Customer-Empowered Rating Systems

Chapter 11: Many online merchants today, such as eBay and Amazon, use rating systems empowered by its customers. Is this adequate for determining which products to buy, or which users to trust? Cite examples from these two merchants that support your opinion (whether it is good enough, or inadequate).

Answer: I believe that the customer-empowered rating systems on eBay and Amazon are absolutely adequate to determining the safety of people that you don’t know. For example, on eBay, you just know that if someone has a 99.9% satisfaction rating out of 20,000 total ratings and you read the positive comments that people have left about them after working with them over and over that you can trust their product. The reason I believe that this is adequate is that the people that leave these responses have worked with that person and, on eBay, can only leave feedback if they have either bought from or sold to that user. The people leaving feedback are people that were once in your shoes, and if they say that a vendor of textbooks shipped the book promptly and it was in good condition as described, and 5,000 people have also had this experience, you should have no reason to believe that that vendor will personally seek you out and screw you over when they have treated everyone else so well. This is really the only way to rate people as the customers are the only who experience each other on these websites, not the sites themselves, and you know that they will be honest because if they got screwed over they wouldn’t. The system also works as a deterrent against poor dealings. A vendor knows that if he takes someone’s money and either does not send out the product or sends one with less quality than bargained for that that person will rip into them verbally on the ratings and feedback system and then people in the future will see that and choose not to buy from that person.