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People Are Complete Suckers For Online Reviews (nypost.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the reading-the-reviews dept.

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.

15 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. More Complex by zieroh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think it's a bit more complex than that. Oftentimes, you can determine from poor reviews exactly what the shortcomings are, and decide if those shortcomings affect your intended use of the product. If a competing product has no reviews, then you have no way of knowing what the shortcomings are.

    --
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    1. Re:More Complex by TWX · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Correct. What went wrong for other people? Why did it go wrong? Will this function impact me?

      As a case in point it's not really possible to buy an inexpensive TV that lacks "smart" features anymore. Smart features are very inconsistent from manufacturer to manufacturer. Thing is, if I never connect my TV to anything but an antenna, do those smart features matter? I need to read other users' experiences with a given TV or a range of candidate TVs to see what features work and what don't, and just because a TV gets poor reviews doesn't mean that the functions that I'll use are the ones poorly reviewed. It could be that the Internet connectivity stuff is what's garbage, or like the one I actually bought, the stock remote sucks but if I get a $10 remote from the previous model TV, I get 80% of the features back that normally require a cell phone with Bluetooth or other "smart" feature to work.

      --
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    2. Re:More Complex by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think it's a bit more complex than that. Oftentimes, you can determine from poor reviews exactly what the shortcomings are, and decide if those shortcomings affect your intended use of the product. If a competing product has no reviews, then you have no way of knowing what the shortcomings are.

      I read reviews, but only really pay attention to ones that make sensible explanations of what they do or don't like. Positive reviews can be very helpful if you are looking for a certain functionality, but they have to be precise and not cheerleading. A lot of reviews often means there are more good ones to find, more useless ones as well. For the most part, when I read reviews and then purchase, I wind up getting pretty much what I expect. You can never eliminate the possibility of a surprise when buying products you've never tried before.

    3. Re:More Complex by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Correct. What went wrong for other people? Why did it go wrong? Will this function impact me?

      It's striking me as somewhat ironic that a couple stanford researchers appear to have missed the significance of having thorough documentation.

      Because that's basically what you're getting with masses of reviews readily available.

  2. Obvious by burtosis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If one product has 12 reviews and one 45k reviews, the 12 review has 5* and the 45k review has 4* I'd be more likely to buy the 45k review one. It's simply significantly harder to astroturf and bot 45k reviews than 12. Online typically all you have to go on is a shitty picture, product details that are nearly always incomplete and exaggerated, and reviews. The reviews are the least shitty way to not get ripped off. For the record, yes I know that many reviews on most every site are fakes, paid for the review, or bots.

    Plus sometimes the reviews are pure comedy gold and are worth reading on their own which can inspire some sales on their own.

    1. Re:Obvious by _Sharp'r_ · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, the study appears to naively assume all online products, sellers and reviews are completely legitimate and that reviews solely indicate a statistical level of quality and aren't influenced by other factors.

      Any product with tons of verified reviews means at least that the product has survived and sold enough to gather those reviews. That's an endorsement it's very difficult to fake.

      Now if they actually purchased and tested products themselves to determine which was better as part of the study, they might have a decent conclusion, but as all they did was make a statistical assumption then go judge people's rational behavior against their assumption, the study's conclusion is way off. They're trying to make a case about statistical uncertainty and they refuse to believe results based on people's actual experience with purchasing products online.

      This is a signal to noise issue. People are ignoring other factors and trusting lots of reviews because they're searching for the signal within the influenced-by-seller noise.

      --
      The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
    2. Re:Obvious by OzPeter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If one product has 12 reviews and one 45k reviews, the 12 review has 5* and the 45k review has 4* I'd be more likely to buy the 45k review one. It's simply significantly harder to astroturf and bot 45k reviews than 12.

      Personally I look for reviews in the middle of the pack to get a good sense of what the product is actually like. I see a lot of 5s that appear to be people gushing about a product and a lot of 1s where it seems to be all about trashing a product. I feel that the 2s, 3s and 4s give a more balanced perspective of a product.

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  3. Re:"...often click the bad ones first.." by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I always check the bad reviews and only the bad reviews. Good reviews generally aren't helpful, they're either fake and posted by the seller or genuine but not useful. Seeing twenty 5 star reviews that say "it worked great for me" is great, but what I really want to know is how it failed for people and if I care about those failures.

    If all the bad reviews are by people who are clearly crazy or doing something stupid, I can be fairly confident in the product. If they instead reveal significant flaws, I may want to reconsider.

    As always, XKCD has a relevant cartoon about this.

  4. Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics by Spazmania · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The three main kinds of mistruth.

    With more reviews, the buyer has a better idea -exactly- what's bad about the product thus has a better chance of making an educated decision about buying it.

    The article and study are examples of misusing statistics. The correlation between number of reviews and purchases niether tests nor demonstrates a causal relationship from the former to the latter, and even if it did it does not demonstrate the -claimed- causal relatinoship.

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    1. Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics by war4peace · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Exactly. Furthermore there is a problem with the methodology:

      This bias was so strong that they often favored the more-reviewed phone case even when both of the options had low ratings, effectively choosing the product that was, in statistical terms, more likely to be low quality.

      That is incorrect.
      Say you have product A and product B, each with a score of 3 stars out of 5.
      Product A has 6 reviews, 3 of which are 1-star and the other 3 are 5-star - the average is obviously 3.
      Product A has 600 reviews, 3 of which are 1-star, 594 reviews are 3-star and the other 3 are 5-star - the average is obviously 3, again.

      Based on that information alone, you can NOT determine which product is more likely to be bad. You could however determine which product is more popular - but that's it.

      Furthermore, if both products have a low score, it is actually better to go for the more popular one simply because more people bought it therefore more troubleshooting, more info about how to overcome its shortcomings and more workarounds would be available online for that product. Shortly put, it would be more likely to find someone else who had a similar problem with the product and posted a solution online.

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    2. Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Also, the fewer reviews, the more likely those reviews are FAKE. Most of the statistical claims made in TFA are based on the implicit assumption that all the reviews are equally valid. So the real problem here is not dumb customers but dumb researchers.

    3. Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's more important to see latest reviews. Often scumbag manufacturers will replace a good product with a cheaper shittier version and ride the popularity due to the early reviews to the bank. That's why well established products should be really scrutinized.

    4. Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics by David_Hart · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Also, the fewer reviews, the more likely those reviews are FAKE. Most of the statistical claims made in TFA are based on the implicit assumption that all the reviews are equally valid. So the real problem here is not dumb customers but dumb researchers.

      I'm willing to bet that it also doesn't factor in version/software changes, the fact that many reviews includes multiple models, and for every detailed excellent review, there are many stupid reviews (they ordered the wrong thing in the first place, do not know how to use it, had a problem with customer service, etc. stuff unrelated to how the product works).

  5. I check reviews for... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...suggestions for competitors products. I then make my own determination after checking them out.

    1. Re:I check reviews for... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Mod this up. Most reviews are useless when comparison shopping because the people writing them have a sample size of one. I recently bought a new electric shaver. Most of the reviews are from people who have owned maybe one other shaver in their life. For a product with 600 reviews, 500 of them are left within a few hours of the new one arriving, so all that you really know from them is that it came in a box and didn't break in the first use. The only useful reviews were the ones where someone actually compared it to others that are still available.

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