot to improve their overall e-commerce performance by using reviews to build trust and attract more customers.
Result
Harts of Stur quickly received an overwhelming number of reviews. These reviews quickly helped to improve their TrustScore, increase their order-to-review rate by 10%, and earn 100K Google impressions.
Harts of Stur is a fourth-generation family-owned business with over a century of retail experience. Recognised as a top online retailer, they specialise in cookware, kitchenware, and kitchen electrics, offering an extensive selection of premium products at competitive prices.
100k
Google impressions
200m
TrustBox impressions
Increase of 3%
Order-to-review rate
Increase of 0.2
TrustScore
A family business for the future
As a long-running family business, Harts of Stur has seen the impact of feedback over several generations of shoppers. From brick-and-mortar to e-commerce, the one common thread of success has been how customers perceive their products. Today, “Product Reviews on Trustpilot are incredibly beneficial,” says Matt.
“E-commerce stores, like ours, see a direct correlation between the number of Product Reviews and sales. More reviews lead to higher consumer confidence; customers are more likely to buy a coffee machine from us if they see numerous positive reviews.” Since featuring Trustpilot branding across its marketing channels and customer journey, including TrustBox widgets and the company TrustScore on its website, Harts of Stur has established itself as a trusted and popular seller, encouraging more purchases and eyes on their brand. Their Google Ads featuring Trustpilot have allotted 100K impressions. Their TrustBox widgets displayed on the product, category, home, and search pages have also led to 200M TrustBox impressions over a year.
Using Trustpilot for reputation management
The Harts of Stur team uses Trustpilot notifications to alert them when a negative review pops up, to ensure they respond to their negative reviews particularly quickly and resolve them. They also maintain an 87% response rate to all reviews and reply in less than two days.
“Sometimes, it's as simple as letting the customer know that our customer service team will be in touch; other times, it involves acknowledging a mistake on our part. Engaging with negative reviews helps us address issues promptly and shows customers that we care about their feedback,” says Matt.
To Harts of Stur, all feedback is worthwhile and that’s why they focus so much on inviting as many customers to review as possible. They also use data gathered from Trustpilot reviews to help enhance their business operations and create a better experience for their customers in the future. This process has led to a 10.3% increase in their order-to-review rate and maintaining their Excellent TrustScore of 4.9.
“Review tags are particularly useful when a negative review is left, as it helps us identify whether the issue is related to delivery, damage, or a faulty product. We can track how often these issues occur over time by flagging these reviews with specific tags.
This allows us to identify key recurring problems, such as delivery delays or product damage,” says Matt.
“Within just a couple of months, these reviews helped to improve our overall score significantly, demonstrating the powerful impact of Trustpilot on our reputation and customer perception. We have a 4.9 TrustScore, 25.6% higher than standard.”
The GENE partnership
GENE, a leading e-commerce agency specialising in Adobe Commerce and Magento, has worked with Harts of Stur since 2018. They have collaborated on countless strategic projects utilising platforms like Magento and Adobe Commerce to optimise Harts of Stur’s e-commerce storefront.
When Trustpilot came on board, GENE saw an opportunity to further elevate its partnership with Harts of Stur, especially concerning customer trust and the potential SEO benefits Trustpilot offers from higher review volumes.
“Trustpilot's integration and adoption process with our existing tech stack went smoothly. No issues were encountered during the integration. The Trustpilot team was always on board to provide support and answer any questions, ensuring a seamless transition. Their assistance was invaluable, particularly with the invitation method and onboarding process, which were both efficiently handled. This facilitated a quick and effective implementation, allowing us to leverage Trustpilot's features without any disruptions,” notes Matt.
Looking forward, both Harts of Stur and GENE see Trustpilot as a vital tool for both credibility and performance.