Amazon will revamp its display of book reviews
Booksellers who sell on Amazon are frequently exasperated with the frequent design changes at the site. All too often, we hear the refrain, "If it ain't broke ... don't fix it!"
Now Amazon is tinkering with what I think is its important feature by far -- its book reviews. Whether this will have an impact on sales, I don't know.
Amazon is in the process of reducing the number of book reviews displayed on detail pages. The change does away with Amazon's familiar one-column display of six reviews. Now just three reviews will be displayed in their entirety, followed by a link to see other reviews.
The new display is being rolled out to Amazon's customer base over the next two weeks. Here's a peek (click to enlarge):
Another unpopular change: By default, customers will see only older book reviews voted "most helpful" by other shoppers. Previously, the most recent reviews were displayed first, along with a pair of "Spotlight" reviews.
Many of Amazon's most active book reviewers complain that most shoppers won't click through to read recent reviews, reducing their chance of attracting votes.
"This new design is a terrible disincentive to all reviewers, especially newer ones," said frequent reviewer Daniel Jolley. "It's just a fact that most users simply do not go beyond the first page of whatever they are pulling up online. You're effectively banning most reviewers from ever being on the main item page, even temporarily."
Jim Robinson, an Amazon employee who is guiding the update, defended the new design and said it was unlikely to discourage readership of recent reviews. "While designing the new review display, we gave this possible drawback a significant amount of consideration," Robinson said on this Amazon-sponsored reviewer discussion board. "Many aspects of the design, some visible, others less-so, are meant to keep this from happening. We will watch closely to make sure it does not become a problem."
It's clear that Amazon is trying to reduce clutter on its book detail pages. Shoppers must wade through dozens of features competing for their attention, such as author blogs, related books and advertisements. It seems another feature or two is piled on every year. Amazon recently reduced the amount of space devoted to its wiki and "customer discussion" features, which appear near the bottom of detail pages and are seldom used.
Let's hope that Amazon remembers that its customer reviews are one of the most popular features on its site, if not the entire Web. Those reviews help sell a ton of books every day of the year. If Amazon reduces their visibility to the average shopper, it seems obvious that sales would suffer.
Now Amazon is tinkering with what I think is its important feature by far -- its book reviews. Whether this will have an impact on sales, I don't know.
Amazon is in the process of reducing the number of book reviews displayed on detail pages. The change does away with Amazon's familiar one-column display of six reviews. Now just three reviews will be displayed in their entirety, followed by a link to see other reviews.
The new display is being rolled out to Amazon's customer base over the next two weeks. Here's a peek (click to enlarge):
Another unpopular change: By default, customers will see only older book reviews voted "most helpful" by other shoppers. Previously, the most recent reviews were displayed first, along with a pair of "Spotlight" reviews.
Many of Amazon's most active book reviewers complain that most shoppers won't click through to read recent reviews, reducing their chance of attracting votes.
"This new design is a terrible disincentive to all reviewers, especially newer ones," said frequent reviewer Daniel Jolley. "It's just a fact that most users simply do not go beyond the first page of whatever they are pulling up online. You're effectively banning most reviewers from ever being on the main item page, even temporarily."
Jim Robinson, an Amazon employee who is guiding the update, defended the new design and said it was unlikely to discourage readership of recent reviews. "While designing the new review display, we gave this possible drawback a significant amount of consideration," Robinson said on this Amazon-sponsored reviewer discussion board. "Many aspects of the design, some visible, others less-so, are meant to keep this from happening. We will watch closely to make sure it does not become a problem."
It's clear that Amazon is trying to reduce clutter on its book detail pages. Shoppers must wade through dozens of features competing for their attention, such as author blogs, related books and advertisements. It seems another feature or two is piled on every year. Amazon recently reduced the amount of space devoted to its wiki and "customer discussion" features, which appear near the bottom of detail pages and are seldom used.
Let's hope that Amazon remembers that its customer reviews are one of the most popular features on its site, if not the entire Web. Those reviews help sell a ton of books every day of the year. If Amazon reduces their visibility to the average shopper, it seems obvious that sales would suffer.
posted by Steve Weber at 5/30/2007
5 Comments:
Obviously, Mr. Robinson never heard of Coca-Cola-or maybe he wants to be featured in the next Marketing case study for disaster management.
This is indeed a stupid move. A couple weeks ago, I spent several hours book shopping on Amazon, as there were three different topics I was interested in. It was primarily Amazon's book links (to other similar/related books) that helped me narrow down a POSSIBLE book to buy, but it was definitely the book reviews that pushed me to make the decision about WHICH book to reject and which to buy.
In my case, seeing the most recent reviews was very necessary, as two of my topics are subject to evolving changes in their field, and only the most recent reviews were noteworthy, especially when a reviewer discussed something obsolete in the book, or new science/studies since then, etc. Amazon has definitely not thought this through at all!
I see that next to the three spotlight reviews there is a sidebar on the right with excerpts from up to ten other customer reviews. I still prefer the old format but that sidebar helps. I'm a top 45,000 reviewer now. :-)
I don't want to sound like just one more crabby nay-sayer who complains about change without waiting to see if the new idea works.
But I read a lot of reviews on Amazon, and sometimes even when I'm listing a book I'll read a few reviews to get a feel for it.
And I admit it's common for me to move on to another title rather than go the second page of reviews.
Commenter No. 1 is correct, this business decision is reminiscent of New Coke. But when have Amazon's decision-makers ever asked themselves whether a big change would be good for business?
I think Amazon is making this change to hide bad reviews of items. The front-page reviews are the ones voted "most helpful", and it is a fact that positive reviews generally get "helpful" votes and negative reviews get "not helpful" votes. So, Amazon probably wants to make the negative reviews go away as much as possible.
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