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E-commerce Sites Edit Customer Reviews
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Online retailers have a wide range of approaches to customer product reviews, with some struggling to balance candor with the desire to sell product. The Wall Street Journal Online has an overview of sites' policies. Newegg 'says it has a team of eight people who monitor reviews and reject submissions if they are too vague, mention competitors or criticize a brand without specific product insight, among other reasons. From July 1 to Aug. 2, the site received 18,188 reviews and rejected 15% of them, according to a Newegg spokesman.' Meanwhile, Overstock recently changed its policy: 'The Web retailer had been relying on its merchandising group -- the employees responsible for deciding which products to sell on the site -- to monitor reviews submitted by customers, but found that the group tended to approve only positive reviews. In January, the Salt Lake City-based company changed the monitoring responsibilities to its marketing team. The company now says it posts both positive and negative comments, as long as they are constructive.'"
Once you know, you never Newegg.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
This really shouldn't come as a suprise at all. The fact is, companies are out to sell product. I'm not saying they should delete all of the negative reviews, but don't be surprised if a lot of them do get deleted.
When you watch any type of commercial, you're not going to hear a negative review mentioned, correct? Why should the web be any different?
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Isn't there a difference between editing a review, and rejecting a review? Maybe I didn't RTFA close enough, but I didn't read anything about editing any of the reviews.
Je ne parle pas francais.
Seems to me that this is just filtering. While that's still not good, it's a lot more understandable and acceptable than editing what people say. Yet another misleading Slashdot headline, I guess.
"Astroturfing" certainly isn't something new, and neither is the practice of manipulating articles. Advertising slime certainly *would* stoop to that level to promote a product.
Heck, even movie reviews are total garbage. Sony just got busted for publishing "reviews" penned by someone that didn't even exist.
I don't trust *any* online review, be it on newegg, epinions.com, or amazon. Best reviews are still the ones you get from friends.
I don't think this should really be much of a surprise. It is impossible to trust the reviews that you read. The only person who benefits from truth is the consumer. Everyone else benefits from praise, false or not. The fact that Amazon had a great many reviews of their books posted by the authors or people related to the authors/publishers should give some insight into whether or not "customer reviews" are a good way of judging a product's merits.
I've read enough bad reviews on Newegg that I do believe they are removing only vague or troll posts. Removing only 15% of posts isn't much considering the amount of troll post /. sees.
This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. They are under no obligation to enable you to exercise your freedom of speech on their site. You're more than welcome to publish your own site, tell your friends or hand out flyers on the street corner.
All your talk of "free speech" and "censorship" is rather ridiculous.
I think product review comments should be moderated just like discussion forums. When posts are edited, they should be clearly marked as edited with an explanation.
There is nothing in that article to suggest the reviews are being edited. Rather, the article states that reviews are simply being approved or rejected which, regardless of perspective, is an entirely different thing.
Editing someone elses words would be far worse than simply applying some editorial control as to what is posted on their own site. Slashdot does the same sort of thing in the form of moderation. Moderators can affect what is seen by readers but they can't change individual posts.
Thanks,
David
# Hack the planet, it's important.
This is an abiding flaw of a non-transparent system in which an anonymous editor employed by the company chooses from anonymous reviews. They have tried to remedy this a bit with Real Name, but the fundamental problem remains: one or two dedicated shills or critics can easily manipulate the system.
As another example, some of you may remember the fake Amazon reviews of Bil Keane's Family Circus books during the heyday of spinnwebe's Dysfunctional Family Circus.
Evil sig is livE.
The only true independent reviewer that I know of is Consumer Reports. Of course, there is the problem that they don't necessarily review the types of products that New Egg sells.
False advertising is illegal. There are laws regarding what types of claims you can make, and how much you have to back them up. You can say "our product is great" but you cannot say "the President loves our product" (unless of course he publicly said that, or you've arranged a contract with him, etc.). Similarly, you couldn't say "we have conducted an independant scientific survey, and determined that 99% of people love our product" if that isn't true. Of course there are cases where companies commision "independant" reviews, or distort stats to their favor. But laws exist to constrain advertising, and prevent out-and-out lying.
... that would be misleading. Similarly, you cannot label them as "user reviews" if they have been edited.
When it comes to online user reviews, the situation gets a bit sticky. The reviews are hosted on the company's site... but something that claims to be "user reviews" implicitly indicates that these are the comments from all the users who cared to enter a comment. To modify or distort the comments is to change the implicit nature of the commenting system. So the company needs to clearly state "these reviews have been filtered and edited by our staff" or else they have to let the comments stand, consistent with a reasonable person's expectation of what is meant by "user reviews." To do otherwise is to purposefully mislead the customer. You cannot say "this medication is approved by doctors" if by "doctors" you mean some English professors who have Ph.D.s
(Note: a certain amount of filtering to remove blatantly inflamatory or irrelevant reviews is of course okay, since this doesn't contradict a normal expectation of what a "user review" is.)
New Egg is great. I've ordered from them multiple times. Only once have I had a defective part (I purchased a refurbished motherboard) and they replaced it promptly, shipping me a replacement before they received the defective part back from me.
You should *NEVER* trust a review on a commerce site. That goes without saying. Always go to an independant source that doesn't have a bias. That's like going to a car dealership and asking the dealer their honest opinion on the car in the window. Stupid.
-everphilski-
Obviously they need a scoring system!
Would that be -- oh, shall we say -- "insightful"?
It doesn't matter what website you're talking about. "Customer" reviews can't be trusted at face value, because you can never tell when one's a shill.
(Wanna see an industry that has a 1:billions signal-to-noise ratio on reviews? Try finding legitimate reviews of web hosting services.)
In Newegg's case, they've always done a fine job when I've ordered from them, even though that free pen they sent me ran out of ink really quickly.
I have a hard time finding fair, accurate reviews regardless of whether the reviews are written by staff or by consumers. There is a very real conflict of interest for sites that depend on manufactures for advertising dollars and testing samples. On the by-consumer side, you have to filter out shills and zealots (pick your favorite site and check out the consumer reviews of Quicken and Microsoft Money... it's like a holy war).
That said, I've been very happy with consumer reports. They only review items that they purchase themselves (i.e. no 'freebies' or higher-quality items specifically earmarked for product reviews). Furthermore, they accept no advertising and get all their revenue from subscriptions. These two factors take away much of the conflict of interest and/or bias issues that can plague other review sites.
Downsides? Cost (not necessarily expensive imho, but still a tough sell to people who expect everything online to be free). It's also doesnt work with early adopters because they wont review items before they available for purchase. Finally, though they've been getting a bit more 'hip' lately when it comes to technology I doubt your going to find an exhaustive video card shoot-out anytime soon.
What I'd really like to see is a site (or magazine) that can does a decent video game review. They seem to be either clearly biased, drip with ego and/or condescention, but usually they are just TOO LONG. Why is it Ebert can give a fair review of "Mullholland Drive" on a quarter-page of the chicago sun-times, but nobody can seem to encapsulate "Mario Tennis" in under 5 printed pages??
You're forgetting something though. These people aren't waving a massive flag around saying "THIS STORE SUCKS" they're saying "this specific product on the shelf is not worth your time, try this one over here". It's the same store, just a single product in the store is being targetted though.
:)
It's much like the same thing big biz does with radio, pay the radio stations big bucks to only play their songs (eerily similar to communist propoganda) and either totally filter out, or only allow mild critisism about those few they do play.
This I believe is one of the reasons why Howard Stern is so crazy popular, because he doesn't blindly follow his sponsers and tends to piss in quite a few people's cups. He states it like it is and allows boths sides of an object to be seen. If more stores/businesses took this into practice, then maybe they would actually learn what the users REALLY want and they wouldn't have to worry about stupid shit like hiring 8 editors to only approve the good little snippets for the companies that pay for their product to be "featured".
Do what you're there to do, sell a product and make money, but for baby Jesus' sake, don't sell out in the process.
Very true, but do your outside research also.
If you click on the "Help & Info" tab at the top of newegg it'll take you to a page loaded with some partial and some impartial sites for reviewing products.
Anandtech has an awesome forum that'll help you figure out if something is good and if it's right for you.
Hmmm witty sig or funny sig? Maybe elitest techy sig!
Sometimes I have second thoughts too. But have you considered other sites where people post ratings? 99% of all eBay reviews read like they were written by a speed addict thanking his/her dealer. The average eBay review contains a series of ++++++ with an A+ in there somewhere. So it is entirely possible this is how people like to post.
;)
It's a common human behavior to express positive things with catch-phrases and certain words. Further, the Internet has proven to me that many many people like being fans of companies. Perhaps this "utility" they recieve from being a fan is attached their ability to proclaim it, just like sports fans receive their utility by cheering. Oh yes, and some are borderline illiterate
I would assume normal human behavior before I move on to "editorial conspiracy." I mean, it is also possible that people (such as myself) are satisfied with Newegg. I say, "good" and some people say "Newegg Rock0z" or whatever. We could mean roughly the same thing.
Lately I've been loving the way C-Net reviews items. They seem to be in contrast with retailers in the way they accept everything.
Whenever I want to review something I first go to the negative comments. Through those I can find out what the downsides of a certain product are. If none of those qualities will impair my ability to use/enjoy it then I consider it a good purchase.
Positive reviews only tell me that a large percantage of folks don't have problems with stuff they buy.
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I had a person experience with this. It's probably a bit boring, but here goes.
I purchased about a year ago a LeadTek Geforce 6800 GT from Newegg.com After getting it and doing some benchmarks, i realized that somehow they had sent me some sort of wierd card...it was actually the equivalant of a 6800 GTS (it had memory running at a much lower clock speed than it should have been, and clearly didn't run at 'stock' GT speeds). I contacted newegg, they were very cool about it, and they refunded my money after I mailed it back to them.
I later wrote a review of the product along with the description of the problems that I had in the hopes that it could alert some people who may have been inadvertantly mis-sold a product like myself (Newegg had no idea how I had gotten this card) along with a actually glowing review of newegg for their customer service, but it was never added to the website. I tried a different version later, and it was also not added.
I can understand it to some extent, but I felt that in a way it's also just protecting their behind, and I felt like there should have been a way for me to warn other customers. After all, isn't that why we read reviews? Not just to look for the "5 STARS OMG IT RULES" reviews, but also the problems that people have? I know that's why I look at them. It is I think, a marginal business practice that I don't really agree with.
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These web sites need some sort of moderation like Slashdot--but perhaps with a little more "professional" scoring. Users who login and have a history of responsible opinion should be rated higher than others.
In addition, when it comes to product reviews, there needs to be a weighting system by date. Saying a camera is 4 out of 5 doesn't mean much if it is two years old. A new model at the bottom of the barrel may be better than the best of two years ago with the way the technology changes. So I find reading the reviews and looking for intelligent comments and noticing the date of the comment helps me more than just knowing how many people thought a camera was great.
But in general, systems need to weed the good from the bad... not all opinions are equal--that is just a fact of life.
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