Good morning. It’s まさきん.
These days, I doubt many people buy anything without checking the reviews first. Between work and managing my household budget, I have been thinking about reviews more and more, so I want to take a moment to sort out my thoughts.
On-site reviews and off-site reviews
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of reviews. The first kind shows up in places the service itself provides, like product pages or review sites. I call these “on-site reviews.”
Restaurant ratings on review sites and the star ratings lined up on an online store’s product page both fall into this category. Because the operator has built the system for them, these reviews tend to pile up in large numbers.
The second kind is feedback in places the service does not control, like personal blogs, social media, or word of mouth from people you know. These are “off-site reviews.”
My gut feeling is that people trust off-site reviews more. With on-site reviews, there is always that nagging suspicion that the operator might be editing things in its own favor. CXL’s article on how on-site and off-site reviews relate to conversion rates also covers the difference between these two types, and how important it is to show a balance of positive and negative reviews.
On the other hand, you usually only come across off-site reviews if you go looking for them. Their reach is narrow, but when they do reach you, they carry a lot of trust. I think that is the basic trade-off.
What makes a review trustworthy
Good reviews seem to share a few traits. First, they cover both the good and the bad. A review that only praises actually comes across as suspicious.
Second, they describe what it was really like to use the product, in concrete terms. Writing that lets you picture the product in use is more helpful than abstract impressions. For example, something like “it felt light when I held it in one hand” gives you far more to go on than a single line saying “easy to use.”
Finally, they compare the product with other options. When a product is discussed side by side with similar ones, I feel the review becomes even more useful for making a decision.
On the flip side, a page full of contradictory opinions tends to just confuse readers. When glowing 5-star reviews and scathing 1-star reviews appear in roughly equal numbers, you end up not knowing which to believe. Unnaturally high ratings that look like fake reviews also drag down trust in the same way. This connects to something I wrote before in my post about how the essence of CRM is not creating “bad revenue”: putting long-term trust ahead of short-term appearances is what really matters in the world of reviews, too.
Now service providers get reviewed too
Some services extend reviews beyond customers to the service providers themselves. Ride-hailing services, where drivers and passengers rate each other, may be the best-known example.
It is not just passengers rating drivers. Drivers rate passengers too. I think this two-way tension does help raise the bar for manners and service quality.
When reviews go both ways, service quality itself tends to improve. On top of that, the accumulated reviews add depth of information in the eyes of search engines, which is said to help with SEO as well.
Speaking of which, there are also ways to check prices without signing a contract.
Clicking this opens the Rakuten login page. Once you log in, you’ll see the campaign details.
Now that AI-written reviews are on the rise
One thing that has clearly changed over the past few years is the rise of fake reviews written by generative AI. The writing itself sounds natural, and more and more of it is hard to spot at a glance.
Mass-produced text tends to have oddly polished phrasing and vague praise with little substance. Once you get used to it, I feel like you start to pick up on these traits somewhat intuitively.
Platforms are aware of the problem too, and they seem to be strengthening systems that detect unnatural posting patterns and skewed writing styles. Labels like “verified purchaser,” which only allow reviews from people whose purchase has been confirmed, are also getting more weight than before.
On the user side, I think more people than before have learned not to take reviews at face value. My impression is that more people now read the actual comments before deciding, instead of just looking at the star rating.
That said, I personally do not think this is all bad news. Because fake reviews have multiplied, specific, honest reviews actually stand out more than they used to. A blunt but heartfelt sentence may now carry relatively more weight than praise anyone can churn out. As I wrote in my post about how the best ads stop looking like ads, the trend of unvarnished honesty earning more trust than carefully crafted perfection seems to apply to reviews just the same.
What I watch out for when reading reviews
When I read reviews myself, I first look at how varied the content is, rather than how many reviews there are. If a page has nothing but extremely positive and extremely negative ratings, I make a point of reading it with some distance.
Another small thing I check is whether the posting dates are spread out. If a page has a sudden burst of reviews in a short period, I think it is worth suspecting a campaign or a coordinated wave of posts.
I also pay attention to comment length, not just the stars. If the page is full of extremely short comments, the goal may have been to rack up numbers rather than share real content.
Once you get used to it, this kind of check takes only a few seconds. It is a small habit I want to keep up so I do not make bad shopping decisions.
I think of the links below as a kind of review, too
Having written all this, it occurs to me that the referral links at the bottom of this blog are closer to one person sharing their experience than to advertising.
I actually use these things myself, and I try to write about both the good parts and the annoying parts as honestly as I can. An article that only praises loses its value as a review. That is the same point I have been making throughout this post.
If you read them not as ads but as word of mouth from one user, that would probably make me happiest.
Clicking this opens the Rakuten login page. Once you log in, you’ll see the campaign details.
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