Report: Negative reviews—when well-written—help sell products
Slate reports that Zappos has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars correcting the spelling and grammar of online reviews.
Logic would tell you that it’s better to have someone singing your praises, even if they’re singing them a bit off-key. But as Slate reports, NYU professor Panos Ipeirotis has discovered that “well-written reviews help sell products, even when the write-ups are negative.”
This changes everything. Or does it?
Online shoe seller Zappos has been using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to fix the grammar and spelling in the site’s reviews. As the Slate article points out, Ipeirotis estimates that Zappos has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars correcting the spelling and grammar of more than a million reviews.
This brings up two slightly disturbing points:
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