Article rating – sharing shopping experience about products
An article rating is when consumers are given the opportunity to rate products they have purchased on the Internet. Users can include the entire range of their experiences about a product in the article rating, from the quality of workmanship and appearance to usability and the price-performance ratio.
Article ratings for sales promotion
An article review that praises the merits of a product or the manufacturer certainly has the power to boost sales of the product. This is especially true if the reviews can be found directly below the product in an online store. Many online stores even offer users the option of using filters to hide products that do not exceed a certain minimum rating. In this way, users can find products that have good ratings from customers. Genuine reviews from buyers must come from the customers themselves. However, it is worthwhile for online retailers if they encourage their customers to write an article review for the purchased product. Often, they even offer bonuses or competitions to motivate customers to write a review.
Lack of trust in article ratings
However, there are also many online retailers where an article review can be written for products that have not been purchased. However, this opens the door to fake product reviews. In recent years, there have been repeated cases of companies commissioning service providers to fake reviews on a large scale. This has lowered consumer confidence in product ratings, according to a survey by IfD Allensbach around 10.14 million Internet users in 2010 considered the product ratings of other buyers to be unreliable; while recently in 2007, only 7.79 million users doubted the reliability of such ratings. As a result, many people trust a positive article review far less than a negative review. Articles that have received one or more negative comments therefore often sell much poorly in practice than well-rated alternatives.
Article ratings in opinion portals
There are numerous opinion portals on the Internet where consumers can leave their article ratings for hundreds of thousands of products. In some cases, a minimal fee is even paid for this, although this usually depends on the number of visitors to a review. Other users, in turn, can rate the content of such reviews. In practice, so-called click circles are often formed here, in which the authors rate each other in order to increase their income. Independent article evaluation is thus often restricted.
Article ratings in blogs
More and more blogs are dedicated to the evaluation of products; these are referred to as test blogs. However, an article review on such blogs should always be treated with caution, because entrepreneurs often approach blog operators to book paid reviews. Unfortunately, these do not always correspond to the truth.
