Reviews can be quite pivotal in deciding to make a purchase or not (especially when unsure of a product etc).
When a product doesn't have any reviews, then I sometimes look for a similar item that does have reviews, and potentially go for that, or do a search for the product online to see if there's any other sites that have reviewed it. if the product isn't too pricey then you can often buy it on an impulse. There isn't much LH can do about these ones.
When a product has less than 5 reviews, I find this is where things get tricky, especially if the item only has 1 review. What I then start to question is things like "Can this reviewer be trusted?" "Are they the manufacturer or distributer for the product trying to big up the product?" or on the flip side "Are they a competitor to the product trying to make the competition look bad?"
A prime case of this is the difference in the Golden Root reviews (http://www.lovehoney.co.uk/s.cfm?term=golden+root ), the single tablets are rated around 3/5 (19 reviews), and the box of ten a perfect score (4 reviews). Are those 4 reviews from people who tried the single ones, and loved them? or are they people linked to golden root trying to big it up? as a potential buyer, I'm non the wiser. I would be more likely to trust the 3/5 score, being that a lot more people would probably try it once to make a decision on liking it or not.
I think there's a couple of things that could help with this:
- Did the reviewer purchase the item from LH? (with the reviewer's consent of course, LH verify this when they approve the review)
- What is the reviewer's activity like? a simple link on the reviewer's name to their profile page would go a long way in helping to "trust" the reviewer's review. Going with those 4 GRC reviews, I can see that by looking at the profiles for the 4 users, you have furtiveminx, who has 2 reviews, and 1 forum post all on the same day, the forum post being on GRC too. Seeing that, would I trust that review now? In a word, no. su27011979 and ja1234 both have a number of reviews to their name, so I would be more inclined to trust their reviews.And Playful_Couple, have a few reviews to their name and a few posts too, and I would keep their review in mind.
Review ordering is a bit of a pain, they're currently listed by highest rating to lowest, with those 19 reviews for the single GRC, you have to go through all the reviews that are saying the product is great before those that say the product is bad. I know LH is a business, and bad reviews may put users off purchasing, but having this bias that leans towards the good reviews gives a slightly bad impression. A system such as Amazon's "Was this review helpful?", and then showing the "most helpful" positive and negative review on the product page. And then letting the user decide whether the rest of the reviews, should be sorted by rating, date or helpfulness.
Average ratings are similarly impacted, a product with a single 5* review, will get a higher "average" rating than a product with 20 reviews (10 5* and 10 4*). I think with this a single "neutral" rating should be automatically applied to the product, and order by rating then amount of reviews. That would mean that in the above case the product with the single review will get an average rating of 4, but the one with 20 reviews will get an average of 4.43. Which would hopefully a truer representation of the products actual rating. :)
Hopefully something to think about :)