flak rss random

price discriminatory reviews

Yesterday Amazon offered up as their deal of the day this 31 disc boxed set of Harry Potter movies for the bargain price of $250, compared to the list price of $500 or the $345 they are selling it for today. I was disappointed not to find the weight listed in the product description, but spent a little time poking around the customer reviews. Unlike newspaper comments, even I sometimes find user contributed reviews interesting or helpful.

A couple quick facts. 519 total reviews. 292 (56%) one star. 154 (30%) five star. Not many in between. Of the one star reviews, I couldn’t find any verified purchases. I counted 93 (60%) verified among the five star reviews. What to make of this?

I’m not really sure how useful “too expensive” one star reviews are. I’m more than capable of looking at the price myself. What I want to learn from a review is if the product delivered is the product promised. If you haven’t purchased the product, you can’t tell me that. That’s why I love the verified purchase tag they’ve added to reviews. You have to be a pretty dedicated fanboy to buy a competitor’s product to write a disparaging review. The five star reviews aren’t that helpful either, as I do think you need to have more dollars than sense to purchase this monstrosity. Makes me wonder if anybody bought it just so they could write a review and brag about it.

In the grand scheme of things, this same problem exists in reviews of just about every (near) luxury item. There’s the haters who can only complain about the price and about how you can make your own with only $20 in materials from Walmart. And there’s the gushers, who can only wax poetic about how happy their purchase made them without ever describing their usage of the product.

Posted 29 Mar 2013 02:01 by tedu Updated: 30 Mar 2013 22:21
Tagged: business