Impact of Social Media on E-commerce search results.

E-commerce is growing in India. Existing sites are getting more traffic. New Websites are acquiring new users. New product categories are getting sold online. Logistics companies are creating separate divisions to cater to E-tail orders. Newer ways of selling online are being experimented with and many new online shopping companies are likely to come up in the next one year.

In spite of a lot of product categories coming in to play, there will still be the top categories like, Electronics, Jewelery, Books and a couple more that each E-tailer would like to have in the portfolio. The fact that there are common vendors and sources for products across sites in India, is also not in for any major change in the near future. Another thing which is not going to change soon is the fact that most people will continue to search for products on Google before entering a shopping site.

For people who are into E-commerce business but think of people engagement features as a waste of time must read the next paragraph.

In a Scenario when most product descriptions look alike, there are chances of your page being left out of the results display by Google. Google has the result indexed in its data, but it uses a duplicate-content filter method so the display of the page will largely depend on the extent of Original/ different content on that page. Hence you loose out if you only have the manufacturer-supplied copy, on the product page.
 
When user reviews augment catalog and product descriptions, it increases the crawl-ability of the product pages and also improves the display placement of the product. It is like outsourcing your copy-writing to the users and getting it done for free.

User Reviews not only serve the purpose of SEO, they also add to other factors like trustworthiness of  website, that contribute to conversions.