Rare Book Monthly
Articles - January - 2005 Issue
Some Feedback on Feedback
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The "power of feedback" also results in a kind of customer blackmail. It is absolutely impossible to set realistic transaction rules unless you are willing to be violated by negative feedback if the customer is not happy. We have had customers who kept books for months, then wanted to return them, as though we were some kind of lending library. There isn't any way to say "no" to such a customer, unless you are willing to accept negative feedback posted prominently on your Amazon home page.
Since anybody purchasing from you can post feedback, it is obviously easy to create fake feedback at any time. Your competition can also post bad feedback to your site by purchasing any inexpensive item. Although there are Amazon rules about this sort of thing, I have no sense that they are enforced by the company.
Amazon also has a "score" for feedback. You can rate a transaction from one to five, one being the "lowest" score and five the "highest," or most favorable, score. More than once a few of our customers have written "great transaction" in the comments field and then picked "1" rather than "5" because they did not understand this counter-intuitive scale.
Some of these problems could be ameliorated by Amazon themselves. For example, I do not think that customers should be able to post any kind of feedback at all if the book is not available and if a refund is made immediately. I do not think that any transaction arbitrated by Amazon in some way (for example through their A-Z guarantee) should be rated, especially if Amazon finds that the seller is not at fault. We had a customer, for example, who wanted a refund without returning the book, claimed an A-Z refund and posted negative feedback when we insisted on the return of our merchandise. Even when Amazon ruled she was not entitled to a refund, they refused to delete the feedback from our site.
One of the most startling issues related to Amazon feedback is the way in which the overall rating is computed. Amazon only scores transactions which receive feedback, and does not include the much larger number of other transactions which receive no feedback at all. They must have read Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics, a classic on manipulating opinion based on skewed mathematical information. For example, if you sell 100 books and only 2 customers give feedback, one of which is negative, you will receive a 50% negative feedback rating and 2 1/2 stars out of 5 next to your store name -- this despite the fact that in reality only 1% of your customers rated you negatively, out of the total number of transactions completed -- and that one customer could have purchased a book for $3.
