Smart Christmas Shopping In September
There are 111 shopping days left until Christmas. Do you know what you’re buying for your friends and family?
In the last decade, the Internet has provided shoppers with many tools that have made the shopping experience easier for all of us. First, online shopping saved the time and effort of drudging through the shopping mall in the holiday season. Next, chat solutions like LivePerson enabled us to get more information about the products we wanted to buy by chatting with site representatives live while we are online. Then, shopping comparison sites like Shopping.com made it easier to find the right products at the right price.
In the last year, with the growth of social networking websites and social search, the concept of social shopping was introduced. Social Shopping is an interesting synthesis of offline shopping, which can be a social experience for friends when shopping together, and the growth of product buzz in online media and blogosphere.
With their focus on the social aspect of shopping, social search sites relied on product rankings based on buzz and user-generated comments. While user-generated comments are an important part of the online shopping experience, as proven by the importance of user comments on Amazon.com and other e-commerce sites, there can be a danger when relying too heavily on user comments for purchasing products or services.
First of all, user contributed comments tend to be less balanced then professional reviews, and often focus on a particular feature, for good or for bad. This is excellent for something like movie reviews, where your main concern is whether or not the movie was good. That is why user reviews on RottenTomatoes.com have been so successful. But when considering which MP3 Player or a DVD recorder to buy, you want a balanced review that focuses on product usability, installation and usage and complete product functionality, and not just a rave or a critique of one particular feature.
A second issue with user-contributed comments is that they provide an opportunity for company employees and PR or Ad agencies to post unbiased comments about their own products. Following incidents about fake blog posts from WalMart and Sony Playstation from their PR and ad agencies in the last year, it became clear that user-contributed comments provides an easy way for companies to ‘inflate’ the favorable buzz about their products.
With the rise of social shopping and review websites, we have also seen the birth of product review sites, like my own company ViewScore. Though we do include user reviews in our product rankings, we put a greater weight on an aggregation of reviews given by professional sources like PC Magazine, CNET, VNUNET, Steve’s Digicams, Consumer Guide and more.
So do user-generated reviews have a place in the shopping experience? Most definitely ‘YES’.
I think user-generated reviews provide users with a way to get a laymen’s feel for a product. Sometimes the editors that write product reviews might miss some issues about product usability because their experience installing products is better than the average non-technical person. Other times, issues with a particular product might only arise after several months of product usage, long after the product has been reviewed. For example, if a user is interested in buying a printer that is more economical with ink, reviews from users who have used the printer enough times to change several printer cartridges might be more relevant. Sometimes, the very feature that the user-contributed review focuses on is the one issue most relevant to you in this product category.
So in the next 111 days, I encourage you to read user-generated product reviews to help decide which products to buy for friends and family. But first consult with the professional reviews found in product review digests sites like ViewScore to make sure that the 2-3 products in your set of consideration are the best ones to buy for your friends and family members.
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