When it comes to reviews of products on online shopping sites, more does not necessarily mean better — but consumers often mistakenly assume it does.
Most shoppers favor a product that has a higher number of reviews, even if it has a lower rating than a competing product with fewer reviews, a study published last week in the journal Psychological Science found. However, a product with a low rating but a high number of reviewers is more likely to be of poor quality than a product with a low rating and fewer reviews, according to the study authors. Shoppers tend to believe the opposite — a classic example of how we make shopping decisions emotionally, not logically, said Michael Parrish Dudell, chief strategy officer at CouponFollow.
“If a lot of people have experience with a product, even if the experience isn’t positive, more will follow,” he said. “They are following groupthink.”
The Psychological Science study had nearly 300 participants and analyzed a data set of 15,655,439 reviews of 356,619 products across the web. It also found that there is no relationship between the number of reviews a product has and its quality.
The majority of people — 86% of consumers — say reviews are an essential resource when making a purchasing decision, according to CouponFollow, and millennials are more likely than past generations to value reviews. Exposed to more ads on a daily basis than consumers of past generations, millennials are more immune to marketing and rely instead on word-of-mouth.
“As consumers, we have lost trust in organizations so we depend on our peers to show us what to buy,” Dudell said. “We have been so marketed to, so sold to over the course of our lives, that the baseline feeling is that companies are not being authentic.”
Products with reviews are purchased at a rate of 65% higher than those with no reviews, according to consumer engagement site PowerReviews. Shoppers are more likely to buy a product with a review between 4.2 and 4.6 stars than a perfectly-rated product, a PowerReviews study found. For a more reliable method, use websites like Fakespot, which lets shoppers plug in the URL of the product they’re considering to see what percentage of its reviews are real and reliable.
And consumers have their own methods to seek out what they think are the most trustworthy among reviews.
“It’s all about authenticity,” said Theresa O’Neil, PowerReviews Senior Vice President of Marketing. “The majority of consumers say they seek out negative reviews to find out what was the reason and assure them of authenticity.”
These trends in shopping behavior could change the way both retailers and consumers behave online, researchers in the Psychological Science study found.
“Consumers try to use information about other people’s experiences to make good choices, and retailers have an incentive to steer consumers toward products they will be satisfied with,” researcher Derek Powell of Stanford University said. “Our data suggest that retailers might need to rethink how reviews are presented and consumers might need to do more to educate themselves about how to use reviews to guide their choices.”
When it comes to reviews of products on online shopping sites, more does not necessarily mean better — but consumers often mistakenly assume it does.
Most shoppers favor a product that has a higher number of reviews, even if it has a lower rating than a competing product with fewer reviews, a study published last week in the journal Psychological Science found. However, a product with a low rating but a high number of reviewers is more likely to be of poor quality than a product with a low rating and fewer reviews, according to the study authors. Shoppers tend to believe the opposite — a classic example of how we make shopping decisions emotionally, not logically, said Michael Parrish Dudell, chief strategy officer at CouponFollow.
“If a lot of people have experience with a product, even if the experience isn’t positive, more will follow,” he said. “They are following groupthink.”
The Psychological Science study had nearly 300 participants and analyzed a data set of 15,655,439 reviews of 356,619 products across the web. It also found that there is no relationship between the number of reviews a product has and its quality.
The majority of people — 86% of consumers — say reviews are an essential resource when making a purchasing decision, according to CouponFollow, and millennials are more likely than past generations to value reviews. Exposed to more ads on a daily basis than consumers of past generations, millennials are more immune to marketing and rely instead on word-of-mouth.
“As consumers, we have lost trust in organizations so we depend on our peers to show us what to buy,” Dudell said. “We have been so marketed to, so sold to over the course of our lives, that the baseline feeling is that companies are not being authentic.”
Products with reviews are purchased at a rate of 65% higher than those with no reviews, according to consumer engagement site PowerReviews. Shoppers are more likely to buy a product with a review between 4.2 and 4.6 stars than a perfectly-rated product, a PowerReviews study found. For a more reliable method, use websites like Fakespot, which lets shoppers plug in the URL of the product they’re considering to see what percentage of its reviews are real and reliable.
And consumers have their own methods to seek out what they think are the most trustworthy among reviews.
“It’s all about authenticity,” said Theresa O’Neil, PowerReviews Senior Vice President of Marketing. “The majority of consumers say they seek out negative reviews to find out what was the reason and assure them of authenticity.”
These trends in shopping behavior could change the way both retailers and consumers behave online, researchers in the Psychological Science study found.
“Consumers try to use information about other people’s experiences to make good choices, and retailers have an incentive to steer consumers toward products they will be satisfied with,” researcher Derek Powell of Stanford University said. “Our data suggest that retailers might need to rethink how reviews are presented and consumers might need to do more to educate themselves about how to use reviews to guide their choices.”
[“Source-marketwatch”]
