And I know that. I also know that the day earlier an Indiana seller can get something to me can be mitigated by a lot of things. Also, condition is subjective. But I have to make a decision somehow.
In other news, half of the population is below median in intelligence.
And now over to Barry for the latest in sports! Barry?
Stranger
I rarely look at overall percentages when I am trying to decide on a product or a seller. An averaged star rating or percentage may as well not exist for all the flaws in interpreting them.
I look at the spread of star ratings - if it’s even across the board, or there are as many at the bottom as at the top - I will read through the reviews for a while to see why. Pointless complaints about the seller or packaging or such, discount. Complaints about the product that don’t apply to me, discount. Good and bad comments about specific aspects of the product that might affect its value or usefulness to me, weight heavily. I really don’t think you can use the rating and review system any other way if you actually care about what you discover before purchase. Counting stars or betting on the high percentage is almost a complete crapshoot.
My favorite reviews are of major appliances, which I’ve bought almost entirely online for the last decade. You want the ones that say “After a year…” but you have to sift them out from the “This is the best refrigerator made and I love it and it’s fabulous and I can’t wait until it gets here next week.” (Seriously.)
The majority of Amazon ratings are product ratings. When you are searching for something, it comes up as the product page. To get to the seller ratings you’ve got to click on the specific seller’s page.
But that still leaves a lot of slack in how the product is rated. As noted above, people trash a product that doesn’t have a specific feature or whatever, not because there’s anything wrong with it. And most product reviews are dotted with rants about shipping and poor CS and other seller issues.
As the topic headline puts it…
One of my favorites is a review for Zoomies, these binocular glasses that are supposed to give you close up views of things around you. The reviews range from just bad (they fall apart, and don’t focus well), to people competing to be in the next Cracked “Funny Amazon Reviews.” There’s one weird review, though, where a woman complains that they didn’t cure her husband’s macular degeneration. I looked all over the image of the packaging, and the ad copy, and nowhere is it claimed that Zoomies cure macular degeneration. I think I’ll buy a toilet brush, and complain it didn’t cure my menstrual cramps.
AS I understand it, the feedback “star” system allows for only a single input, with no real guidance toward whether the star rating is supposed to reflect the product or the vendor. If anyone understands differently, what is the source of your information?
It seems to me that if anyone has a poor understanding of the system, it is Amazon’s web design itself.
To me, it’s intuitively obvious (to the most casual observer) that on the product page, you are invited to rate the product. Not the vendor. Or your breakfast that morning. Or the sex you had last night.
If you understand that differently, [del]what is the source of your information?[/del] never mind.
For item reviews I always click on “See all verified purchase reviews” and then at minimum review the most helpful positive and negative reviews.
I just bought a crab trap. The name clearly has “Pacific” in it, and the description says it’s for Pacific crabbing. It still has 22% 1 star reviews from people on the East Coast who don’t realize that their crabs are smaller and can get through the bars. I understand some confusion, but FFS check the reviews and read the description.
Now there are legitimate reasons to not give 5 stars to something because the product is not expected. I bought a shoe polish kit and was surprised to find that the two cans it came with were the exact same color. Odd choice for the manufacturer, and it was 99% my fault for not reading the description. I might bother with a 4 star review saying that the selection is odd, but it wasn’t a 1 star worthy complaint.
No they’re different things. For example, they bug you to review third party sellers, but treat item reviews as completely optional.
I don’t like that they require a description for the seller review. I just put BS in those because the majority of the time I had zero contact with their customer service and everything came as promised. I get tired of variations of “it was okay!”
See Omar Little’s post #24
If someone’s selling a used product and there’s something wrong with it (whether or not it’s the seller’s fault), a low rating with explanation seems justifiable. And if the seller is otherwise racking up “stellar” ratings, I wouldn’t get bent out of shape over two negative reviews.
As for “verified purchase” reviews, they can distort reality (I’m thinking of books in particular). One can easily buy a book somewhere else or read a library copy, but Amazon evidently decided to make those reviews harder to access because of fears that nasty people will trash the book without buying it.*
*in one of my favorite Amazon book reviews, a “verified purchaser” was upset because a sizable number of negative reviewers weren’t “verified” and thus she concluded they hadn’t read the book. Then she went on to admit that she hadn’t read it yet, but was familiar with the author and just knew it was going to be really good, thus five stars. :dubious:
What annoys me are the emails that Amazon sends begging for feedback. It links you to a page that has radio buttons, the star row, and a comment box. The buttons let you confirm that it was what you ordered and it came on time. Cool. But it won’t let you submit until you’ve put something in the comment box.
Besides it being what I ordered and it came on time, what else do you need? I now default to “well packaged.” I’m not sure why it annoys me, but it does.
To expand on my comment, I sometimes get snarky as I’m not sure if anyone reads them. “Didn’t ship with live spiders! 5 stars!!!111” or “I like turtles.”
There’ve already been two xkcd links. But it turns out xkcd has more to say about feedback/rating systems than at first appears. Here’s a fairly early one on point: xkcd: A-Minus-Minus As so often, the mouse-over text is the best part.
Yep… It’s like anything else: you have to clear away the dreck to get to the good stuff. But you can usually tell when a review is useful for your purposes.
(I also like their feature where you can ask specific questions, and – maybe – someone will have an answer.)
Not long ago, I wrote a nasty review of Amazon themselves (they tried to ship a product addressed to my P.O. Box – using UPS. UPS doesn’t deliver to P.O. Boxes! The package went to the UPS depot thirty miles away. They offered to deliver it to my home – but I use a P.O. Box for a reason! I don’t want packages just left on my doorstep!)
Anyway…they phoned me, listened to me, explained why they did it that way, listened to me some more (when I told them I don’t WANT them to do it that way!) and – asked my permission to delete the review.
(They hardly need my permission! It’s their damn web site!)
So, WTH, I said they could delete it if they wanted. And then I ranted a bit more about how bad an idea it was to send a package via UPS addressed to a P.O. Box
The poor customer service rep earned his sub-minimum wage that day!
I approve of that.
This guy should get negative feedback just on principle. Can you imagine offering a DVD of a third rate animated film $732?
Maybe I do things oddly, but I never look at “the product page” after I have purchased and taken delivery of the product and used it and formed an opinion about it. So I guess I have never experienced that intuitively obvious interface.
But if I go back and “review my orders”, I can see a page called “Feedback”, where I can choose 1-5 stars and enter comments in a text entry field, apparently to rate the vendor.
Normally, I do not bother to search for the opportunity and procedure for making a comment, if everything is satisfactory.
But when you’re contemplating making a purchase, you do look at the product page, right? And the review you see there relate to that product, not to all products sold by that vendor. So it would make sense to me that the reviews are going to be understood as reviews of the product, by people contemplating purchasing the product. And when I read the reviews, it’s mostly impression of the product that I’m looking for. Sure, if there are issues with the vendor, I’d like to hear about that, but as far as I’m concerned it’s mainly about the product. If it was shitty and broke when first used I want to hear about that, and I’m only secondarily interested in how well the vendor handled the situation.
And then there’s Funny Amazon Ratings. A whole world I hadn’t explored before. I’ve read through a good number of them now. They’re available at Cracked.com and a number of other sites.
Some are funnier (or odder) than others but I feel compelled to share one of them that I think will appeal to a lot of Dopers.
Scroll down a little to Number 8. A review for a book called: “A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates”.
I haw-hawwed bigly.
ETA: I can only imagine the number of folks who didn’t get the joke and thought it was a serious review!
Actually, I don’t often look at the product page comment section. I buy what I want or need, and glance at the number of stars to make sure there are at least several. And the few times I’ve actually read comments, as I recall there are always a lot of them that relate to the performance of the seller.
Which may be the reason for the OP’s remarks in the first place. People give the wrong kind of information in the comments, but then I’m supposed to be guided by looking at the wrong comments to know what the right comments are supposed to be???
Actually, when I do look at comments, I filter for worst, and then judge whether the complaint addresses an issue that I would be concerned about. They usually don’t.