Amazon may introduce a third-party product rating system

Recently, some netizens posted that they saw Goodreads ratings on Amazon's book products . Goodreads is a third-party book review software that was acquired by Amazon in 2013, but Amazon did not use the software's functions much after that.

For most books, there are many more ratings on Goodreads than on Amazon, and the average score of the same book on the two platforms is likely to be different. Goodreads' rating policy is very loose, and there is no identity verification when registering an account, so anyone can create multiple accounts to rate a book, thereby affecting the overall rating of the book.

In addition, Goodreads has no strict restrictions on rating books , and some people can write reviews without even buying or reading a book. What's more, some books have received many negative reviews before they are even published.

In fact, whether it is Goodreads or Amazon, "rating bombing" for a product is a very common situation: a large group of people give a product or a book one star together to lower its overall rating. This may be because the author of the book made radical remarks on Twitter, or the book contains "homosexual" related content, anyway, it has nothing to do with the quality of the book itself.

Some people even use this to blackmail the author, saying that if the author doesn't take the money, they will organize people to give bad reviews , which can be said to destroy their worldview.

Currently, not all book products on Amazon will display Goodreads ratings. According to insiders, this feature is still in the testing phase and may be fully applied in the future.

In addition, although some products will display both Amazon and Goodreads ratings, the display mode is different: Amazon's ratings are mainly expressed in stars, while Goodreads' ratings can only be displayed in numbers at present.

However, since most books have far more ratings on Goodreads, Goodreads ratings appear to be more reliable to consumers.

In fact, although this update of the rating system is mainly for books, Amazon is likely to introduce a third-party rating system for all categories in the future. This may be another attempt by Amazon to crack down on fake product reviews. Earlier this year, Amazon sued several companies that helped sellers to fake reviews, and even did not spare the fake review groups on FB.

Amazon has not yet made any official response to this, and the subsequent development of the incident is worth paying attention to.

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