In the digital economy, we're always thinking about ways to eliminate frictions in the purchase process, search process, and evaluation process by utilizing ratings & reviews.
User experience designers and researchers work on eliminating the frictions. They innovate and design products and services based on experiences of our customers and their constant feedback.
When we're thinking about what's going on around us today in the exciting digital economy, it's important to step back and look at fundamental human behaviors that were shaped by pioneers such as Amazon. From the get go Amazon allowed their customers to review products. Back than ratings and reviews were fairly new to the market. More over many academic researches showed that bad ratings and reviews can slow down sales and effect brands and publishing agencies. In 1994 publishing agencies were indeed unhappy and when reached out to Mr Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon said:
I don't make money when I sell books. I make money when I help customers make better decisions.
Consumer feedback forced brands and publishing agencies to reset and concentrate on customer's needs. The approach also made the most expensive thing up to date, Data, available to B2B, B2C and H2H (Human to Human). Just to think on how expensive and time consuming this type of data used to be before instant feedback on the web became available to the masses.
Airbnb, Uber, Yelp to name a few make money when they help both customers and service providers make better decisions.
Any business that helps customers:
eliminate friction
reduce uncertainty
increase the ease of completing a transaction
potentially unlocks tremendous economic value.