AMAZON TO IMPROVE PRODUCT REVIEWS WITH MACHINE-LEARNING PLATFORM

Amazon Reviews

Amazon is the most popular online shopping website used worldwide. To improve their site, Amazon has developed a new machine-learning platform to surface more useful reviews of the products it sells. This new platform should enable consumers to make more educated buying decisions.

Amazon is a one-stop shop for nearly any product. With such a vast number of products, it can be difficult to know what product is the right one to get. When searching for products, users are often rely on the reviews of others to decide if they should buy the product. I have purchased my fair share of Amazon products that died within the first week of use despite a sea of positive user reviews. This is because often sellers inflate their product pages with false reviews.



Although Amazon already has a decent review and rating system, it can be overwhelming at times to read through all the reviews and feel confident enough to make the purchase. An Amazon spokesperson stated:

The system will learn what reviews are most helpful to customers and it improves over time. It’s all meant to make customer reviews more useful.

In April, Amazon sued a handful of fake reviews websites after they found a number of phony reviews. While the amount of phony reviews were small, the potential of losing customer trust was not something Amazon was willing to do. Amazon’s new system will hopefully help address the possibilities of customers viewing phony reviews. Although it will be nearly impossible completely get rid of all phony reviews, this new platform is a step in the right direction.

The new system was implemented on Friday and will most likely be unnoticeable at first. Currently, the system is only being used in the United States, and there is no word on whether the platform will be implemented in other countries in the future.

Being someone who purchases products from Amazon almost weekly, I am excited to see Amazon making improvements to their rating system. Even if I am not purchasing a product from Amazon, I (like any responsible adult) often find myself using their review system to determine the durability/reliability of a product I am about to purchase. There are times where I will spend 30-40 minutes reading through reviews for even the most frivolous of products. Hopefully, Amazon’s new review platform will be able to reduce the amount of time I spend weeding through useless reviews.



What are your thoughts? Do you think the new platform will improve Amazon’s customer review process? Let us know what you think in the comment section below