Reputation Management

Howdy Manufacturers,

Jon Hoch here again with our winter edition of our new video series on our Manufacturers' Portal. And today, we're going to be talking about your reputation online, but before we get started, check this out, this is so cool, watch this.

[Audible: "Hello, I'm Mr. Plow. Are you tired of having your hands cut off by snow blowers, and the inevitable heart attacks that come with shoveling snow? Then call Klondike-5-3226. Call now and receive a free t-shirt. ♫ Call Mr. Plow, that's my name, that name again is Mr. Plow.":♫ ]



So what do you think of that? What do you think of my reputation right now? When we come back, we're going to have a discussion about how to manage your reputation online through our Manufacturers' Portal and through our websites. Stay tuned...

Okay, we're back! Did you know there are two ways to shop our site?

You might be very familiar with our quick search, but we actually have a reviews quick search that you can get to by clicking this link right over here ["Snow Blower Reviews" box on right-hand side of the home page].



It gives you the ability to see all of your reviews and to see how you're ranking going forward, but here's what I want to do.

I want to do a quick search for a rear engine rider. And I'm going to show you how a bad reputation can just kill your sales.

So when you do the search, we list the products very similarly, but it goes by the letter grade ranking.

You can see as you go further down the page, the letter grades get worse and worse and worse. And look, we've got D's and we've got F's.



Now this is the worst case scenario. Most products have A's or B's or B-'s to some degree, but look at this.

17 reviews to give this product an F rating. Let's see what they have to say really quickly.

We've got Warren from Franklin Massachusetts who does not recommend it, and I'll let you read that for yourself, right?

We've got John in Fort Wayne who doesn't recommend it either.

We've got James in Springfield, Illinois, who says 'Weedeater Are Thieves." He doesn't recommend it.



We've got Bob in... Gallipolis, I guess. Have you been to Gallipolis? I haven't been to Gallipolis. He doesn't recommend it either! He said it's pathetic.

So here's the point: most of your products aren't going to have seventeen people who say that your product's pathetic. But there are going to be one or two people that don't like your product. And those few people are actually going to influence your letter grade ranking, and it's going to make an impact on your sales.

So if we go back to the top of this page, we actually have gotten to the point in which if the letter grade is a C, D, or an F, we actually no longer stock that product. In fact, we tell the customer to go somewhere else to buy it.



In this case, we tell them to go over to Ace Hardware and they can go ahead and buy this product. And we actually get a commission if they go to Ace Hardware to buy it. and guess how many commissions we've gotten on this product: ZERO.

You know why? Because nobody wants to buy it because it's an F rating.

So what makes us different than everyone else is our letter grade rankings. So the key here is that this again is the worst case scenario.You're probably going to have maybe a C+, a B-, even an A-.

But there are things that you can do to get your rankings higher. And in our next video series, we're going to tell you exactly how to get those higher, which equals a better brand reputation, which equals more sales, more money for you, us, everybody.

NEXT: Good Grades: How to Earn Better Letter Grades for Your Products