With the use of three examples discuss the usefulness of online rating systems. Rating systems are becoming increasingly influential, with more and more people making decision about purchasing of different products and services based on the others opinio

Authors Avatar

                

With the use of three examples discuss the usefulness of online rating systems.

Rating systems are becoming increasingly influential, with more and more people making decision about purchasing of different products and services based on the others opinions provided in the form of online word of mouth, be they written by experts or simply by fellow shoppers. The usefulness of the rating systems should be evaluated carefully since it is generally not known to what extend ratings are truthful and compliant. This essay will look at three different examples, which are Trip Advisor, Amazon, and Premier Inn with regards to customers and businesses in order to evaluate the usefulness of online raring systems.

There are different types of rating systems available online which vary from being qualitative such as written reviews and comments, which are regarded as a most powerful technique for the use of word-of-mouse, or quantitative ratings such as stars or likes, which in order might use single overall rating or rating of multiple dimensions of the product or service, or a combination of both.  When thinking about myself I rarely do pay attention to the stars rating. First of all I do believe they do not show the full picture and therefore the need for review is essential to prove the argument for given scores for the product. After looking at research I found that this is true for the majority of people, as there is evidence that consumers read the text of online reviews rather than rely solely upon such summary statistics as star rating.

True Quality of the product

Reviews are identified as the more reliable and truth worth type of rating system that might represent true quality of the product. 58% of customers prefer sites with reviews before making a purchase and 98% of online shoppers stated that they do read online reviews before making purchase.This rise of online communities and reviews pushed more researches to be undertaken in order to understand the usefulness of online reviews and at possibility of detecting opinion spam review .

Looking at amazon.co.uk website you can notice that there is evidence that quantitative ranking does play important role as it helps customers to choose the product by sorting it according to average customer review, which means that the products that have higher stars ratings will be shown before the lower rated products. This could influence the products popularity and sales and might be one of the advantages for products, which have high ratings. However, since matching of stars do not always provide user with the true quality of the product , low ranked products are at disadvantage, even though the product might be of a good quality and therefore the use of this kind of rating systems are undermined.

Recently, Trip Advisor introduced the new rating system, which does not require the user to leave a review while one can leave a quantitative ranking by given stars to the businesses. This caused lots of opposition from a number of businesses, since the evaluation of just stars rating is very ambiguous and influences the overall scoring very quickly. If the business received low rating it is very hard to guess why this happened with just looking at the numbers and therefore the problem cannot be improved. Many hoteliers claimed that lots of its anonymous reviews are either fake or defamatory. Moreover, even customers found this information useless which shows another disadvantage for rating systems using quantitative rating, which is opposed by many people.

Join now!

Despite the recent attempt by Trip Advisor to introduce quantitative rating, the companies chosen represent the third type of ratings with the combination of both methods quantitative and qualitative ratings, which are more useful both for customers and businesses.

Wider audience -> more information -> sales

The most obvious benefit of online rating systems is the ability to get wider audience, which in turn can be more influential for analysis and decision-making for both customers and businesses.  This is common for the websites such as Trip Advisor that has more than 60 million users in just one month, and Amazon that ...

This is a preview of the whole essay