How Planet of the Vapes uses customer reviews in their eCommerce strategy

Planet of the Vapes has been selling online since 2008, with a focus on providing only quality products to their customers. This focus on customer satisfaction has helped them achieve an amazing 9.4/10 rating on Trustpilot, from over 4,300 reviews.

Patrick is the CEO and founder of Planet of the Vapes, and you could say he’s pretty experienced when it comes to eCommerce: he’s been selling online since the age of 17. He started his first store in the days of Yahoo! Auctions (remember that?) and, as an online entrepreneur for more than half his life, he’s used a lot of eCommerce solutions. Now though, planetofthevapes.com relies on Shopify Plus as their platform of choice.

We talked with Patrick to learn how Trustpilot, Shopify Plus, and the two solutions together have helped his online business stand out among online Vaporizer shops.

“Trustpilot is a critical element of our eCommerce strategy. Trust and social proof are necessary to communicate to customers, get them over the buying line, and keep them coming back and Trustpilot gives us the tools to collect reviews, display them, and gain insights to improve our policies and procedures to better serve our customers.”

Why Trustpilot and Shopify Plus?

When Patrick’s team started exploring review solutions in 2015, they were looking for two things: a solution Google trusted and a platform that key competitors were also using: “We wanted to be on the same platform as our competitors to show users that we are more trusted and deliver a better buying experience than they do.”

Shopify Plus was the obvious solution for their high volume, high transaction online store: “It’s a great platform that gives you the tools you need to run an enterprise eCommerce business. It’s fast, light and flexible.”

With Trustpilot, Planet of the Vapes can gather reviews, use them to find insights into how they can improve business, and feature the reviews using widgets on key pages to communicate that they’re a trusted retailer that real customers love. Trustpilot’s integration with Shopify Plus makes this a breeze. Shopify Plus can automatically send review invitations and reminders whenever a customer places a new order. As Patrick says, “It makes getting reviews easy and we get actionable insights from the reviews and reports.”

So easy, that they’ve already got more than 4,300 reviews and counting.

And what do they do with all those reviews? Show them off of course.

“We use Trustpilot widgets on key pages to communicate that we are a trusted retailer that real customers love.”

The Results Are In

This customer-focused strategy has been working for Planet of the Vapes.

They’ve achieved 112% growth in 2017 and 62% YTD growth in 2018, and will soon be crossing into 8 figures in revenue.

Trustpilot has played an important part since the company is “focused on continuously improving the customer journey and Trustpilot gives us the insights into how we’re performing and insights into areas that can be improved.”

To that end, both the Marketing and Customer Success teams rely on Trustpilot to understand the customer journey: “For Customer Success, our TrustScore is a critical KPI and how we measure the team’s performance. Reviews provide insights into what customers are responding to and areas of the business or our communications that need to be improved. Holistically, we’re all looking at the user journey and that applies to marketing as well. Our marketing team is in communication with Customer Success to understand what we’re doing right and what we need to improve on.”

Trustpilot’s onsite widgets help to close the gap in communication so that visitors who are almost over the line feel comfortable hitting Order. They customized this widget to do just that:

Trustpilot’s integration with Shopify Plus means our reviews strategy is closely aligned with our eCommerce strategy. Our customer experience is always a top priority. Trustpilot helps us improve that experience and show others the proof.

If you’d like to know how you can achieve similar results with online reviews, please request a demo below.