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Amazon Overhauling Customer Reviews
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon says it's making some big changes to its product review system, one of the most heavily used on the internet and a vital part of Amazon's business. A machine-learning platform will endeavor to select helpful reviews with an emphasis on more recent ones. The average score will change as well: new reviews will be weighted higher than old reviews. Reviews from verified purchasers will have more influence as well, and also reviews voted up by other customers. "For example, sometimes a company will make small tweaks to a product or address some customer complaints, though this product isn't officially updated or renamed. With the new system, [Amazon] said, these small modifications should become more noticeable when shoppers are buying products." Because the review system is so important to customers, Amazon will be rolling out changes slowly, and watching for anything that breaks or gets skewed in unexpected ways.
The other problem is that they'll group different models on the same page. So the reviews you see are for all the models together. In many cases Version B is way better than Version A. But, you still see the bad reviews without realizing it's unrelated to what you're going to buy. They also need to address the paid bad reviewers. I looked up stuff just last week and the same one star review, word for word, was listed on three different items. And these were three totally unrelated items. One in electronics, one in cookware, and the third in camping equipment.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Well, yes and no... http://www.amazon.com/gp/custo... ... This person's one star review was posted three years ago and has garnered 76 responses. The most current was 20 days ago. It's amazing seeing the "You're right" - "No, you're wrong" conversation. Even when the company, right from the beginning, stated, "This is how your testing methods are faulty...", people are still saying this one star review has convinced them not to buy the product. [BTW: 88% of 4,121 people gave this product a 4-5 star review. ] So, while this review has survived the test of time, the only usefulness it has achieved is to show how bad testing methods are readily accepted if it's buried in enough data.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.