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Is there an Amazon.com API to retrieve product reviews?

How do you maintain high quality ratings and reviews on a product review website?

  • I have a product review site that lets you leave text reviews as well as numeric ratings for a variety of characteristics of a product. Lately there has been more false ratings to boost certain products or tarnish other products. The bulk of the ratings/reviews are anonymous (user not logged in). I'm thinking of disallowing anonymous reviews/ratings to curb the bad ones. What other ways can I maintain the highest level of accuracy and honesty of reviews and ratings?

  • Answer:

    Disabling anonymity will raise the quality level but reduce the participation.  If your community is large enough, this isn't really a problem but if you are struggling to get reviews then adding friction to the process may not be the best idea. I would lean towards not requiring a login and instead educate your reviewers to the expectations and moderate the reviews if you have the time to do so.  Low-quality text descriptions never make it to the public view and this gives you the quality without the immediate reduction in participation.  There will be a long-term reduction in participation as frequent-fliers who write crappy reviews only to never see them get published will drop away. Other suggestions in this vein are to require a minimum length for a review (# of words) and perhaps write a script that looks for common, low quality phrases such as "I like it" or "Great stuff" and prevents the review submission with a message explaining the quality. If you simply must start requiring logins, consider supporting login via Twitter or Facebook and tie review publication back to that user's social network.

Jason Levine at Quora Visit the source

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Looks like you are fighting spam. I would say you should start looking at events and their probability. For example, are the same IPs hitting your site to promote certain reviews? Do certain reviews fall outside the norm of commenting and promotion? You can apply statistics to this problem and compare the normal distribution ip, user agents and activity to help you identify suspicious activity.

Dan Ho

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