Data Ranching Software: Online Stores?
January 25th, 2008These days even e-commerce websites are getting into the data ranching game by soliciting user reviews of their products. Sites like Amazon.com have amassed millions of reviews on everything from books to bicycle tires. Amazon even allows users to upload their own product shots while sites like VintageVantage post photos of actual customers sporting VintageVantage t-shirts.
For the most part customers find these reviews to be helpful in making purchasing decisions but retailers have an incentive to suppress negative reviews while promoting more positive ones. In fact review management is very common on most e-commerce websites and this is really a breach of trust between review submitter and review aggregator. If product reviewers or potential customers recognize review management this can be very damaging to the image of the retailer in the minds of its most passionate customers.
Photos, on the other hand, are a great way to grow content on any e-commerce website with little risk of alienating users. Unfortunately photos are not easily indexed by search engines so this type of content, while useful, generally does not generate increased traffic to an online store.
In this age of user-generated content the lines between online catalogs and data ranching are being blurred all the time. But does it make sense for retailers to get into the publishing business? Stay tuned for our analysis of consumer review websites as data ranches!
