If you’re about to buy something online and its only customer review is negative, you’d probably reconsider the purchase, right? It turns out a product’s first review can have an outsized effect on the item’s future – it can even cause the product to fail.
Shoppers, retailers and manufacturers alike feel the effects of customer reviews. Researchers at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business looked at the influence of the first review after noticing the exact same products getting positive reviews on one retailer’s website but negative reviews on others, said Sungsik Park, Ph.D., who studied the phenomenon as a doctoral student at UF.
“Why would a product receive a 4.7-star rating with 100 reviews on Amazon, but only four or five reviews with a two-star rating Walmart or BestBuy?” Park wondered. [Read more…] about The strange impact of the first consumer review