Here is a number worth pinning above your marketing budget: 65% of global shoppers now rely on user-generated content – the ratings, reviews, photos and videos made by real people – to decide what to buy. That is one of the headline UGC statistics from Bazaarvoice’s latest Shopper Experience Index, and it quietly changes where your money should go this year. Let me walk you through the figures that actually matter, and what they mean for how you spend.
What the 65% figure actually means.
Bazaarvoice surveyed more than 8,000 shoppers across the UK, US, Germany, France, India, Australia and Canada. 65% said they lean on UGC when they are deciding whether to buy. It goes further than that. The same research found that 86% of shoppers engage with creator content before making a buying decision, and among Gen Z, 80% call UGC crucial to how they choose.
Read that again. Most of your customers are looking for other people’s content before they trust yours. Not your product-page copy. Not your polished hero film. The clip a real person filmed in their kitchen, the review with a slightly blurry photo attached – that is the content doing the convincing.
The shift is happening from both sides, too. In that same survey, the share of shoppers who describe themselves as passive – people who read opinions but never share their own – dropped from 46% to 28% in a year. More of your customers are becoming creators themselves. That is a growing pool of real content about your product, if you give people a reason to make it.
Shoppers are slowing down, not speeding up.
The newer numbers are the ones that surprised me. In Bazaarvoice’s June 2026 index, 97% of shoppers said they now consult multiple sources before buying. Six in ten need two or three sources before they feel safe. Almost four in ten – 37% – want four or more.
People are not impulse-buying their way through your funnel. They are opening tabs, cross-checking, hunting for the catch. Bazaarvoice put it well: the influencer gets the click, the review closes the sale. Just under half of shoppers happily follow a creator’s recommendation during discovery, then 38% jump straight to a search engine to pressure-test the claim and dig for one-star reviews.
So a single great piece of content does not close the deal any more. Your customer sees it, likes it, and then goes looking for three more opinions to back it up. If those opinions are not there, the sale stalls.
What that does to your budget.
Here is where a lot of brands get it wrong. They commission one shiny video, put it everywhere, and expect it to carry the whole journey. The statistics say that is a waste of money.
If shoppers need several sources before they buy, you need content in several places, from several angles, that all feels like it came from real people. One video cannot be the discovery hook, the trust-builder and the review all at once. You want a spread: a talking-head clip that explains the product, a casual demo that shows it in use, editorial stills for the product page, short cuts built for the feed. Different formats for different moments in that slow, careful decision.
There is a second reason to think in volume. AI search now leans on the same content. Bazaarvoice’s own research points to AI shopping tools building their recommendations from independent reviews and real sentiment. Feed the humans and you feed the algorithms at the same time. Starve them, and you go missing from both the search results and the shortlist.
Where to put the money.
My honest take, as someone who films this stuff for brands every week: stop paying for one perfect asset and start paying for coverage.
Order three to five pieces around a single product instead of one. Get a mix of formats so you can drop the right one into the right moment – the feed, the product page, the paid ad, the follow-up email. Make sure at least some of it looks like a real customer made it, because that is the content the 65% are actually looking for. And keep it honest. Shoppers are hunting for the catch, so anything that oversells gets found out fast and costs you the trust you were trying to buy.
None of this needs a huge budget. It needs the right spread of content, built to look like a friend’s recommendation rather than an ad. Spend on variety and honesty, and you meet shoppers at every stop on that careful, multi-source journey – instead of betting the whole quarter on one video and hoping it does everything.
If you want a batch of UGC that covers discovery, trust and conversion – filmed, edited and ready to post – take a look at my packages or email me at [email protected]. Tell me the product and where it needs to show up, and I will handle the rest.
