What I Think About: Amazon.com Ratings System
In my recent research on Amazon.com about the Amazon Kindle, I came across something that really bothered me. Amazon has a great system for researching products that you are interested in buying. The site encourages people to rate and review the products that they buy and these are generally very helpful. Unfortunately, you are not required to own the product or even to have used the product before you can review it.
On the Amazon Kindle product page, there are more than 2,300 product reviews. Among these, there are more than 300 1-star reviews, which is the lowest rating possible. That seemed disturbing to me, as a potential buyer, so I looked closer. I would say that a good 90% of these 1-star ratings were submitted by people who don’t even own the device and haven’t ever used one either. They simply complain about features that they don’t like, they hate the price, they hate the DRM features of the device or they just generally can’t be happy in life and have to share it with all of the world through a negative review. In addition, this is also true of a decent number of the 5-star ratings as well.
So, this is obviously a downside of such an open system for review and rating of products and it requires you as a user to be vigilant about trusting the numbers without actually reading the reviews first. By the way, I finally decided to order a Kindle anyway and it arrives tomorrow. I’m pumped to get it and look for some “hands on” posts on the Kindle in the coming days.
Leave a Reply