"In a highly competitive marketplace like Kindle covers, what role do product reviews play?
From
the point of view of the consumer the answer is fairly obvious. It is a
well known fact that shoppers are becoming better informed,
particularly with regards to eCommerce. More than half of consumers will
now routinely track down reviews of products that they are thinking
about purchasing. The practice is used more when the goods to be
purchased get more expensive.
Consumers can use product reviews in
several ways. Firstly is reading actual product reviews themselves.
This process may reaffirm the customer's decision to buy or make them
look for something else.
Reviews can also function on a deeper
level though. Consumers are becoming ever more sophisticated and will
see reviews differently depending on their 'trust value'. Most consumers
instinctively believe the reviews on Amazon for example as they have
earned a reputation over a long period of time. Other sites that someone
has never heard of though may be treated with a degree of caution.
Consumers have found out that reviews can be fraudulent and they are
wary.
The quantity of reviews available for a particular product
is a critical factor in establishing trust. A product which has a couple
of thousand reviews is likely to instil greater confidence than one
that has just a few, it's social proof. With products that have lots of
reviews shoppers can get an overall sense of whether it is up to par and
subsequently focus on the bad reviews to try and establish what the
cons could be.
Some of the more advanced platforms have methods of
commenting on individual reviews, posting questions and methods for
voting for them as being helpful or not. This causes the most popular
reviews to bubble up to the top and leads to a more informative consumer
experience.
As review usage becomes ever more prevalent then more
places will publish them. One of the results of this is that websites
can now be found that specialise in publishing reviews of websites
themselves. Now shoppers can read product reviews on one website and
then check for reviews of the website itself so as to see if it has
enough trust value to believe the reviews that it contains and if it is
secure enough to make a purchase.
With so much time and work put
into consumer reviews for the benefit of online shoppers what use is it
all to a manufacturer? The best manufacturers have realised the value of
consumer reviews and have discovered that they contain a huge amount of
valuable information that relates to their very product, what is useful
about it and what is lacking or just doesn't work. The best
manufacturers have started using 'customer refined design' principles."
