Amazon Kindle Cover Reviews a New perspective

“In a highly competitive market like Kindle covers what role do customer reviews play?
From the consumer’s point of view the answer is quite plain to see. It is a well documented fact that shoppers are becoming ever more savvy, particularly with regards to online shopping. More than half of consumers will now routinely track down reviews of products that they are thinking about buying. The practice is used more when the products to be purchased get more pricey.
Consumers can use product reviews in several ways. The most obvious way is sifting through actual customer reviews themselves. This information may reaffirm the customer’s choice of product or put them off.
Product reviews also function on a deeper level as well. Consumers are becoming ever more savvy and will treat online reviews differently depending on their ‘trust value’. Most consumers inherently believe the reviews on Amazon for example as they have built up a trustworthy status over a long period of time. Other websites that someone has not heard of though could be treated with some suspicion. Consumers have discovered that online reviews can be fraudulent and they are cautious.
The quantity of reviews available for a particular product is a critical factor in building trust. A product which has a couple of thousand reviews will instil greater confidence than one that has just a few, it has more social proof. With products that have lots of reviews shoppers can get a broad sense of how good it is and then home in on the less positive reviews to try and establish what the drawbacks could be.
Some of the more ambitious platforms have ways of commenting on individual reviews, asking questions and ways for voting for them as being useful or not. This allows the best posts to bubble up to the top and provides a more informative user experience.
As the use of reviews becomes more prevalent then more places will publish them. One of the benefits of this is that sites are now available that specialise in hosting reviews of websites themselves. Now shoppers can read online product reviews on one website and then verify reviews of the website itself in order to ascertain if it has adequate trust value to believe the product reviews that it contains and if it is safe to make a purchase.
With so much time and effort put into customer reviews for the benefit of online shoppers what point is it all to a manufacturer? The smart manufacturers have discovered the importance of customer reviews and have come to see that they contain a huge amount of valuable information that pertains to their very product, what is positive about it and what is missing or just doesn’t work. The best manufacturers have started using ‘customer refined design’ principles.”