Way back in the last decade eBay had reviews. They allowed buyers to review products that they’d purchased and displayed them in product pages. These disappeared from the site and reviews have been absent from eBay for many years.
Now it appears that reviews might be on their way back. In that looks like a pilot trial on eBay.com, buyers are once again being invited to write reviews with the ratings displayed at the top of listings just below the item title.
Reviews are a powerful way to drive traffic and can make or break a product. They need to be legitimate though and that’s where the rub lies, Amazon have recently sued over 1000 unknown reviewers who are being paid to leave positive reviews on their site. Prolific Amazon reviewer Harriet Klausner who died this year reportedly reviewed over 31,000 books and her reputation which such that publishers sent her some 50 books a week in the hope of a scoring one of her reviews.
Fake reviews are worthless to consumers, but companies love them under the assumption that it makes their business look great compared to their competitors. Since the news of Amazon’s legal action a grass movement campaign has sprung up on Twitter with the hashtag #noreceiptnoreview, largely focused at fraudulent reviews on TripAdvisor.
eBay Reviews
To leave a review eBay asks for a five star rating, three yes/no questions (which for a printer were: Is it easy to set up?; Is it good value?; and Is the print quality good?), a review title and then a free text box in which to enter your review.
So now it appears that reviews might be coming back to eBay and doubtless they’ll be keen for them to do two things (apart from being genuine!). Firstly to add to buyer confidence when they’re viewing an item and about to purchase but more importantly to help with SEO.
Google loves a good review so long as they’re in the correct rich snippet format and if eBay can build up a large catalogue of reviews and have the five star ratings displayed on search engines it won’t do eBay SEO any harm at all.
Would you like to see reviews rolled out across all eBay sites? Would you leave reviews and encourage your buyers to review your products?
7 Responses
Why not just rename eBay whilst you are at to to Amazon. Hardly tell them apart soon as they have copied so much stuff.
In my Market this is going to be a complete disaster if they role this out. As well as being bashed by a negative now because buyers don’t bother reading the description, we are also going to get bashed with a poor review as well, great.
Mabs
In the usual crap eBay way, the reviews will be totally visible on the mobile junk app, when the descriptions remain largely hidden. So people will see the poor review, no doubt written after a misunderstanding of what they’d bought because the brain dead idiots looked only at a picture and title.
Yes and No….
if it seperates customer feedback from product review, and ebay keep them both seperate, then its a win.
(great seller, great delivery, i dont know how to do basic flatpack, so negative FB).
i used to love the internet for product reviews, these days, i largely ignore them. not because reviews are useless, but because the reviewers are useless.
i’ll give an example: fine wine.
i would MUCH rather have 3 reviews, from knowledgable wine experts, than 3000 reviews from those whose biggest concern was how drunk they got.
last restaurant review i read, for an all-you-can-eat meat feast buffet, had its ratings severerely reduced, because of the large numbers of vegetarians in attendance.
i dont want my meat feast reviewed by vegetarians, their opinion is not relevent here, but all you usually see is an aggregated score….
two recent purchases where i used reviews; a spare battery for my phone, and a 32gb memory card. both had great reviews, both were completely fake items.
knowing a little about these items, and how to test them, i wasn’t long in figuring they were fake. the thousands of reviewers who felt “its a battery, says samsung on it, must be genuine. 5stars” were less than useless.
the thousands of “holds my files for college. 5 stars” didnt realise that once 8gb of the (alleged) 32gb were used, it would start overwriting previous files from the beginning, because it was an 8gb stick which had been deliberately & maliciously faked to look like a 32gb.
Not in the least bit deserving of all the (genuine) 5 star reviews both items had.
before i trust reviews, i have to trust the reviewers.
i read reviews, but as said, with a pinch of salt.
although i have found myself asking questions on amazon, to owners directly, using the feature and it seems good.
ive also helped out people by answering questions back.
This will only work with new BIN goods. What is the point of reviewing a one off used item or even a new auction item? It would be an ebay fix if the review rating for “value” for an auction win at say £20 was consolidated with a typical “value” rating for the same item which typically had an average BIN price sale of say £40.
What is eBay? Seriously in 2015/16 what is it.
Where are they headed. Amazon big box retailer with product reviews or marketplace for unique items?
I don’t think they can have both its not working for sellers or buyers who have to wade through pages of results