Let’s agree to the fact that rating system on e-commerce websites are not as helpful as they should be. Review of people complaining about late shipping, the color was unexpected, etc. just makes it hard to justify a product’s quality.
There’s another problem too, even though some people are serious with reviews and don’t write one liners like “nice product” or “good quality”; reviews fails to give you exact detail of how good a product is.
Also it is pretty common that people base their review after reading opinions of other people. For instance, if someone came to a website to give a product 3 stars because he felt a little improvement can be made (say, a gaming mouse that is a little less comfortable to hold). There are high chances that he may change his rating (no matter higher or lower) after reading review of other people.
You might have noticed that even Google Play store has started a new rating system for games where a user can rate each individual feature such as Game play, controls, etc of a particular game. This accurately tells about what to expect from a game before you download it.
No doubt we needed something like this for other products as well. Buying shoes or clothes online becomes a headache when you are not able to find honest suitable opinions about a product’s features. How well these shoes will fit you, how comfy they actually are or, are they enough sturdy to last long? It is nearly impossible to figure out this much without actually buying them.
But now, this will end. Wal-Mart has come with a feature-based reviews system of the product rather than traditional reviews, says one of their patent application.
This kind of review system solves the biggest problem of choosing products for their specific features. I usually buy common household electronics (data cables, chargers) by considering how long they’ll last. If I can see how good people have rated them based on how long these products worked well, I swear my life will become much easy.
Coming back to the topic, the patent application mentions that Wal-Mart will consider different features of products for user ratings. Like, a shoe will be rated based on its weight, size, comfort, body, look, etc.
Like, if I find that weight and fitting of shoes is good, I can give 4-stars to both features. For appearance, aesthetics, and shipping I can rate it accordingly. Yes, there would be an option for rating shipping as well (pheew!). These minor rating will make up the overall rating of a product.
You can picture it like a traditional product reviews that many websites gives, especially about smartphones. Now that Wal-Mart will have products rated based on features it will be able to provide better suggestions and will make the overall shopping experience pleasing.
Do you know? : Sony patented Wireless transfer energy method from one phone to another phone
Multi variable review . . . .
Sorry, why is this news?
I mean, it’s fine that Wallmart has figured out that you can review a product based on more than just 5 stars but really? Yawn. . .
Does anyone read these patent applications? This is not an application that simply claims a feature-based review scheme….that would not be novel. Instead, it teaches the development of an AI that creates and then populates a customized multi-variable review scheme for each product by extracting and classifying users’ thoughts from “traditional” reviews. It would analyze a batch of classic, paragraph-form reviews and build product feature sets and corresponding ratings based on what it can parse out.
My bet is that this patent is being applied for as ammunition against Amazon. Most online sites have millions of reviews that are in paragraph form and it’s foreseeable that they’d want to mine them for specific information about critical product features.