Reviews, Lists, & Cool Features
Chapter 12: Putting Your Two Cents In: Reviews, Lists, & Cool Features
8. Check your review thoroughly and click Save
The last page in the process thanks you and confirms that your review was submitted. It may also ask you to enter some information to build or update your About You area. This is 100 percent optional. Do it if you like — no harm will come of it — but don’t feel obligated. You’ve written your first review and you are free to return to shopping!
Reviews can be fun to write, but don’t expect immediate fame and glory. It takes some time for your review to go live on the site. Amazon gives them- selves a 5-to-7 day window. More often than not, it’s up there in a couple of hours, but you won’t be able to write it and then immediately go check it out.
Patience, Grasshopper, patience.
Figure 12-1:
Every item on the site has a review page that looks something like this.
When you’ve written a review and submitted it, you are agreeing to Amazon’s terms and conditions. One key thing to note is that your review becomes their property and they can use it as they like. That means that it might show up on other sites on the web. For example, both AOL and Target use
Amazon’s reviews on their sites.
Was the review helpful?
Not only are we allowed to review items, but we’re also allowed to vote on whether other people’s reviews were good. You may have noticed that under- neath each review is a sentence that says, “Was this review helpful to you?” — and then you get to click a Yes or No button to vote on reviews.
When you do so, you come to a screen that looks like Figure 12-3.
Amazon counts the votes and posts them above the review. This tally helps you determine which reviews to take seriously and which you may be able to disregard.
The Top Reviewers
You may have noticed that some customer reviews have little icons next to them that look like the icon in Figure 12-4. These are the proud, the few, the Top Reviewers.
Figure 12-2:
The
“whoops”
page tells you what information is missing from your review.
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Chapter 12: Putting Your Two Cents In: Reviews, Lists, & Cool Features
Top Reviewers are (according to the opinions of other customers) the best reviewers at Amazon.com. In addition to the Top Reviewer icon, you may also have noticed that you can vote on whether a review was helpful — and that vote is how Top Reviewers are born. Theirs are the reviews deemed most helpful, most often, by other Amazon customers.
There are six classes of Top Reviewers: Top 1,000, Top 500, Top 100, Top 50, Top 10 and the reviewer’s reviewer, El Numero Uno. Today, the number-one reviewer at Amazon.com is Harriet Klausner, a former acquisitions librarian who has written 5,617 reviews and gotten 34,701 “helpful” votes. (And all I can say about that is “Oh, my God.”)
So what can you do to become a Top Reviewer? Write good reviews for popu- lar items and hope that people find them helpful and vote accordingly. You can check on the status of the Top Reviewers list from the Friends & Family section of Your Store. You find a link to the list in the Explore browse box on the left side of the page. But I warn you, Harriet is going to be tough to unseat.
Figure 12-4:
The Top Reviewer icon means
“good advice ahead.”
Figure 12-3:
Your vote counts toward the reviews total.
And another thing: customer advice
There is yet another way to give your fellow shoppers a hand. In the last year or so, Amazon has introduced a feature called Our Customers’ Advice. It lives on the detail page just above the Editorial Reviews. (See Figure 12-5.)
Customer Advice is actually a recommendation. Say you own a digital camera.
You love it, but it only has enough room for two print-quality pictures. You might recommend that other shoppers buy it along with a new memory card.
With Customers Advice, you can suggest that people buy something in addi- tion to — or instead of — the item shown on the detail page. To do that, you have to know what the ASIN or ISBN is for your recommended item (and, of course, you have to recommend something that Amazon sells).
What are ASINs and ISBNs? An ASIN is something that Amazon made up. It stands for Amazon Standard Information Number and it’s a multidigit code used to identify products. Each product on the site has a unique ASIN, unless it’s a book and then it has an ISBN. ISBN numbers are the industry-standard ID for every published book that’s in the Library of Congress.
To find your recommended product’s ASIN or ISBN, just go to that item’s detail page. The number is in the section of the page called Product Details (or some- times Product Information). (Figure 12-6 shows the eBay For DummiesISBN.)
ISBNs or ASINs are found here.
Figure 12-6:
ASINs and ISBNs are used to identify each product on the site.
Figure 12-5:
Customer Advice recommends products in addition to (or in place of) the item on the detail page.
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Chapter 12: Putting Your Two Cents In: Reviews, Lists, & Cool Features
After you’ve found the ASIN or ISBN for your recommendation, you’re ready to give some customer advice. Here’s how you do it:
1. Go to the item’s detail page where you want your recommendation to