Ecommerce Customer Reviews

A useful feature of an e-commerce shop and a ever-present standard of ecommerce web design is the inclusion of customer reviews on a product page. Speaking personally, if I’m about to buy an album, DVD or book, I find my decision to buy the book greatly influenced by how good the customer reviews for it are.

Obviously this can have detrimental effects if the reviews are condemning the product for poor quality. You also find that people who haven’t even used the product will begin to slate it due to preferences of a rival brand, or simply just unreasonable bias. However it is normally quite obvious to spot poor reviews and you tend to find yourself siding with reviews that make sense of your preconceptions of the product. There’s nothing you can do about difference of opinion, after all. You usually find that the more reviews the better the overall score. A customer with one five-star review is a less accurate representation thana  product with 100 reviews and 4/5 stars.

As with Amazon and Play.com it is beneficial to have the star rating appear on the search results page so that the user is aware of the overall judgement of the product’s quality before seeing it in detail.