Online reviews matter because most people now check them before choosing where to spend their money, and roughly half say they trust a stranger’s review almost as much as a recommendation from a friend. For small businesses, that means reviews now function as word-of-mouth at scale — and ignoring them, good or bad, has a real cost.
How many customers actually read reviews before buying?
According to BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey of just over 1,000 US consumers, 97% read reviews before choosing a local business, and 41% say they “always” do — up from 29% the year before. On average, shoppers check six different review sites before deciding. We couldn’t find an equivalent large-scale South African survey, but there’s no strong reason to think the underlying habit is very different here.
Do people trust reviews from strangers?
The same BrightLocal survey found that 49% of consumers trust a stranger’s review almost as much as a personal recommendation, 85% say positive reviews make them more likely to use a business, and 77% say negative reviews put them off entirely. Locally, Hellopeter — South Africa’s own review platform, still drawing an estimated 400,000 visits a month, with over 80% of that traffic from South Africa — builds its brand around a similar idea: that people trust “the collective voice of other South Africans” over advertising. That’s Hellopeter’s own positioning rather than independent research, but its continued local traffic base suggests the underlying instinct holds true here too.
Can a better rating actually increase revenue?
A Harvard Business School study by Michael Luca found that a one-star increase in a business’s Yelp rating was linked to a 5–9% increase in revenue. That figure applied specifically to independent restaurants, not chain-affiliated ones, and Yelp itself has little presence in South Africa — but the underlying point holds regardless of platform: rating changes move real money, not just perception.
Which online review platform should you actually use?
Not every platform suits every business. This table matches business type to the platforms worth focusing on.
| Business type | Where to focus |
|---|---|
| Local service business or general SME | Google Business Profile |
| Online store / e-commerce | Trustpilot or Yotpo |
| Tourism and hospitality | TripAdvisor, Facebook and Google Business Profile |
| B2B or software | G2 or Capterra |
| Home services and trades | Google Business Profile – the popular US platforms Angi and HomeAdvisor have no real presence in South Africa |
Consumers may check six sites on average, but that is aggregate behaviour across all shoppers, not a checklist for your business. Pick the one or two platforms your own customers actually use, and put your effort into consistently earning reviews there rather than spreading thin across all of them.
What should you do about a bad review?
Hellopeter’s own scoring model treats businesses rated above 8 out of 10 as strong performers, and one thing that sets them apart is that they respond to reviews consistently — including the critical ones. A brief, non-defensive reply that acknowledges the issue and offers to sort it out privately does more for trust than a perfect rating with no engagement at all.
Is how people find reviews changing?
Yes — at least among the US consumers BrightLocal surveyed in 2026. Google is still the leading source at 71%, but that’s down from 83% the year before, while AI tools such as ChatGPT jumped from 6% to 45% as a place consumers check reviews. We don’t have equivalent South African figures, but the same shift is worth watching here: a solid review profile is starting to matter for what AI assistants tell people about you, not just for search rankings.
Reviews are one of the few marketing assets a small business builds for free, simply by doing good work and asking happy customers to say so. The businesses that treat them as an ongoing habit — not an afterthought — are the ones that show up when it counts.