Jeff Bezos is famous for focusing not on his competition, but on what the customer needs. He’s been quoted as saying – “We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.”
With that in mind, I find it surprising that Amazon still hasn’t put in place one of the most important features that their search results need, which would drastically improve the user experience when it comes to finding great products.
We have all searched for generic products, and often you will find tens of results for pretty much the same generic product with slight deviations on price or rating… this happens because even though you can filter for products with higher ratings, you’re not able to differentiate between the really popular great products, and the also-rans which have found a hack to make the final cut.
All it takes are enterprising sellers, who just need to order 1 of their products for themselves, enter a rating as a verified buyer, and voila… their generic product will now make the cut to the highest echelons of quality that Amazon purports to have.
If only Amazon would let their users filter for “number of ratings” along with “average rating”, then we’d be seeing a much cleaner experience for customers who are seeking top-quality popular products.
I also understand that Amazon might look at it differently – that filtering for “number of ratings” puts new sellers at a disadvantage against older, more established sellers. But I see that as a non-issue… because the customer is anyway looking for high-quality products that have stood the test of time (and hence have a high number of ratings). In that situation, every new seller is anyway at a disadvantage because they are new. So if their listings don’t make the cut, then so be it – because the customer is clearly not interested in products that are new (read, without enough ratings).
So the way I see it is this – by adding the “number of ratings” filter, Amazon would truly be doing what it says it does, which is to “start with what the customer needs and work backwards.”