I’ve had various discussions this week about the importance of customer reviews on our books at a site such as Amazon.com and how these influence buying decisions. I am squarely (not even vaguely) in the camp that customer reviews can make or break your product here.
Recently, I was in search of a clock for my soon-to-be 3 year old son A. He has been asking for a clock for his room. We continue to talk about time with him and he wants a clock of his own. Great! So I go to Amazon.com in search of a fun yet functional clock for A’s room. His favs are Disney (Pooh, Mickey Mouse, Peter Pan, Cars) or Animals (all kinds of zoo and home animals) so I really try to center the focus of my search on this and Amazon’s great search functions allow me to really drill down into their offerings. I find and am quite happy with a Lightning McQueen clock - that is until I read the 3 one or two star reviews of the product. All of the reviews basically said the same thing: 1. The $12.99 + shipping product is cheaply made and is really worth about $3.99 and 2. The photo on the catalog page makes the clock look bigger than it is…Whether the right decision or not, I immediately left the catalog page without purchasing the clock. I am all about VALUE right now so me spending over $15 on something that should be $5 was not appealing. I ended up finding a suitable Mater clock at disneyshopping.com that looks good and I’m looking forward to giving it to A for his birthday!
How many times do you go to a product page and read the reviews first before deciding to buy??? And is it crucial to your decision. If a product has a mix of reviews, I really try to see what are the complaints centered on - sometimes it is really just personal opinion (I hate this book because the picture on the cover is ugly) but sometimes it can be important to me. I removed many items from my first baby registry, most notably the bathtub that I scanned in-store. I removed it after going home and reading the online customer reviews because people had their babies get hurt in it and it seemed that there was a design issue that the manufacturer did not anticipate - the babies could slide out of the baby tub! But I’d say that over 70% of my yearly purchases are affected by customer reviews - either at a site like Amazon.com or a consumer electronics site. It is important for me to know other thoughts before I put forth money.
So my continued effort this year for books that my editors publish is to send our books out for review - to key industry influencers, professional friends of the author, product managers, etc. There is the occassional bad review (and I’ve hit into this), but 9 out of 10 books that I send out generate a positive review from a reader and I ask them - or beg them - to post their thoughts for others to see. It really does make a difference!
