

The Magic Behind Amazon's 2.7 Billion Dollar Question - wallflower
http://www.uie.com/articles/magicbehindamazon/

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audionerd
Communities often often struggle to define the meaning of a user's vote.

Amazon is wise to make a separation between "I agree with the user's opinion"
(via my own review) and "I found the user's opinion useful" (via my vote).

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David
Only one paragraph ties reviews to revenue, and I'm still looking for the
evidence in here:

"As we’ve watched Amazon customers make purchases on the site, we can clearly
see that promoting the most helpful reviews has increased sales in these
categories by 20%.(One out of every five customers decides to complete the
purchase because of the strength of the reviews.) From this, we can project it
has contributed to Amazon's top line by $2.7 billion."

Maybe I'm just missing something... Is there a metric for how many users base
their decision to buy on the helpfulness of the review?

Even at that, we have no idea how many of those who bought an item because of
the reviews would have bought it without.

I agree with the article that reviews are useful, and I definitely appreciate
the community-upvote functionality. It's pretty neat. But I think the case is
greatly overstated, and their estimates are pretty dodgy.

