Weekly App Review: How Ebay's Good Reviews Can Improve Localization

Helpshift’s Review Analytics gives a thorough, actionable breakdown of what people say about your product in the app store. You now have the ability to transform feedback into a solid product development and marketing strategy at scale. Every week we’ll provide data-driven insights for an app based on its publicly available user ratings.

Ebay has a global average review score of 3.7 on iOS, excluding ratings without a review attached. What can their reviews tell us about the app’s localization strategy? Let’s start by checking the review sentiments each day this week.

The sentiment for Ebay is mostly positive out of 1956 worldwide reviews. There’s no doubt that users enjoy the app overall. Yet good reviews can still reveal an issue that Ebay could address for a better localization process. In fact, evangelists often have the most experienced advice. Checking what users have to say around the world is as simple as clicking the country you’re curious about. Let’s try the United Kingdom:

Each review shows the user’s country of origin as the UK. This sample shows a trend throughout reviews from that region–users think Ebay has a great app, but the experience isn’t well catered to them. UK sellers have an issue with flat rate international postage. Buyers are often shown foriegn (US & Chinese) items despite their default setting for UK. Customers cannot feel engaged when the app isn’t made with them in mind. Personalizing your marketing with custom pages and 1:1 native communication is an important aspect of user experience, and is proven to increase conversion rates.

Localization goes a long way toward securing 5-star ratings, and customer reviews are an excellent way to establish what international customers want. AirBnB segmented users to create landing pages by region, referral, and device, which increased their conversion rates by 25%. Localization isn’t just about changing languages; countries often have different product and service expectations as well. We discuss these nuanced international strategies in our 5th webcast.

Simply “porting” your app to other regions will create localization issues. While this is easier for smaller apps, Ebay could fix these problems by creating region-specific updates that solve the issues their segmented users complain about. For example, why not prioritize nearby sellers based on location, like Tinder does for user profiles? Here’s one final example from another region–India:

This customer is forced to use a computer (defeating the point of an app) when completing payments. Yet again the customer sees that Ebay’s app is great, but also realizes that there are problems with the product offered in India. You could say this customer agrees with our app review: the only drawback to Ebay’s stellar app is their localization. To remedy that problem, companies now use in-app tools which allow proactive, customized help for international scaling. Every feature is built in over a dozen languages out of the box.

Solving the pain point of localization means segmentation, analysis, and a handoff to the product team.

Altogether:

Ebay has secured plenty of good reviews by having a user friendly app. Customers from UK, Australia, India, and U.S. are impressed by the intuitive interface. It’s a translatable strength that every app should try to mimic.
The good reviews also contain localization critiques that Ebay should address: more useful fee payments, intuitive & local item offerings, and a better method for international postage. They should address these problems with region-specific updates and/or a universal solution.
Companies now use in-app tools which allow customized help in 16 languages. Use analytics to segment the common issues that users have by country, and optimize the product accordingly.

Improving your mobile app reliably is all about data-driven feedback. We’re happy to help. To get a free ratings breakdown, contact me at [email protected].