Jared Spool has an interesting piece up about how changes in Amazon’s rating systems led to a rather large increase in sales. By his calculations, Amazon makes approxiamately $3 Billion dollars a year by bubbling up good reviews to the top. Jared Spool also picks up on the fact that Amazon makes it easier to find bad reviews of the product, and this ultimately helps their bottom line:
In our studies of Amazon shoppers, we found many start by looking at only the negative reviews, using them to try to “talk them out” of buying the product. Interestingly, Amazon now has a feature to easily see the more negative reviews together.
I go straight for the negative reviews (a technique I picked up from Chris). If people’s nit-picky comments are the worst you can say about this product, then it really can’t be all that bad. Having worked in publishing, I know that endorsements are often crony paybacks.
My jaundiced eye may be out-of-sync with the general population. According to Jared, “one out of every five customers decides to complete the purchase because of the strength of the reviews.” So if small tweaks are worth so much and the reviews are so important, why does Amazon bury them at the bottom of the page?
