On an aggregate level, customer reviews help people make decisions. If a product on Amazon, Walmart, or Target's website has hundreds of reviews and the average comes out about 4 stars, that's probably a good product.
The problem, however, is that it's rare that any item with a lot of reviews doesn't have a few 1-star reviews mixed in with the better ones. In many cases, the writeups with the negative reviews can give a would-be-purchaser pause, even when it seems like an outlier opinion.
That small handful of people could have had unique, not-likely-to-be-duplicated bad experiences or they could be overly critical and picky. It's also possible that those customers learned something that all the 5-star reviewers ignored, which makes acting on reviews tricky at best.
There's also the small matter that most reviewers are simply random strangers. They might have a bad experience that would not be applicable to how you might use the product or they might be idiots using the item incorrectly.
So, product reviews are useful but have real limitations. Amazon (AMZN) -) has found a unique way to make reviews a lot better and much more useful.
Amazon tests a new review feature
Amazon has a lot of reasons to want customers to be happy with their purchases. The key one is that returns are both expensive and inconvenient. No customer wants to have to go to a UPS store, Kohl's, Whole Foods, or other Amazon pickup location to bring something back.
It's an added hassle that essentially undermines the reason people shop online in the first place — it's convenient and they don't have to go anywhere.
To help limit returns, Amazon has been testing a new shopping feature. Amazon Shopping Director Oliver Messenger shared the news in a post on the company's blog.
"Sometimes, it helps to get a little advice from your friends or family. But when it comes to online shopping, it can be hard to keep track of feedback from multiple people across messaging apps. Enter Amazon’s latest collaborative shopping feature— Consult-a-Friend, a new mobile shopping experience we are currently testing that lets you quickly and easily request, view, and manage your friends’ feedback on products within the Amazon Shopping app," he wrote.
The feature will allow shoppers to get the opinion of people they actually know who know them, which takes the anonymity out of the review process.
Consult-a-Friend also offers other benefits.
As an example, Messenger wrote, “Not sure what to get your notoriously hard-to-buy-for dad? Survey your siblings on the newest model smart TV and see their responses in one spot.”
Amazon raises the bar on shopping
Amazon has a distinct advantage that even Target and Walmart can't reach. The sheer size of the company's customer base allows it to take for granted that your friends and family are on Amazon and checking it enough to be useful for a feature like Consult-a-Friend.
"Typically, I’m critical of any actions that add friction to a transaction, and that was my first reaction here. However, I think this makes a lot of sense. For some purchases, asking around from friends and family makes sense. This creates a digital version of my dragging my kids to a store to 'help' me buy something for my wife," 50-year retail veteran Gary Sankary shared in a comment on a RetailWire story about Consult-a-Friend.
Messenger shared that the new feature is in the first stages of testing.
"Consult-a-Friend is currently being tested with select customers in the U.S., Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sweden, Turkey, UAE, and the UK," he wrote.
The company has not shared plans for a full rollout or what the criteria are for the test to be considered successful.
