Influential impact of Amazon product reviews revealed

Thursday, March 23, 2017 - 13:18 by Graham Miller

The reviews and ratings that products receive on Amazon can have a major impact on whether or not customers actually choose to buy them online, or skip over them in favour of a rival item.

Now a new report from Power Reviews has explored the extent to which customer feedback is able to influence buying habits on the world’s biggest online store, according to Business Insider.

Spokesperson, Matt Moog, revealed that the difference between having zero reviews and having a single piece of feedback associated with a product can be vast; reviewed items have a 65 per cent higher chance of being snapped up by shoppers.

Furthermore, 33 per cent of Amazon customers will entirely overlook products that have failed to garner praise from other consumers, while sales can rise by a fifth if a retail site features a reviews system with positive feedback available.

Interestingly, a recent study from BloomReach uncovered that Amazon’s reviews are influential not only in terms of convincing customers of the site to make a purchase, but also when it comes to boosting the reputation of specific items on a broader scale.

In many cases, people will visit Amazon to check up on reviews for a prospective purchase, then head to a different site to buy it via safe shopping online if the price is lower elsewhere.

Amazon has become much more stringent on the kinds of reviews it allows through to its website, outlawing the culture of companies providing products to people for free in return for positive feedback. But policing the reviews process is difficult and there are still kinks that need to be ironed out, especially given how powerful their impact can be on the sales figures of a single product or an entire retail site.