User review

A user review is a review conducted by any person who has access to the internet and publishes their experience to a review site or social media platform following product testing or the evaluation of a service. User reviews are commonly provided by consumers who volunteer to write the review, rather than professionals who are paid to evaluate the product or service. User reviews might be compared to professional nonprofit reviews from a consumer organization, or to promotional reviews from an advertiser or company marketing a product. Growth of social media platforms has enabled the facilitation of interaction between consumers after a review has been placed on online communities such as blogs, internet forums or other popular platforms.

User reviews guide stakeholders, including consumers, producers, and competitors decision making process regarding the good or service experienced by the user providing the review. Purchase decisions can be made with easy access to product information through reviews from users who have knowledge from an experience, information or tangible good. Producers of goods and services can utilise user reviews through word of mouth (WOM) recognition enhancing their reputation, but can also be disparaged. For goods which value is derived from knowledge and information, user reviews provide a "wealth of experience information," and therefore increase potential consumers.

In some markets, user reviews are considered more trustworthy than professional or firm initiated marketing.

Through user reviews, consumers seeking to make a purchase decision are able to independently analyse and evaluate their choices. Consumers are able to identify with specific product attributes that provide the highest utility by comparing their own value chain with users who provide information about their personal experience. Through the online network, consumers positive interpretation of a user review is likely to increase the chance of purchase, whereas negative interpretation of a user review is likely to broaden the consumers search.

User reviews are seen as a 'driving force' in marketing, in direct correlation with sales of a good or service. Positive user reviews of a good or service are likely to increase demand of the product through positive attitudes and behaviour toward the company. Research has shown that negative user reviews have a more widespread impact than positive. Both the volume and valence of reviews are recorded to impact demand of goods and services but serve as an opportunity for improvement for management and production chains.

By interpreting user reviews, competitors are able to understand their competition's strengths and weaknesses from a user's perspective. The facilitation of distribution of personal experience through user reviews provides an advantageous opportunity for competitors to improve their own product based on their competitors feedback. By providing personal experiences, user reviews give the market a chance to analyse their weaknesses and use it as an opportunity, sometimes at the dispense of the company originally reviewed.

Advertisers, marketers, and other competitive stakeholders have motivation to produce fake positive user reviews for products they wish to promote or fake negative user reviews for products which they wish to disparage. In a fake user review, an actor will create a user account based on some marketing persona and post a user review purporting to be a real person with the traits of the persona. Marketing companies who sell fake reviews train workers to write them in realistic ways and to post them from multiple accounts in order to increase credibility. This is a misuse of the user review system, which universally only invite reviews from typical users and not paid fake personalities. Alternatively, a real user may provide a fake review of a good or service they have not experienced.

Allegations of Fake Reviews