I was recently researching a potential purchase and reading a lot of Amazon reviews to do so, because Amazon had the most reviews for the most different products.
And I discovered something really weird: five-star reviews that aren't actually positive reviews of the product, and very often provide no information whatsoever.
Examples: "I bought it as a gift from someone else." "I haven't received it yet." "I haven't tried it yet but I'm sure it's fine."
Why would you write a review like this when you could just . . . not?
Then the universe provided me with what might be the answer!
I try to avoid Amazon whenever possible because of their labour conditions, but I ended up ordering a couple of products there because I couldn't find them anywhere else.
Each of these products had a card inserted in the packaging saying the seller would give me an Amazon gift card if I wrote a review of the product, and sent them an email with the order number and a link to the review.
One offered me a $10 gift card for a review of a $25 purchase, and the other offered me a $15 gift card for a review of a $35 purchase.
I can certainly see how this might incentivize people to leave a review even if they have nothing to say!
I didn't leave any reviews so I don't know if they actually send you the promised gift card. (Apparently my sense of "I don't want them to win!" is worth more than $25 to me.) I don't know if they only give the gift card for a five-star review (the cards didn't say anything to that effect) or if these semantically null reviewers think Amazon is like eBay and sellers will be penalized for reviews that are less than five stars.
But, in any case, there's something very, very wrong with the system if sellers are incentivized to turn over 40% of the purchase price in exchange for a review!
2 comments:
Allan and I talk often talk about this syndrome. "Received in 3 days!" "Looks great, don't know if it will hold up!" "Can't wait to try it!"
Unfortunately, it's not just on Amazon. It's widespread, on product and service reviews everywhere. It doesn't correlate with gift card incentives. They're reviews by people who don't understand the purpose of reviews.
I usually click on the 5-stars and scroll through them, reading random reviews, then do the same for the 1-stars. It also helps to go to the Amazon US website -- a greater volume of reviews will presumably make the percentages more meaningful (bigger sample size).
They're reviews by people who don't understand the purpose of reviews
Weird that people wouldn't understand the purpose of reviews!
It kind of reminds me of the time I signed a petition, and there were people signing it with comments opposing the cause that the petition was advocating for.
(e.g. it was a "free widgets for all" petition and people were leaving comments saying "Ban widgets!")
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