Amazon's Product Reviews Aren't Useful
I’m going to let you in on the worst kept secret about Amazon: their product ratings are terrible. Now, I’m pretty sure Amazon has acknowledged this is a problem. However it doesn’t seem like there’s been much of a priority to fix it. We want legitimate, reasonable reviews!
This is admittedly anecdotal, but I feel like almost every item has over a 4 star rating on Amazon (though I would love to see the actual data on what percent of products have 4+ star ratings). And I would wager significant portions of their reviews are fake.
My “proof” - go to pretty much any other shopping website, and the average star rating for the items being sold is significantly lower. When every item on your first page of results has a 4.2+ star rating, that’s no longer helpful. Forgive my cynicism, but I just don’t believe that Amazon shoppers are inherently nicer about reviewing products the shoppers of other sites.
To help illustrate this, let’s do a quick thought experiment: Let’s say you see an item with several thousand reviews on Amazon (not uncommon), and it has a 4.4 star rating (also not uncommon). How many average shoppers do you think actually take the time to rate a purchase and write a review? I would wager maybe 1 in 100, maybe 1 in 200, maybe even 1 in 1,000? I’d love to see the actual data on this. But absent of that, let’s say it’s 1 in 100. In reality, I think there’s even few shopper who leave reviews. I know several folks who have never written a review for anything. But for the purposes of this thought experiment…
If we assume that 1 in 100 people actually write a review that would mean that you would need 100,000 to buy the product for every 1,000 reviews. And the majority of those supposedly being 5 star reviews? I think not. (The sheer volume of reviews alone is certainly suspect.) Personally if I’m writing a review it’s almost always because I’m not happy with the product or something went wrong. This just doesn’t pass the gut check for me.
On top of that, you could easily have a full first page of results with 50+ items when you search for “legal pads.” And the average number of reviews for each product on that page is over 1,000 (if you don’t believe me, check for yourself).
Now, I know that Amazon is huge, and their volume is enormous. But can they really be getting this high of volume to justify the number of reviews? And do this for 50 different versions of “legal pads”? And be doing this across every product category - constantly? I just don’t think that adds up. Maybe I’m just massively underestimating Amazon’s volume, but it seems more likely that a large portion of the reviews are not legitimate.
Oh and by the way, have you seen some of these reviews? These customers are basically writing essays, that are several paragraphs long. Oftentimes these are for items that are $10-25 dollars. No way there are that many people taking the time to write those long reviews for a purchase of that size.
The more likely solution? Large numbers of these reviews are fake. My main curiosity is: what portion of the reviews are not legitimate? Could it be as high as 50%? Even higher than that? I would love to know the scope of how big the problem really is.
What’s more, this seems like a very fixable problem. Analysts could easily examine the data to look at trends about when reviews or coming in, and at what velocity. Using some form of natural language processing weed out likely fake reviews. There are a handful of technology solutions that could help with this. I just hope one day soon Amazon decides this is a problem worth fixing.