The way we rate our purchases on Amazon and Flipkart must change

Summary:

• The way five star based rating works is misleading
• We need to change our approach of understanding the current ratings
• Reading reviews before placing order for all items is practically impossible. A reliable rating helps a lot.
• We put immense importance to product rating while purchasing anything however seldom care to provide our ratings/reviews

First thing first, the ubiquitous five star based rating that we are familiar with, is not a five point grading but a four point grading system. The minimum rating one can provide is one star and not zero star. The implication of this is when we see a product with 3 star, we tend to perceive this as 60% positive rating, however in reality this has a 50% positive rating. Similarly something with 4 star actually has 75% positive rating instead of 80% which our human brain normally perceives. There are several other shortcomings of the five star based rating system which are well known and documented in this Harvard Business Review article

But even then, a product with 3.5 star rating, which means a 62.5% satisfactory rating (instead of 70%) should be good product more often than not, right ? From my experience (and several others might agree), this is not the case. With 3.5 star ratings we have more chances of getting disappointed, and we typically look for 4 star or above rated products while purchasing.

Amazon remains tight lipped about their rating calculation. This is what they say in their help page

How Amazon rating is calculated

Flipkart on the other hand do not even have something similar, they do warn us about fake reviews in this Flipkart story ,but do not talk much about the ratings.

The result is, for most cases the rating system reduce into something like this :

3 Star : Bad

4 Star : OK OK

5 Star : Good

This I think is sad and must change. Upon digging further I figured, this is caused by one or more of the following:

1. When we purchase something and fail to provide a rating/review the eCommerce website assumes we are fully satisfied and uses that in their rating calculation
2. The sellers sometimes buys the stuff themselves (or somebody on their behalf) and provides glowing reviews and ratings as verified purchase
3. There are several third party fake reviewer service available to manipulate the ratings in eCommerce websites and sellers can engage them

The second and and third points above are not scalable and cannot manipulate ratings for popular products. That leaves us with only ourselves to blame for this skewed ratings.

We cannot expect the eCommerce giants to change their algorithms for rating calculation, This is what we can do instead to help ourselves:

1. Make a point to rate our purchase. Unless each of us contribute we cannot have reliable product ratings. Google map works so well because some of us care to add new places into the map.
2. Sometimes we are too polite to give 1 star for a purchase. If we are truly dissatisfied we should give that.
3. 5 star has to be earned by the product. This cannot be default. Make sure we differentiate between delightful experience and satisfactory experience.

Conclusion:

The importance of eCommerce has been steadily rising in our life all through the last decade, but the recent pandemic has increased our dependency on eCommerce many folds suddenly. It is in our interest we provide our feedback and let fellow shoppers know about our experience.

Thoughts, feedback ? Feel free to add a comment.

Additional reading :

https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-stars-ratings-calculated/