Online reviews of products and services are becoming more and more common. If you have ever shopping online, you have probably read a review. Amazon.com is one of the leaders in online reviews, but Yelp is now one of the most popular websites specifically for reviews. Yelp offers reviews on restaurants, shopping, night life, hotel, spas and beauty...anything your area that you want to know about.I personally love online reviews. I used them when buying all my furniture online and I use it to find local restaurants. I believe it holds producers to a higher standard; if people don't like a product or service they can write about it online for everyone to see. From a business owners perspective, one bad review can make or break a company.
So online reviews; good for buyers, bad for sellers?
Long run, I think it's good for both groups. Buyers find out where to go, and sellers find out how to improve (if they choose to or not, is a different story). My worry is in the short term. New businesses can suffer from the reviews of a few extremely biased customers, and never even get past that "growing up" phase.
ReplyDeleteYou are always going to have people who hate a restaurant. As long as the website regulates what is said on there and each review has a reason as to why the restaurant was horrible, everything should be just fine.
ReplyDeleteMy roommate loves yelp, he uses it all the time. So there are people out there who rely on this information, and I agree it could totally break or make a business depending on the review.
ReplyDeleteOnline ratings are very helpful. For a person to put in the effort, and go back and rant....or rave about a product, means it had a great impact on the person. With that being proven, you will find that most reviews are one of the extremes, and not helpful if a product or service is just mediocre. With electronics, i like to look up reviews because many times you can find about long term issues or reliability factors, or even sometimes people post better solutions.
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