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People Are Complete Suckers For Online Reviews (nypost.com)
schwit1 shared an article from the New York Post:
No reviews, no revenue. That's the key takeaway from a new study published in Psychological Science, which finds that if two similar products have the same rating, online shoppers will buy the one with more reviews... "[When] faced with a choice between two low-scoring products, one with many reviews and one with few, the statistics say we should actually go for the product with few reviews, since there's more of a chance it's not really so bad," wrote researcher Derek Powell of Stanford University, lead author of the report. In other words, when there's only a handful of reviews, a few bad ones break the curve and bring down the overall rating. "But participants in our studies did just the opposite: They went for the more popular product, despite the fact that they should've been even more certain it was of low quality," he wrote.
Matt Moog, CEO of PowerReviews, previously conducted a study with Northwestern University [PDF] that drew from an even larger data pool of 400 million consumers, which also found that the more reviews there are of a product, the more likely it is that a customer will purchase that product... He has also found that customers who read reviews often click the bad ones first. "They want to read what's the worst thing people have to say about this," he said... Most online shoppers (97 percent to be exact) say reviews influence their buying decisions, according to Fan & Fuel Digital Marketing Group, which also found that 92 percent of consumers will hesitate to buy something if it has no customer reviews at all.
Matt Moog, CEO of PowerReviews, previously conducted a study with Northwestern University [PDF] that drew from an even larger data pool of 400 million consumers, which also found that the more reviews there are of a product, the more likely it is that a customer will purchase that product... He has also found that customers who read reviews often click the bad ones first. "They want to read what's the worst thing people have to say about this," he said... Most online shoppers (97 percent to be exact) say reviews influence their buying decisions, according to Fan & Fuel Digital Marketing Group, which also found that 92 percent of consumers will hesitate to buy something if it has no customer reviews at all.
If something has 1000 reviews, I know that the bulk of those are likely to be legitimate. If someone has 3 reviews, I have no idea how accurate the reviews are. More reviews = more sample data of user experience, and more data means that "wrong" reviews (reviews that don't reflect the user experience) are obscured. If you were presented with 2 studies where one used a sample of 5 people and the other used a sample of 5000 people, which results would you trust more? Reviews are just a less controlled study.
The exception to that rule is if every one of the reviews is giving this place or product five stars. “If the rating is unusually high, that actually can have a negative impact,” said Moog, as shoppers suspect this is too good to be true. “What we have from our data is that the optimal rating is about 4.4 stars.”
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APK
That's a very good and pertinent example of what TFA is about, and why people skip good reviews. Either they are sockpuppets, or empty praise telling us nothing of value.
It's the bad reviews that put meat on the bone. A review saying "it has problems with X, but here's my workaround" is worth a thousand reviews saying "It's the best thing since sliced bread!". Counter-intuitive as it may seem, constructive bad reviews facilitate more sales, and empty praise doesn't.
P.S.=> EAT YER WORDS arth1
Whoosh!
The point was that pointless praise does not work - it's the bad reviews that work, and constructive bad reviews help sell a product. Mindless praise is worthless - people don't look at that. This is a prime example - you're making my (and TFA's) point by posting this!
You apparently think that repeating praise from others is going to sway people. It isn't. They'll look at bad reviews and what those say, and whether the product is still good, knowing the worst.
Anyone who attempts to drown bad reviews in praise and counter-attacks against individuals come across as feeling they have an inferior product, else they wouldn't feel a need to do that. You are a prime example here. The lady doth protest too much.
Negative reviews by morons actually tend to be extremely helpful. You know exactly why it was rated poorly (they didn't read directions / too dumb to use it). I find this especially true for restaurant reviews, where they describe something "wrong" with the food that really means that the food was made correctly and they've just never had a good version of that food.
Not to mention all the reviews that are complete garbage. I remember a few years ago and I saw a bunch of 1 star reviews for a product, curious I checked and almost all of them were not only complaints against the shipper, but they were all along the lines of "product works perfectly fine but shipping took too long due to that hurricane. 1 out of 5 stars." That's right, they dinged the product (which actually had many sellers) because of shipping delays due to Superstorm Sandy.