Wanted to share some nuggets of what I think is good in shopping search land. No, the eternal critic isn’t going soft, just want to point out some positive notes about this industry.
There are a ton of review sites and all the shopping engines incorporate product reviews in some way. But when I read reviews, I don’t just want to get a thumbs up or 4 stars out of 5, especially when the average product seems to have 4 out of 5 rating. What I love seeing are details. For example, if I’m looking at a touch screen phone, I’m probably interested in the screen. If I want to find specific reviews related to the screen, I’d usually have to search through hundreds of reviews, which is a total waste of time. That’s why I like Live Product Search’s take on reviews:
Notice the left hand nav. If you scroll down on that page, you’ll see you can look at reviews by attribute. Not just ease of use or screen, but battery life, affordability, software, connectivity, video, photo quality, etc. In fact, there are over 30 filters. Considering that there are so many window shoppers out there right now, this functionality is increasingly important for a good user experience. Now I don’t like that most of the reviews seem to be culled from eBay – I’d rather see a Google Product Search experience where reviews are culled from Checkout orders as well as tons of leading sources like CNET, Epinions, PriceGrabber, Buzzillions, PCWorld, etc.
Runner up for reviews is Buzzillions (which is now featured on Shopzilla). Not as strong as Live Product Search because you can’t filter by attribute, but at least you can see the breakdown of what consumers liked or didn’t like.
What’s interesting about how Live Product Search Reviews handles reviews by attribute is that it appears to be based on text pattern matching in the reviews. In most cases, this seems to work quite well; in others, though, it misaligns reviews to attribute tags. An example of this is found in the Speed attribute; there are a handful of reviews aligned to the attribute “Speed” that are related to the speed (promptness) that the eBay seller shipped the item to the buyer).
What I like about the Buzzillions review submission format is that it alllows Reviewers to tag as either “pro” or “con” various product specific attributes. For example, on the Apple iPhone Review Form, a reviewer can indicate that the “Battery Life” is Pro (meaning, it’s good). In addition, users can nominate more attribute tags that they’d deem relevant to the product; and, I assume, that once enough reviewers have nominated the same tag, that attribute tag appears by default in their Pros & Cons list.
Are Shopzilla affiliates getting the Buzzillions content through the Shopzilla API?
I always use Live product reviews. It is the most easy to use and does indeed give the information you need. I used it to purchase my Ipod, even though i was going to buy it anyway! Some of the movie reviews they do are pretty good as well.
Amazon’s rating system is also good. Why have you not mentioned it. I like their most useful pro/con review. So in most cases all you need to read is the two reviews not trawl trhrough thousands of reviews before buying.
I don’t really trust reviews from those online stores, because they might only approve good reviews. I usually browse the review from independent website.