Forum Moderators: buckworks
Helping people avoid products that are unsuitable for their needs can lead to fewer product returns and less time consumed by customer service problems.
If its legitimate reviews of a product that shows the reviewer did his/her homework but is still negative - keep it.
If its "sucks" or "meh" or something else pointless just delete 'em
So whilst having nothing but good reviews makes it look like you're trying too hard to sell something, having a mix of bad and good reviews does not necessarily lead to greater trust. Some people try to get round this by only deciding to trust consensus opinions on products that have a lot of reviews, although I've come across cases where there are lots and lots of obviously fake reviews.
What you should look for is a review that goes into depth about a product's features, rather than just praising or damning it. Who will like it, how does it work, pros and cons, etc. Just filter out the reviews that look as though they were written by impulsive children or over-enthusiastic PR people.
Also, recognise that a lot of people take user-contributed reviews with a pinch of salt.
Also, recognise that a lot of people take user-contributed reviews with a pinch of salt.
however, an unrelated negative review, due to an isolated issue like "i was not happy because i didn't receive my free - gift wrapping" is not a relavent informative review. that customer just filled in the gift-wrap form incorrectly and is most likely an idiot
- Positive reviews double the sales of a product among customers who read them
- Negative reviews halve the sales of a product among customers who read them
- Overall, adding reviews leads to a 1.9x increase in sales from customers who read them
There appear to be several reasons why the overall effect is so positive:
1) The presence of reviews increases consumer confidence and makes them more likely to buy
2) The overwhelming majority of reviews tend to be positive, with only a few negative and almost no neutral ones.
3) A negative review doesn't stop people buying from the site - it only stops them buying that particular product. They just find a similar product with a more positive review and buy that instead. This is called 'purchase substitution'.
Hope this helps
I think it also depends on what you are selling.
I know for certain items, it has helped reading negative reviews mixed in with mostly positive reviews(I ended up still buying the product).
As for what we sell,a wide selection is something 'pin' ourselves on, so we cannot afford to post too many negative reviews on too many things.
Everybody in the world is willing to take bad reviews at face value. But we never believe good reviews. Haing a few bad review "proves" that the good reviews are real.
j/k
I never trust reviews and assume them all to be sock puppets. But the stats are amazing on how much diff it makes.
If a consumer has to go elsewhere to read the bad because you only run the good reviews, then you have just lost a sale.
We have a general rule for allowed reviews, and they have to answer the who, what, where, when, why and how questions. If they don't meet these simple arguments then the review is not accepted.
It's possible for a product to have all positive reviews, without any of them being shills, just as much as it's possible for a product to have all negative reviews without it being anti-shills. However, just remember, a person with a negative experience with something is MUCH more likely to write about it then some one who was satisfied with an experience. So as always, take what you read with a grain of salt, and maybe visit a brick and mortar shop if it's a big enough purchase.
I just did this recently with a GPS receiver as reviews were all over the place. I went to a shop where I knew the employees were well versed with them and ended up taking the employee's advice after he outlined all the pluses and minuses of the 3 I was looking at.
Chip-
Besides, would you really want to remove bad reviews just so that your customers can unknowingly buy products with major deficiencies or incompatibilities? Not only is that dubious ethics, it would probably come back to haunt you in a variety of ways.
Keep in mind that some people will visit more than 1 site, and read reviews, the site that allows comments, good and bad will, I feel, win in the end.
If a product has reviews which average out at over 4.0 stars out of 5, I would have more confidence in that product than if they max out at 5.0 stars. An imperfect rating seems to imply a genuine rating, at least for me.
Widget wore out in just days!> See also: High Durability Widget
The screen is too small for clear viewing> See also: Widescreen Widgets
Batteries ran out quickly> See also: Spare battery packs for Widget
I think it's far more powerful the way Amazon does it which shows you percentage wise which product people ended up purchasing instead of which product some one purchased and then followed up by purchasing 10 different accessories just to make it work like Product B.
Some products have over a thousand reviews. What's more, you can sort the reviews according to their rankings and read all the bad reviews, then re-sort them to show all the good ones. They even show the percentages of each ratings (five stars is good, one star is bad, so at a glance you can see a product has 80% five-star reviews, or 50% five-star reviews etc. and quickly make thumbnail assumptions about the quality of the product).
If you do a drill-down or search box search, you can sort the results according to their reviews, and each product listing shows how many reviews it received so you can see how authoritative the rating is.
The upshot is that I have never felt more confident buying from any store, whether brick and mortar or online, as I do buying from this site. It is by far my favorite online retailer and part of the reason is the way they have cultivated community.
There's so many different models, which get replaced on a fairly frequent schedule, that most individual products just attract a couple of "bought this and it failed after 3 weeks, useless product do not buy 0/5" type reviews.
Which doesn't tell anyone anything apart from the fact that hard drives have a failure rate. Without knowing how many people bought this product and didn't have problems the reviews don't give any useful information.
The way it works out is that the better drives tend to have the most bad reviews, I presume because more people buy them, and therefore the total number of failures is greater.
Reviews that appear to be honest should be allowed to stand. A preponderance of bad reviews for a product suggests that the product should be dropped, improved, or perhaps marketed in a way that causes less user disappointment.
There's little doubt, though, that some review spammers are getting more clever and harder to spot.
Accumulating reviews of very costly items is difficult, too. A consumer is likely to buy only one 60" plasma TV for quite a few years, so he won't have much of a review history for that product category. In addition, review quality can be a bit iffy - the typical consumer doesn't have much to compare with when commenting on picture quality, etc. (Assuming it's not horrible in some way.) So, you might have one consumer who says "great picture!" and a more savvy AV buff who provides a detailed list of the shortcomings of the TV's picture quality compared to the top-of-the-line Sony. Both reviews can be helpful to the purchaser, IMO.
If you run into somebody who never likes anything others; wil see him for what he is. If it's somebody who generally likes most, but dislikes this, they'll be more likely to heed the warnign if it's relevant to them.
Sort of build a trust rank among the reviewers.
Another way is what amazon does: let the users rate (useful or not) the reviews themselves.
Combine both and you'll have a great system.
