The importance of feedback

Do I need feedback?
Every website that wants to improve needs feedback.
A quick analysis of your website by a few users can give you a good insight and even scope out a few problems you did not know you had.

You only need as little as 5 users or less to get a good grasp of where you might need to improve, or to emphasise the positive sides of your product (source: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html)

Feedback doesn't have to be negative. It's very common to worry about feedback being too harsh and that scares a few people into denial.

Feedback lets us improve, and the more we improve the site, the better it will be. The better the website is the more sales it will make!

How can feedback help me and how do I work with it?
What can we do with all the feedback we receive?
Organise the feedback into groups and give it weight.
As an example:
3 users think that your navigation is lacking and your website could improve its main navigation menu.
1 user thinks that your overall colour scheme is disrupting.
2 users think that your registration process is too long and difficult.

Organise the feedback into work packages.
We start with the 3 users’ opinion on the navigation. This is not a lot of work for one of the developers, and with a little bit of thought and work this can be reworked almost instantly. We put this on top of the priority list because a) it is the most common issue and b) it's quick to fix.
The second one down the list will be the one user who thought the overall colour scheme was bad. After some brief research we find that the colours we picked for the website is not ideal so we put this as the second work package.

Why did we not put the two user feedback (the registration issue) as the second work package? Because the registration process (in this hypothetical scenario) is tied in to a large portion of the website and the cost of development in time and money would be too high to give enough return on the investment. We put this as a "nice to have" issue. We save this, because we want to think about this issue for the next big development of the website.

In short: by making use of feedback we can improve our website. A simple analysis now, and some clever handling of the feedback, can lead to long term savings and improved business.