Don’t Judge a Product by the Number of Reviews It Has
Sorting good price gems and scam junk can be a daunting task on Amazon, so it’s no surprise that most of us rely on product reviews to help us narrow down our choices. The most cautious of us (read: me) will even go as far as to see how many reviews of something to help determine how well established and liked a given item.
If one product has a 3-star rating with 12 reviews and one has a 3-star rating with 300 reviews, I am definitely more likely to buy an item with 300 reviews, even if it is slightly more expensive than the alternative because it seems more popular. which, in my opinion, equates it to the best – and I’m not alone.
A recent study published by the journal Psychological Science and published by Quartz found that most people are like me and will want to buy the item with the most reviews almost all the time. better quality. The only problem? This is not at all what it means.
Statistically, this popular product is more likely to be of lower quality than one with fewer reviews. For example, in the case of two similar products rated 3.1, one with 29 reviews and one with 154, the probability that the product with the most reviews is actually better than the product with 29 reviews is only 40%. However, the researchers found that shoppers were 90% more likely to buy it because they thought it was better.
The study, led by Derek Powell, PhD in Psychology at Stanford University, analyzed 15.6 million reviews covering over 350,000 different products in the Amazon directory. When a product has a ton of reviews but an average rating like three, the only thing that should tell you as a customer is that it’s definitely a mediocre product. Alternatively, a product that currently has the same rating but fewer reviews is more likely to actually be the best product overall since it hasn’t been reviewed by such a large group, which means there is less strong consensus. that the product is not that good.
Although the study looked specifically at Amazon, the advice applies to almost all online retailers: just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s better. Instead, look for higher-rated products in general and actually read some of these reviews to get an idea of what other shoppers thought was good or bad for a particular product.