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By: Ryan, on March 20, 2009

Jared Spool wrote an excellent evaluation of the Amazon review process. Here’s an excerpt:

Amazon had reviews from the very first day. It’s always been a feature that customers love. (Many non-customers talk about how they check out the reviews on Amazon first, then buy the product someplace else.)

Initially, the review system was purely chronological. The designers didn’t account for users entering hundreds or thousands of reviews.

Interestingly, only a fringe portion of the audience writes reviews. For example, while Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has more than 3,000 reviews, our calculations indicate Amazon sold more than 4,000,000 copies of the book. That’s 0.075% or only one out of every 1,300 purchasers that took the time to write a review.

For small numbers, chronology works just fine. However, it quickly becomes unmanageable. (For example, anyone who discovers an established blog may feel they’ve come in at the middle of a conversation, since only the most recent topics are presented first. It seems as if the writer assumed the readers had read everything from the beginning.)

The problem came with the eleventh review. Since the product page only showed ten on the first page, the eleventh pushed the earliest review onto a different page. This worked fine as long as every new review was better than the existing ones.

But that wasn’t happening. Newer reviews often had a what-he-said vibe to them, echoing the sentiments of the well-written reviews, while, at the same time pushing them out of the reader’s view.

The full article: The Magic Behind Amazon’s 2.7 Billion Dollar Question

I find this incredibly interesting because we just launched a very similar system on our product pages at backcountry.com. Our gear content is sorted by a gravity engine and user votes push the best content to the top. The it’s part of our bigger goal to be the center of gear knowledge and let our gear community decide not only which content is the best, but hopefully which products are worth buying. Jared’s article and Amazon’s success is a huge validation of those efforts.

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