Name: Community as Commerce: Turning Ratings & Reviews into Sales
Uploaded: 2026-03-18T04:06:07.797Z
Duration: 25 min 8 s
Description: Community as Commerce: Turning Ratings & Reviews into Sales

Transcript for "Community as Commerce: Turning Ratings & Reviews into Sales": Hello, everyone, and welcome to this Next Customer Connect session. I am Monica Malpe, a Senior Product Manager here at Amplify, and I am joined by, Christina Bailin, the CMO at Car Parts. Christina, thank you so much for joining us. I'll, give you a moment to intro yourself, but I will just set the stage to say it's a really great opportunity for us to understand a little bit more about, you know, to connect with a customer to dig into how they're using us, behind the scenes a little bit. So this is a great opportunity. So Christina, I'll let you just give a little bit of background. Sure. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. I'm Christina Vilein, Chief Marketing Officer of carparts.com. And we've been working with Amplify for the last two years, a little bit more than that actually prior to me joining CarParts. And we've been on a real journey of transformation from a marketing standpoint, really focusing on the customer, bringing them up to speed where it comes to the customer journey and pulling those insights into our organization. And Amplify has been a really critical part of that journey. So excited to be here with you today. Thank you. And we are delighted to have you for sure. So just to kind of set the stage here, could you give us a little bit of an overview of how you're working with us, how your teams are working with us here at Amplify? Yeah, so at CarParts, we don't look at reviews as just social proof. They're really a core performance lever. So over the past few years, we've really transformed how we collect, structure, syndicate, and activate review data across millions of SKUs. So our partnership with Amplify has been central to that transformation. And we really approach reviews from three different angles. One is technical integrity. So working closely with your team to ensure that reviews are captured, displayed, and that the UX is frictionless for consumers. Two is journey optimization, which I touched on a little bit before, which is identifying additional touch points across post purchase, email, and PDP engagement. And then the third is syndication and family grouping. And that's really allowed us to take our number of reviews to the next level. So syndicating reviews from our partner websites, as well as grouping of family SKUs so that more people can, see reviews and build trust with our product. And all of those three touch points have really led to, significant growth in terms of trust, brand awareness, and just overall, purchase. We've seen an increase in conversion rates across our website from about 2.3% to 2.5% over the past year, which has led to, like I said, significant growth. Wow, that's amazing. And I love that you are tracking that back and, can attribute that to the reviews. How so you're collecting all of this content both natively and from your brands. How are you using the data in terms of, you know, within your organization? How are your teams using the data? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, we don't really look at it as static data. It is part of our performance intelligence dashboard. So we really use Amplify across a number of different touch points. So the most obvious one is identifying sentiment trends across categories, but then also surfacing recurring product feedback themes. So, one of those examples would be, a product where we have folded bumper covers and we were seeing somewhat negative reviews in terms of how people were receiving the product and unpackaging it. And we realized that we needed to provide more information on how to actually use the product, that people needed to allow the folded bumper cover to sit out and sit in under the heat or use a heat gun to unfold the bumper cover. And so that was an example of where we really took the data across data science, marketing, as well as merchandising to make a real impact on the business, and we saw lower returns as a result. We also use feedback to improve PDP content clarity. So, it could be language around, you know, what do we mean when we say OE quality part? That's industry terminology, but maybe the consumer doesn't know that. And so that was one example of where we provided more clarity on the PDP page. We've also optimized our marketing copy and creative messaging. And then, ultimately, guided product development conversations with suppliers using the feedback that we're seeing in Amplify. So they've really become a real time voice of customer, the customer for us. And you covered a little bit of what I was going to ask next, which was who in the organization is using the data. But I think you've kind of covered most, but I'll just leave that open in case there's anyone else you want to include in that group. Yeah, great. So, you know, we talked about the content and SEO team, the merchandising and sourcing teams. The other team that uses this is customer experience. So they also review trends to proactively address any sort of recurring issues. And then within marketing, specifically, our email and retention team also use product review prompts to optimize the post purchase journey. And so we've, as a result, included more trigger emails, as well as expanded our SMS program, thanks to the reviews that we're seeing. And as you're ingesting all of this content, what would you say would be the best practices for how often you're reviewing the content and the data? Yeah, great question. So we do have a person on the marketing team whose sole job is to look at product review data on a daily and weekly basis, and they work really closely with our customer service team. So some of the product reviews have concerns around shipping or orders, and so that gets then escalated to the customer service team. But I'd say we look at it on a daily basis, and then typically on a monthly basis when it comes to sharing that information with our merchandising and sourcing teams. That's great. I love that you're reviewing it so real time, and responding to customers. When you are, so you've given us maybe one or two examples of how you've actioned insights, are there any more that you have up your sleeve that you can share with us? I think that's always interesting for listeners to hear about. Yeah, we talked a little bit about fitment clarity. And so when customers were receiving those folded bumper covers, we were able to address that as one piece of feedback. The other one was just packaging being damaged. So we saw that there was, a consistent trend with certain, packages being damaged on certain SKUs. And so we've been able to work really closely with our operations team and our DC directors to, improve our packaging, across those SKUs so that and then providing customers more guidance around, how to deal with that packaging. And then I mentioned the third one just being the terminology confusing around confusion around, OE quality parts versus being and then we also have something called, Kappa certified parts. And so we actually got really strong positive feedback across our product review sites around Kappa certified parts. And so we ended up launching an entire, customer marketing campaign around what is Kappa certified, which is a safety standard that's used within the industry. And so that's been also a really positive growth lever for us in the business. Great. And I was just going to ask you, what is Kappa certified, but good to know, good to know. And can you share with us maybe some measured benefits of, trends that you're seeing in the data? Yeah, so, last year we saw significant growth. So as of December 2025, our product reviews grew 25% year over year, which is the most that we've seen, in several years. And so really, really positive growth. And the majority of that was, driven by the syndication of reviews. We also saw, even just in December, a 9% month over month growth. Again, one of the things that we were able to do is work with your team to enhance the amount of trigger notifications post purchase that led to additional product reviews. So that was really great. And then beyond volume, what we're seeing is just stronger trust signals on PDPs. What we're seeing across the board is a stronger affinity to want to purchase with carparts.com, and we believe here that much of that is driven by the strong partnership that we have with your team, as well as the product reviews growing on our site. We're seeing higher engagement with review modules, and then as I mentioned earlier, improved conversion rates on products with robust review depth. Yeah, that's great and so so important to have that social proof and validation to help really drive conversions. I was going to, I'd love to just dig in a little bit more about the conversion, the correlation between reviews and, conversion that you see. So is there a tipping point in terms of that number of reviews where you start to really see that uptick in conversion? Yeah, we haven't done an in-depth study, but typically we like to have at least five reviews on products where we start to see more traction, but we do consistently see that products with higher review volume and higher star ratings outperform low reviews, SKUs, and conversion rates. So, Amplify syndication and family grouping capabilities have really allowed us to aggregate review equity across variations, which then has directly increased PDP trust signals and accelerated purchase decisions. So we really do believe that trust drives transactions. Yep, for sure, for sure. And then I'd love to talk a little bit about, your experience working with us from a customer support perspective and as a strategic partner. So is there anything that stands out to you in terms of the way that we've supported you over the past couple of years, that you'd like to share? Yeah, we really don't view our partnership with your team as a transactional vendor relationship. It really is a strategic partnership. And what really stands out is the proactive support from the team. We have, folks on the retention marketing team, as well as our tech and product teams that have no problem reaching out on sometimes a weekly basis for that proactive support. We've received nothing but the best standards. Also the responsiveness to any sort of integration needs or any sort of fire drills when there might be a tech issue on our side, your team is always ready to jump in. And I don't think I've ever seen a response that took longer than six to twelve hours. It's always very, very quick. And then the collaboration on the syndication strategy, that was something that your team brought to CarParts, and it's something that has significantly grown the business. So that's, a huge thanks to your team. And then finally, just the willingness to problem solve at scale. We have, a pretty complex business. We sell over 1,500,000 parts, and so, having reviews on as many of those parts as possible is key to the growth of our business and your team really takes that partnership seriously. And so we're very grateful for the partnership and the ability to have really grown the business over the past couple of years and beyond. So Christina, I'd love to get a little bit of insight into what your future review strategy looks like, for this year and into next. Is that something you could share with us? Absolutely. I mean, I think the buzzword that we've all been hearing for the past couple of years is AI. And so in 2026, we're really thinking about how AI can help summarize some of the review themes that we're seeing dynamically on PDPs, helping customers instantly understand key pros and considerations, that reinforces our AI forward narrative and really helps to ultimately drive even more clarity for consumers. Seeing aggregated review insights, understanding fitment and installation expectations, and learning from real buyer experiences similar to how you might see it on other websites. We don't currently have that on car parts today. And so really just, again, making it more easy, discoverable, and ideally personalized, for our customers as they navigate what can sometimes be quite a challenging and complex, thing, which is to how do you update your car, which has over 30,000 parts on it. It's not a one and done clear cut deal. And so we'd love to be able to pull more information from those product reviews, especially into our AI chatbot, which we just launched last year called Spark. So marrying the data will just further allow customers to, feel more supported and have a more personalized journey. Excellent. Love that. Absolutely love that. And Amplify's AI, reviews, capabilities include review topics and review summaries, which can be added to the actual review widgets themselves to help, shoppers parse through, you know, hundreds, you know, in some cases hundreds of reviews that you might have for a particular part and drill down into the topics that are particularly important to them as they're making their decision. Great, yeah, we're very excited to explore how to tap into those products, purely because of what you just said. It's just going to help ease the purchase buying behavior and hopefully minimize the amount of time they have to spend searching for the right information to give them that comfort that they're buying the right part for their car. So earlier we talked a little bit about how you have several different teams at carparts.com utilizing the content and data that you're collecting through Amplify. I'd love to just, I'd love to understand a little bit more about how you're envisioning or what your, I'm gonna use the word North Star here would be in terms of, bringing teams together, with a unified data set to work from. Yeah, I think the real transformation has been customer focus has always been one of our core values at CarParts. But we really haven't had the data or the single view of that data to really be able to truly be customer focused. And I've said many times over the past year that it's never been a more exciting time to be a marketer because of the data at our fingertips, especially when it comes to consumer insights. And here with Amplify, we have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of touch points of real time customer data about every single product that feeds directly into that ability for us to back up our value of being customer focused. And it really is the thing that unifies all of our teams together is to, have a set of core insights where we understand what are the friction points, what are the points of differentiation for car parts, and use that to directly impact our value proposition to customers, what differentiates us, and then how we ultimately direct our, tech roadmap and product roadmap from those insights. And so, it's a very exciting thing to be able to have this data at our fingertips, harness it, and really impact the direction and future of where we take our business and grow and ultimately, make the lives of our customers a little bit easier for them, especially around the car parts journey. Yep, love that, love that and that's what it should all be about is the customer for sure. So Christina took us through how car parts is utilizing the data and the content that's being captured by the ratings and reviews module in the Amplify platform. So the teams at CarParts are taking actionable insight from understanding what people are saying about their products, how their products are being rated over time and so on and using that as an integral part of how they are managing their business. And I just wanted to just pause here for a second to take you into Amplify and just show you how ratings and reviews fits in. So on the left hand side here you can see all the different modules that support your social marketing needs, your customer care needs, your social commerce needs. All of those modules are available here which is super convenient not only because you don't need to log in multiple times to multiple platforms but also from a analytics perspective. So if I click into unified analytics, I'm just going to show you I'm going to take you just into listening which is another way to understand and gain insight into what people are saying. But in this case, it's more about your business and your brand. So if I look here at this report that sits amongst all the other available reporting, You can see all the different data elements that can be pulled in. And this is for our demo brand, a made up beauty brand called Totique. So in this world, Totique has imaginary competitors that are all listed here. So we can look at not only when Totique is mentioned but also when the imaginary competitors are mentioned as well as also identifying what region is being mentioned as well. So all of that is available here in a very easy and digestible report with all different data points pulled into one view. And that's just one report that you would have access to with Amplify. But if you want to learn more, and dig a little deeper into the platform and have a little bit of a walkthrough of what the other modules do, put a note in the comments and we will get back to you and set up a demo session. So I think that that concludes what we we plan to cover today. So for those of you who have joined, we have a poll that will be appearing. So we would love your feedback. So please take a moment or two to respond to that poll. And Christina, thank you so, so much, for joining us and sharing, those insights with us. It's been, wonderful to get kind of real time customer insights and all the exciting things that you have planned for our partnership. So thank you so, so much. Oh, you're so welcome. It was my pleasure and great speaking to the team. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.