A user review is a review conducted by any person who has access to the

internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

and publishes their experience to a review site or

social media platform Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks. Common features include: * Onlin ...

following

product testing File:Consumer Reports - product testing - electric light longevity and brightness testing.tif, Testing electric light longevity and brightness testing File:Consumer Reports - product testing - television testing laboratory.tif, Television testin ...

or the evaluation of a service. User reviews are commonly provided by

consumers A consumer is a person or a group who intends to order, or use purchased goods, products, or services primarily for personal, social, family, household and similar needs, who is not directly related to entrepreneurial or business activities. Th ...

who volunteer to write the review, rather than professionals who are paid to evaluate the product or service. User reviews might be compared to professional nonprofit reviews from a

consumer organization Consumer organizations are advocacy groups that seek to protect people from corporate abuse like unsafe products, predatory lending, false advertising, astroturfing and pollution. Consumer Organizations may operate via protests, litigation, Adver ...

, or to promotional reviews from an advertiser or company marketing a product. Growth of social media platforms has enabled the facilitation of interaction between consumers after a review has been placed on online communities such as

blogs A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

, internet forums or other popular platforms.

Purpose of user reviews

User reviews guide stakeholders, including

producers Producer(s), The Producer(s), or co-producer(s) may refer to: Occupations *Producer (agriculture), a farm operator *Producer, a stakeholder of economic production * Film producer, supervises the making of films **Executive producer, contributes t ...

, and

competitors Competition is a rivalry where two or more parties strive for a common goal which cannot be shared: where one's gain is the other's loss (an example of which is a zero-sum game). Competition can arise between entities such as organisms, indi ...

decision making process regarding the good or service experienced by the user providing the review. Purchase decisions can be made with easy access to product information through reviews from users who have knowledge from an experience, information or tangible good. Producers of goods and services can utilise user reviews through word of mouth (WOM) recognition enhancing their reputation, but can also be disparaged. For goods which value is derived from knowledge and information, user reviews provide a ''"wealth of experience information,"'' and therefore increase potential consumers.

Economic effect

In some markets, user reviews are considered more trustworthy than professional or firm initiated marketing.

Consumer

Through user reviews, consumers seeking to make a purchase decision are able to independently analyse and evaluate their choices. Consumers are able to identify with specific product attributes that provide the highest

utility In economics, utility is a measure of a certain person's satisfaction from a certain state of the world. Over time, the term has been used with at least two meanings. * In a normative context, utility refers to a goal or objective that we wish ...

by comparing their own

value chain A value chain is a progression of activities that a business or firm performs in order to deliver goods and services of Value (economics), value to an end customer. The concept comes from the field of business management and was first described ...

with users who provide information about their personal experience. Through the online network, consumers positive interpretation of a user review is likely to increase the chance of purchase, whereas negative interpretation of a user review is likely to broaden the consumers search.

Producer

User reviews are seen as a 'driving force' in marketing, in direct correlation with sales of a good or service. Positive user reviews of a good or service are likely to increase demand of the product through positive attitudes and behaviour toward the

company A company, abbreviated as co., is a Legal personality, legal entity representing an association of legal people, whether Natural person, natural, Juridical person, juridical or a mixture of both, with a specific objective. Company members ...

. Research has shown that negative user reviews have a more widespread impact than positive. Both the volume and valence of reviews are recorded to impact demand of goods and services but serve as an opportunity for improvement for management and production chains.

Competitor

By interpreting user reviews, competitors are able to understand their competition's strengths and weaknesses from a user's perspective. The facilitation of distribution of personal experience through user reviews provides an advantageous opportunity for competitors to improve their own product based on their competitors feedback. By providing personal experiences, user reviews give the market a chance to analyse their weaknesses and use it as an opportunity, sometimes at the dispense of the company originally reviewed.

Fake reviews

Advertisers, marketers, and other competitive stakeholders have motivation to produce fake positive user reviews for products they wish to promote or fake negative user reviews for products which they wish to disparage. In a fake user review, an actor will create a user account based on some marketing persona and post a user review purporting to be a real person with the traits of the persona. Marketing companies who sell fake reviews train workers to write them in realistic ways and to post them from multiple accounts in order to increase credibility. This is a misuse of the user review system, which universally only invite reviews from typical users and not paid fake personalities. Alternatively, a real user may provide a fake review of a good or service they have not experienced. A 2021 study from

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

documented large markets where sellers on

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

purchase fake reviews in private

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

groups. These reviews increase the ratings and sales of products and are widely used by sellers. One way to prevent fake reviews is to create barriers which favor long-term identified users who understand and support community rules in a review site. Amazon is suing fake reviewers. By providing boundaries for membership such as knowing the user's details, or having to pay for membership, companies can provide boundaries. In 2016, the

Australian Competition & Consumer Commission The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is the chief competition regulator of the Government of Australia, located within the Department of the Treasury. It was established in 1995 with the amalgamation of the Australian Tra ...

fined Electrodry $215,000 for inciting its franchisees to

forge A forge is a type of hearth used for heating metals, or the workplace (smithy) where such a hearth is located. The forge is used by the smith to heat a piece of metal to a temperature at which it becomes easier to shape by forging, or to the ...

false online reviews to boost their rating on online review websites. In August 2024, the

Federal Trade Commission The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent agency of the United States government whose principal mission is the enforcement of civil (non-criminal) United States antitrust law, antitrust law and the promotion of consumer protection. It ...

voted unanimously to ban marketers from using fake user reviews created by

generative artificial intelligence Generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI, GenAI, or GAI) is a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses generative models to produce text, images, videos, or other forms of data. These models Machine learning, learn the underlyin ...

chatbot A chatbot (originally chatterbot) is a software application or web interface designed to have textual or spoken conversations. Modern chatbots are typically online and use generative artificial intelligence systems that are capable of main ...

s (such as

ChatGPT ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and released on November 30, 2022. It uses large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o as well as other Multimodal learning, multimodal models to create human-like re ...

) and

influencers A social media influencer, or simply influencer (also known as an online influencer), is a person who builds a grassroots online presence through engaging content such as photos, videos, and updates. This is done by using direct audience intera ...

paying for

bots The British Overseas Territories (BOTs) or alternatively referred to as the United Kingdom Overseas Territories (UKOTs) are the fourteen dependent territory, territories with a constitutional and historical link with the United Kingdom that, ...

to increase follower counts.

Evaluation of user reviews

Various systems have been proposed to evaluate the quality of user reviews so that consumers can access the best ones, avoid lower quality ones, and prevent mixing of honestly provided reviews with less honest reviews from advertisers or people with an agenda other than nonpartial evaluation. Consumers perceive user reviews using good grammar and persuasive writing style to be of higher quality than those written in other ways. The relationship between user reviews and the quality of a product is uncertain. For some levels of quality in some circumstances, there may be no relationship between quality and ratings. For top levels of quality, one study found that user ratings matched scientific ratings a little more than half the time. Furthermore, people reading user reviews tend to perceive them to be as objective as scientific testing, especially when there is an average user review score. Given a large set of multiple user reviews by different people, there are

text analytics Text mining, text data mining (TDM) or text analytics is the process of deriving high-quality information from plain text, text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extracting information ...

algorithms which can accurately predict which reviews come from the same individual authors.

Sentiment analysis Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining or emotion AI) is the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subje ...

can be used to predict the extent to which a review is favorable or critical.

Motivations for contributing a user review

Research suggests that motivation to provide a user review commonly stems from

psychological Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

attitudes and behaviour.

Uses and gratifications theory Uses and gratifications theory is a communication theory that describes the reasons and means by which people seek out media to meet specific needs. The theory postulates that media is a highly available product, that audiences are the consumers o ...

is a discipline which considers why anyone would volunteer time to create a user review. Some researchers suggest that internal behaviours that value social benefits, self-enhancement, concern for others and the need for gratification are more likely to provide user reviews. Providing a user review is suggested to fulfil a sense of belonging by conforming to beliefs of a majority or minority opinion of personal experience.

Review bombing A review bomb is a malicious Internet phenomenon in which a large number of people or a few people with multiple accounts post negative user reviews online in an attempt to harm the sales or popularity of a product, a service, or a business. Whil ...

is when user reviews are made en masse in order to more strongly influence the creator of a product or its sales, in response to an actual or perceived slight against the customers . In some situations, research suggests that competitors take advantage of anonymous review systems to negatively influence and control the intensity of their competition.

Case studies

Many researchers have profiled user reviews on

Yelp Yelp Inc. is an American company that develops the Yelp.com website and the Yelp mobile app, which publishes crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. It also operates Yelp Guest Manager, a table reservation service. It is headquartered in S ...

. Research has shown that user reviews often influence consumer purchases in the hospitality industry. User reviews have created criticism and questioning of health care practices, when before the advent of user reviews, health care providers were rarely criticized or evaluated by users.

References

{{reflist Review websites Product testing User-generated content