ISO 20488 - Online Consumer Reviews

[Sidney Vianna]

Consumer reviews play an increasingly strong role in purchasing decisions, but with a plethora of platforms and opinions, whose view can you trust? A new standard just published aims to put some order into the process to restore back our faith.

Read the whole article @ Putting the trust back into online reviews

For a preview of the ISO 20488 document, point your browser here.

 

[Sidney Vianna]

By coincidence this last week I had an experience that is relevant to the subject of this standard. As another 100 million of consumers in the USA, I have an Amazon Prime account. I needed to buy an item last week, and, as I normally do when deciding between competing products in Amazon, I use the reviews as one of the deciding factors when selecting the item.

Made the purchase, received the merchandise and installed it. Because the product is being used by guests, I did not provide any feedback nor reviews at amazon.com.

To my surprise, I received an offer and a request from the company that sold me the product. They really want me to provide a very positive feedback and offered to send me an item (probably worth around US$10) if I did that. I find that type of incentive bordering the unethical, but it made me think if all the positive feedback and reviews which led me to buy that product were also "incentivized" the same way they wanted me to provide the positive review.

So, credibility of online consumer reviews is a real, mainstream problem. Hopefully this standard will have an impact.