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MKBHD - Do Bad Reviews Kill Companies?
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this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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I feel like in most cases if a product has such bad reviews that it kills the company that made it, there's a good reason for that.
Of course there are exceptions, and it is expected that a reviewer do their due diligence to make sure they're giving an honest, accurate, and reasonable review, but no company should be shielded for being told their product isn't good if it isn't.
I gave a keyboard wrist rest a 3 star review because the pad is this weird shape that gets narrower in the middle. From the images on Amazon, it looked like it was more or less rectangular. Rounded ends but with a consistent width throughout. The seller started harassing me to change my review to 5 stars. I reported them to Amazon. The emails from the seller stopped, I haven't bought something from Amazon since.
Sellers that demand or worse make up 5-star reviews are the ones who sell shitgarbage products and need to go out of business. Seeing 6 5-star reviews that all say "Great product! Would purchase again!" pretty much means the product will give you glans cancer and the doctors are going to have to cut off all the nerves that make it possible to orgasm.
I want to see a product get negative reviews by idiots. That's how you know the product is good and the source is genuine.
Give an example: I bought a little inverter that works with my power tool batteries. It can deliver 110V60Hz AC at 150W from a drill battery, plus it has USB ports. I've run a desk lamp from this during a power failure, or charged my cell phone. Works fine. I knew it was legit when I read people's reviews saying "Doesn't run my hair dryer. 0/10." Because there's plenty of idiots in the world who don't know how electricity works.
The problem on Amazon, especially for all these dropshippers that all sell mostly the same products: if you don't have the best rating, nobody will buy your shit. So here it might indeed kill the company. Or at least this listing.
Which...fine. Don't build your business on a faulty model.
For tech stuff, the best reviews to read are always the 1 or 2 star reviews, since you can see if the people complaining have legit gripes or they're just idiots who bought the wrong thing for their task.
5 star reviews are mostly worthless, they have a strong likelihood of being fake, or for people who only ever post 5 or 1 star reviews. A product with fewer 5 star than 3 star reviews will likely make me shy away, if for no other reason than the dissenters are drowning out whoever the vendor hired to fake reviews for them. That's noteworthy.
4 star reviews are more worth reading. There is a set of folks who thinks 5 stars should be reserved for extremely good exceeded expectations, and merely "as expected" should not get top marks. These are more likely written by people who bought the product and care about what they're talking about.
3 star reviews will have actual good consumer information in them. "I was looking for a box to hold my Shark Model no. 24352097ASDF0872RSD vacuum cleaner accessories in, and this box does okay but the wide brush attachment thing doesn't fit anywhere." Okay, if I have that model of Shark, I know this might not be the box to buy for my vacuum accessories. It's not that the box is a bad box, it's just this isn't the correct use case. Thanks fellow citizen!
2 star reviews are almost never written because you seldom dissatisfy a customer below the middle of the scale without completely pissing them off.
1 star reviews come in a wondrous variety. Anything from "product never arrived" which you're warned is wrong to leave in the product review because so many of these platforms are designed to separate the product, seller and delivery service for maximum customer violation, but okay. You'll get "Product wasn't as advertised at all, ordered a coffee grinder got a salad shooter" which can sometimes happen when dropshippers misuse the listing sub-options menus. You know how if you order a T-shirt from Amazon you get one listing on which you select size and color from drop down menus? Or Duct tape: 1 pack, 2 pack, 5 pack? I've seen sellers who probably don't speak English as a primary language market completely different products like this, which leads to dumb shit like reviews for several different items mixed together. If I see a lot of 1 star reviews, and many of them are "soldering iron did a terrible job curling my hair" I take that as a good sign, because the seller feels legitimate enough to let those remain up. Illegitimate sellers can't tolerate low review scores and will try to have them removed or hidden. Or, you see a pattern of "flashlight power button quit working after 3 months" in which case you know to legitimately avoid this flashlight because it legitimately isn't well made.