Kevin Sterling's Blog - Posts Tagged "action"

Without question, customer reviews on sites like Amazon are a valuable tool for all of us in deciding what products to buy and which ones to ignore. Hats off to the altruistic people who use their valuable time to consistently write them.

Reviews are also critically important to the companies or individuals who produce the merchandise being offered, as they are the #1 driving force toward sales. As an author, for example, the reviews of my books are paramount to my success, so I’m constantly keeping track of how they’re coming along.

But let’s start with the perspective of the buyer, searching the Web for an item to purchase.

Upon landing on a product page, most of us look at the average customer rating (stars) and the total count before deciding whether to dig into the written reviews at all. If the product has just one or two reviews, no matter how good or bad they are, we usually assume there isn’t enough decision-making information to draw upon, and we move on. Completely logical, unless it’s a brand new product, of course.

Nevertheless, let’s assume we’ve found an attractive-looking item that has plenty of reviews. And if it’s a quality product, it probably has a high concentration of 4 and 5-star ratings with a lesser number at 3 stars and a scattering in the 2 and 1-star range.

But wait. If it’s such a great product, why does it have any 2 or 1-star reviews at all?

The truth is that no single product will ever satisfy everyone. On top of that, issues will inevitably evolve along the way to create a poor experience for a number of people. I don’t care if you’re making toaster ovens or writing books. It simply is.

For that reason, I no longer cull through 1 and 2-star reviews looking for the worst case scenario to help assess my “risk parameters” with a product. Frankly, unless ALL of the reviews are that low, they’re usually from people who are angry and lashing out, making them less credible to begin with. They also tend to include comments like, “there was a snowstorm that delayed the delivery of the item for two days, so it missed getting here for my wife’s birthday.”

Seriously? What does that have to do with the product and whether I should buy it?

On the other end of the scale, 4 and 5-star reviews are pretty much the same. These people absolutely loved the product and rarely have anything negative to say. Yes, logic suggests that a 4-star review indicates a slight degree of dissatisfaction, and that’s probably true on occasion. But there are lots of people out there who never give 5-star reviews, or at least hold them in reserve for the absolute Everest of products like Tolstoy’s War and Peace (although, quite remarkably, 5% of its Amazon reviews are 1 star).

*Palm slap to the forehead*

Consequently, I believe the best reviews for identifying potential issues are those with 3 stars. They suggest the buyer generally liked the item, but had issues, and they will often provide lucid, rational feedback regarding what they didn’t care for, perhaps suggesting what could have been improved. Sometimes, I’ll read a person’s list of complaints (usually for an entertainment item like a movie or book) and discover that I’ll probably LIKE the product, as their list consists of things I actually enjoy.

The rating scenario gets particularly interesting if you’re dealing with an item that’s controversial in some way. In fact, a perusal of the written reviews on Amazon for these products can be outright entertaining.

Take my books, for example. The Jack Lazar Series has one characteristic outside the norm for action thrillers, and that’s explicit sex—especially in the first novel, Lazar’s Intrigue. So, as you might imagine, the ratings for that book are all over the board from lots of enthusiastic 5-star reviews to a handful of 2 and 1-star criticisms that classify it as smut.

But sexual content in books is highly contentious, and I’ve found that men are offended by it far more than women. Who knew? So in these cases, it becomes necessary to dig even further into the reviews and integrate one’s own tastes and opinions before forming a buying decision. Ultimately, if something isn’t your cup of Oolong, no matter how many glowing 5-star ratings it may have, it’s probably better to move on to something else.

The classic example of this is the book Fifty Shades of Grey. Most of the reviews for E L James’ racy novel are 5 stars, obviously from people who connected with her story, including the explicit sex (my wife and I both found it very entertaining). Consequently, those people are the appropriate audience for her books.

But, can you guess what rating has the second highest count by a longshot? The 1-star category. That’s because Fifty Shades is the epitome of a “love it or hate it” product.

Admittedly, in this case, many people bought the book out of curiosity over what everyone was talking about, but a little due diligence would have prevented the majority of those 1-star reviewers from ever reading the book at all.

One other thing to consider about a controversial novel like Fifty Shades of Grey is the average rating. At last check, the book averaged 3.5 stars, which in itself might cause a prospective reader to move on. But the wild review variations are the culprit here, and the high number of 5-star ratings suggests that it’s the perfect product for SOME people, therefore potentially justifying further investigation.

So, it’s not always appropriate to judge an item based on the average rating alone.

If you’re an author, and you feel like the world has come to an end when you receive a bad review (as I used to do), try going to the Amazon product pages for your favorite authors (like the aforementioned Leo Tolstoy) and see how many 2 and 1-star reviews they have. It’s an inevitability, and the numbers will blow your mind, especially if you think he or she wrote the best books in the world. How could anyone think poorly of them?

But everyone has different tastes and opinions. Some people will relate to your protagonist, and some will not. And if they don’t, they will most likely consider him or her to be “unrealistic”.

I remember reading a review from someone saying that Sarina, the DEA agent in Lazar’s Intrigue, was unbelievable because no woman would constantly demand having public sex. But Sarina was based almost entirely on a girl I dated for over a year; and gosh, it seemed quite real to me at the time! But if a reader can’t imagine themselves ever doing something like that, they may not be able to stretch their boundaries enough to find the character convincing.

To quote Anaïs Nin, “we don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”

In summary, the customer review and ratings game is complicated, probably more so than people realize. Therefore, as a buyer, perhaps it makes sense to evaluate reviews differently based upon the nature of the product, thereby gathering information that’s authentically relevant to ourselves before we make an informed buying decision.

If the product in question is yours, no matter how high its quality may be, you must expect some scathing reviews and let them be. It’s a fact of life and the price of doing business in cyberspace.

Cheers!