The Shared Value of Online Shoppers: Amazon's Presentation of User Reviews

When it comes to user-generated content, Amazon was among the very first to recognize the value of smart, contextual presentation and emergent display. Waaaaaaaaay back in the '90's, they were pioneering use of customer ratings and reviews in e-commerce.

Naturally, they had a business reason for this early focus: Books are hard to sell online, because you can't pick them up, flip through them, and read the back cover (well, you couldn't in the '90's anyway). The opinions and recommendations of fellow consumers will always be important, but in the early days of e-commerce they mattered more, because other kinds of input supporting the purchase decision were less accessible.

Amazon has mastered presenting consumer opinions:

 

Here's a breakdown in the words of Justin Marshall, one of my respected colleagues at ZAAZ:

First, they give the landscape: all decisions by stars (top-left corner). Then, they pit pro vs. con to convey the spectrum of opinion. (I'd like to think they stole that from The New Social Etiquette's "Most Controversial.") And, finally, they present the rest by "Most Helpful."

Amazon has architected a conversation out of the bits and pieces of content provided by its customers, and in doing so has created an additional value within the shopping experience: A dynamic, informative, multivocal, and authentic source of peer opinion, understandable at a glance and rewarding of deeper inquiry.

One might even call this a community. Obviously unconventional, it nonetheless meets all the usual criteria I can think of, and above all, it provides value to customers--value that also drives sales.

One of the real puzzles here is the source of users' motivation, None of the architectural elegance of Amazon's system would be meaningful without users' participation.

Why do people participate, providing, at the low end, product reviews (mind you, book reviews are mostly happening on a different visit than the purchase visit, so the threshold is not trivial) and at the high end, detailed and thoughtful reviews. Why do they bother, when the conventional wisdom suggests shopping is the most task-oriented of online behaviors? Why do they return and provide feedback?

Naturally, I'll venture a guess: The Amazon customer community is a community of shared values, In fact, it's a community of a single shared value: Value.

What I'm suggesting is that users are motivated to participate in Amazon's customer community by their shared interest in getting good value for their dollars. Helping others make good purchase decisions, and receiving a (designed) measure of socially-driven feedback for their help, is motivating. Customers are on the same side, and in e-commerce community, where the social value surrounds purchase choices, everybody wins.

Have you rated an item on Amazon? Written a review? Created a list? I'd love to hear about it.

Comments

[Suffian]

Thanks for the enlightening post! I haven't written a review on Amazon, but I've written a few on Visual Bookshelf on Facebook. I have to admit, I sometimes skip the editorial reviews and head straight to the customer reviews. I just like to read real comments from real people, I guess.

[Ryan]

Thanks for the note, Suffian. In your comment, the word "real" jumped out at me. There's something importantly authentic about interactions with other customers that's different from reading expert perspectives.

I love the way Amazon presents customer reviews, but since I wrote this post I've realized there's no mechanism in place to create a real, ongoing conversation in the review space. These pages will tend to be fairly static, because the rich will get richer, that is, the best arguments will tend to get the most usefulness votes, further strengthening their positions as best of the best.

So it's less a conversation than a snapshot of a conversation. In the context of product reviews, however, I'm not sure it matters. Anyone?