Customer reviews are great, and word-of-mouth is still better.

Discgear.com just announced some dramatic success with customer reviews — 74% increase in conversions within 5 months.  Congrats to them and to their review system provider, PowerReviews.

But I couldn’t help noticing this quote from Michael Brown, their IT Director: “User-generated comments and reviews are second only to word-of-mouth as a purchase driver for web users.” So, by all means, invest in a customer reviews system.

But don’t forget your word-of-mouth system, too!