Negative product reviews left by customers online can actually be good for retail business, a recent study has found.

According to data released by social commerce specialists Reevoo, 68 per cent of consumers find a company more trustworthy if there are both positive and negative product reviews, while 30 per cent suspect a company of forgery or censorship if they can find only positive comments.

Around three times more consumers go out of their way to look for negative product reviews than those who purposely look for positive ones. Indeed, negative product reviews proved to be much more popular than “most recent” or “people like me” reviews.

However, those consumers who actively seek out negative reviews online are actually 67 per cent more likely to convert their interest into a sale than the average customer.

The reasoning for this trend is that those who look for negative reviews are much more in depth with their pre-purchase research, having viewed four times as many products as the average consumer, and staying on the website for considerably longer.

Richard Anson, founder and CEO of Reevoo, said of the figures: “Consumers who seek out negative reviews outperform the average visitor to a website. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, negative user-generated content actually one of the most effective conversion tools.”