Just over a year ago, I bought a paper shredder. (Brand name Rosewill, from Newegg.) Just days after the one-year warranty expired, the shredder's motor died, in a rather terrifying puff of smoke and sparks.
When I was buying the shredder, there were online reviews from people who had problems, with follow-up comments from the manufacturer saying to contact them and they'd replace it under warranty, and there were reviews from people saying "I don't know what you're talking about, I didn't have problems."
But I wonder how many people had problems after the warranty period expired, but never thought to write a review because who goes back to the site you bought it from a year later to write a review?
Online review sites, including retailers, should fix this by standardizing the idea of follow-up reviews. You write a review after you get the product, and then after a certain period of time you get an automatic email asking you to write a follow-up review.
The period of time for a follow-up review would depend on the product. A week or two would be plenty for something like nail polish, but maybe six weeks would be good for moisturizers and stuff that are supposed to produce longer-term results. I think 110% of the warranty period would be very informative for electronics.
This would be far more useful than one-time reviews of newly-purchased products, and would significantly increase traffic to the websites. (At a minimum, you'll double the number of visits by people writing reviews, so you can show them recommended products etc.)
3 comments:
It's a great idea for consumers. But why would a company want consumers to expose how their products fall apart immediately after warranty (or often, during)? That's not in their interest.
I thought of this same idea last year when I was looking for reviews of luggage, where the most important factor - rarely found - is durability. All the reviews were of newly-purchased luggage - how nice it looked, all the nice little features. Several reviewers acknowledged that they were unable to comment on the most important factor. Because of this the reviews were pretty much useless.
Is there a centralized "review everything here" website? You could find a category, much the way you do on eBay or Craigslist, then post reviews by brand.
It would have to be ad-free, similar to Consumer Reports or C-Net, but for all products.
I've seen centralized "review everything" sites for certain categories of products (for example, Makeup Alley for makeup, CNet for software).
This model might also work for large retails who sell multiple brands of things, like Walmart or Amazon, or even those that sell multiple brands of a specific category of product, like Bare Necessities or Tiger Direct. The reviews will show the relative quality of the products to each other, so they'll just sell more of the better product (which, if things are priced properly, would be more expensive.)
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