You didn’t have to take four years of Latin like I did to know that “Caveat emptor” means, in English, “Let the buyer beware.” It’s a phrase we’ve heard for years and years and it’s always been an important precept for making purchases.
One of the many advantages of the Internet is that people are given the opportunity to tell others about their experiences regarding the purchase of a product or service. Many websites allow customers to “rate” their impression of a purchase by using stars. Generally, you can use up to five stars to show your observation of how something worked. Often, you can even rate by portions of a star. Also, on many sites, you can leave a comment to go along with those stars.
On the surface, this is a wonderful idea. In this blog, however, I’m going to warn you of a few of the pitfalls of using reviews to decide if you’re going to purchase a product or use a service.
Pitfall #1 – Don’t depend on reviews when only a small number of people have rated and/or commented. If you look at the picture above, you will see that 1,084 people reviewed the Verbatim CD-R CDs. (These are the printable CDs I use.) You will also notice that it’s rated with 4 1/2 stars. With that many people rating the product, you would probably be getting a fair assessment of the CDs. However, if there were only two or three people rating the product, you might not be getting a balanced review. If just one out of three people cans the product, the overall rating would be bad.
Pitfall #2 – Often on websites, anyone can review a product or service, whether they’ve used it or not. This means that I might post a review of something, either panning it or praising it, without ever using it. My review would be worthless but you might not know that. Some websites, like Amazon, for instance, will verify that the person making the review actually purchased the product or used the service. Here’s an example:
You can see that James actually purchased the Verbatim CDs and he rated the product with four stars. He also wrote a review which I’m not showing here but it was a good review. In the case of Amazon, you know that the person has actually tried the product before they reviewed it. That’s a good thing. Hopefully, all websites will get to this point.
Pitfall #3 – Not trusting your gut. (Think NCIS and Gibbs) When you see a negative review, keep a few things in mind: the person writing the review may be having an awful day and they are venting their frustrations on some product or service; there are some people you just can’t please and this person may be one of them; the person may have some agenda of their own (for instance, I’ve seen reviews of a Windows computer done by a person who thinks only Macs are good and all other computers are evil); the person actually did have a bad experience but that is the exception rather than the rule.
In conclusion, reviews online can save you from a bad experience but you should never take them as gospel – good or bad. Reviews are much more helpful if you think of them as guidelines.
Want to review this blog post? Write a comment below!