Paying attention to online consumer reviews pays. According to a survey by Neilson Online, eighty-one percent of online shoppers read reviews while shopping during the holiday season this year.
Even for consumers who did their shopping at local retailers, web sites play an important role in their purchase decision. Fifty-five percent of survey respondents said they researched products online before going to a store to buy.
The top factors in evaluating customer reviews were:
The product has multiple ratings or reviews—63%
The rating or review comes from an established source—14%
But can online reviews be trusted? I found plenty of stories about pay for play practices.
An interesting story surfaced this month about paying for ratings and reviews on Amazon. An employee of Belkin used Amazon's Mechanical Turk site to offer $.65 as payment per favorable review of its router that had received poor ratings from consumers. The ploy was discovered and reported, and the company issued an apology within forty-eight hours.
I think the story about Belkin's bogus customer reviews is instructive. It points out how important online reviews are to a product's success—that a high-level employee would resort to such an unethical practice to counter the negative reviews being posted by real customers.
The story also points out the level playing field that is possible on the web. Belkin's pay for play scheme was discovered by a blogger, and the story spread through the wires quickly. Not only were the reviews pulled by Amazon and an apology issued by Belkin, but the story's popularity serves to punish the company's behavior far beyond a bad review.
I am hopeful that companies will heed this cautionary tale. There are other ways to deal with customer reviews than trying to rig the system. Foremost, they need to set up areas on their own sites to get public feedback—a space to respond to customers. If online marketers can turn around a dissatisfied customer, they will save more than a single purchase. They will earn the respect of every person that customer tells—online or otherwise.
