Customer reviews at amazon.com are a good example of how ecommerce is improving. The customer experience benefits from opinions and recommendations. Amazon.com's success with customer reviews points to a great development in the brief history of e-commerce. It suggests that there is more to the online shopping experience than selection, price, or convenience. Customer reviews of Amazon.com’s huge product line are significant not only because they put regular shoppers on the site, but also because they return social considerations to the shopper's decision making. (Chan, 2003)
All products on Amazon.com can be reviewed. In the case of books, editorial reviews by leading magazines are provided by Amazon.com. For all products, customer reviews are available. Moreover, customers can rate each other's reviews. A rating figure is placed against each review so that customers can decide whether to read it or not based on that. (Krishnamurthy, 2003)
Now, a Customer review is an important and essential part at Amazon.com. Customer reviews provide information that is written by reviewers who themselves can become established and respected tastemakers, its value is social. In other words, its opinion is a form of information we have always used as a differentiator of quality and respective value. It even predates the idea of product as consumable commodity. (Chan, 2003)
Someone think that Amazon.com's customer reviews work because they label product with a simple recommendation. However, customer reviews work by creating the mirror world of social value: reputations, desires, comparisons, and other kinds of associations reflected on the surface of social relations. Customer reviews help consumers to place where a product belongs by virtue of what other people say about it. We discover how hot or cold it is based on who likes it, what kinds of people they are, and for what reasons. Basically, the product is social value. (Chan,2003) Therefore, some social presence belongs in a marketplace, online as well as off.
Also, Amazon.com has gone about building a community by customer reviews. Customers become part of the Amazon.com community by contributing products reviews. These reviews are carefully vetted by Amazon.com staff to make sure that they are relevant and tastefully done. The result is that customers feel that they can trust one another’s recommendations and reactions. (Seybold, 1998, pp.130)
In all, Amazon.com has done the right thing by leveraging social and community opinion making on its site.
Chan, Adrian. (2003) “Case Study: Amazon.com.� retrieved 20 October, 2004, from
http://www.gravity7.com/cd_case_amazon.htm
Krishnamurthy, S. (2003) E-Commerce Management:Text and Cases, Louiseville:Transcontinental Printing,Inc.,
ISBN 0324152523
Seybold, P.(1998) Customers.com:How to create a profitable business strategy for the internet and Beyond,New York: Time Books, ISBN 0812930371.
Sharon Tse 01:21, 28 Oct 2004 (EST)
