Could you point me to another merchant who offered customer-readable customer reviews before Amazon? I'm not saying there isn't one, just that when we were implementing them, I was unaware of any precedents ...
My memory is there were some stores that had "customer reviews" before Amazon, but they were all screened by the company before being published. So every product would only have 5 star reviews.
When Amazon came out with real reviews, it seemed crazy to many at the time -- like why would you want to share bad things about your products on your own website? I thought it was awesome.
OK, so now this hinges on the idea that such stores had an online e-commerce-y presence before amzn. Again, I'm not ruling it out, but I don't remember us having any real models for this.
Amazon's customer review system was created as a barrier to entry for competitors, as much as anything else.
Pretty sure that was meant to mean "customer reviews" the amazon product. See also in the list: "marketplace" which I don't think they expect anyone to believe they invented either.
