Amazon launches first product with 1 million reviews

Since the introduction of one-click ratings, the terms of product competition are fundamentally different.

In his letter announcing his resignation as CEO, Jeff Bezos said one of Amazon's innovations was "pioneering customer reviews." Some have suggested that Amazon's mission is to replace trust in brands with the same customer reviews.

But in the early days, reviews were something shoppers could trust, and as Amazon grew in size, so did the influence of reviews. So creating fake reviews became worth the effort, and the idea that reviews could replace brands failed.

No matter how hard Amazon tries to weed out counterfeit goods, customer reviews are inherently biased and easily manipulated.

Instead, Amazon chose to address the volume problem, rather than having products with hundreds of thousands of ratings, some of which may not be credible.

Now, the product is an order of magnitude more reviewed, and that signals to consumers that at least a lot of people have bought the product and it’s still being sold on Amazon.

Now, customer reviews are less about reading every single review in the hope of discovering a reason not to buy and more about seeing a product with thousands of reviews or now ratings and using that as a signal.

The Amazon Echo Dot has 5,000 unreviewed reviews that rate it 1 star, and 10,000 more with 1 star ratings.

Even if shoppers wanted to read negative reviews, they would only see one-third of the complaints.

To sum up, if customer reviews were a proven innovation, there wouldn’t be products with millions of ratings being inundated.

It is not clear whether consumers would distinguish between products with 10, 1,000, or 100,000 ratings.

If on a retailer’s shelf the brand is the shortcut, on Amazon the reviews take its place, and today the shortcut on Amazon is one of the first search results.

Reviews and ratings act as visual filler, confirming that at least one other Amazon consumer has purchased it.