Soletrader: Stengthening their brand reputation
The global shoe and accessories retailer known for innovation, design, and heritage.
URL: soletrader.co.uk
Market: B2C
Founded: 1946
Trusted Shops membership: 2016
"Trusted Shops... enabled us to considerably increase the amount of reviews we collect..."
Want to learn how Trusted Shops can help your online business?
For this customer story, we spoke with Luke Goodman, E‑commerce Project Manager at Soletrader. Read about:
Soletrader: 70 years of experience
Soletrader.co.uk and Soletraderoutlet.co.uk are part of the Soletrader brand. As part of a group founded in 1946, Soletrader has over 70 years of experience behind it. And with over 50 shops across the UK, Soletrader is a part of Britain’s everyday life.
Not only does Soletrader work closely together with big brands, curate designers’ own works, and provide high performance brands to consumers, they also provide a platform for ethical brands like Veja, Matt & Natt, and V.GAN to grow.
Being a staple on the high streets across the UK takes hard work and talent. Seeing that performance reflected online would take similar efforts as well.
Soletrader had clear goals to accomplish with regards to their online shop. They wanted to boost traffic to the site, increase conversion rates, and boost their online reputation. With those goals in mind, Soletrader partnered together with Trusted Shops in order to implement their trust solutions.
In recent years, they have also seen success expanding into other markets. Alongside their US and EU shops, Soletrader also launched a German site in 2016, which also displays the Trustbadge with an excellent rating.
Communicating trustworthiness
It begins with customer reviews
Trust is at the core of any online purchase. That is why trust solutions often help companies reach their goals by boosting key performance indicators (KPIs) like conversion rates and traffic.
The first step was to collect more service reviews (aka shop reviews). When businesses don’t actively ask their customers for reviews, they often find that many of the reviews they do get are negative. This can disproportionately skew the perception of the company to other potential customers.
The Trusted Shops review system allows shops to automatically send out review invitations to their customers at strategic times in order to maximise the number of reviews collected. Having more customer reviews available online gives other users a more accurate perception of the company’s service as well as the quality of their products.
Thus, within 12 months of collecting reviews with Trusted Shops, Soletrader saw their shop rating go up to a 4.7/5. This helped boost conversions because the shop’s rating now more accurately reflected the true customer experience.
"Using Trusted Shops’ customer review collection has enabled us to considerably increase the amount of reviews we collect on the Soletrader and Soletrader Outlet websites."
*soletrader.co.uk rating
Traffic
Not only does having a better reputation boost conversions for shoppers who are active on their site, it also helps drive traffic to the site. As a Google-certified reviews partner, Trusted Shops sent Soletrader’s reviews to Google.
Having Google-certified reviews helps drive traffic organically to their site, especially when star-ratings appear in Google searches. It also helped Soletrader with their Google Ads campaigns, which can also display star-ratings in the search results. According to Google, Star-ratings in Google Ads (aka seller ratings) can improve ad performance by improving click-through rates by up to 17%.
In the following example, we can see that this user search displays 3 shops selling the same pair of sneakers in Google Shopping. Although the prices are quite similar, Soletrader is the only seller that appears with plenty of reviews and a high service rating that builds trust!
The Trustbadge builds trust
With higher customer ratings, the full effect of Trusted Shops’ trust solutions could be realised.
Displaying the Trusted Shops Trustbadge has helped Soletrader cement their trustworthiness with new shoppers. With the Trustbadge, users can see the shop’s seller rating alongside the Trustmark, a certificate that entitles shoppers to a 30-day Buyer Protection right away. The Trustbadge also links directly to your Customer Profile page so your visitors can read more about your trustworthiness.
The Trusted Shops Trustbadge is easily integrated into many popular e-commerce platforms and provides shops with many customisable options. Soletrader is currently displaying the Trustbadge in their footer on every page of their site.
Having the Trustmark, Buyer Protection, and seller ratings on their websites have helped Soletrader see their conversions improve as well. Luke Goodman, E-commerce Project Manager at Soletrader, tells us:
"We’ve been very impressed with the security offered by the Trustmark...Starting with Trusted Shops has helped increase conversion rates on average by almost a third."
Want to read more on Soletrader’s success? Check out the full case study by clicking on the link below:
