Your thoughts on Product Ratings and Reviews

Recently, we've made a number of platform improvements that aim to unify and augment the overall functionality and usability of the Shapeways platform. Examples include:

• Improved ability to curate and share lists of products
• The new ability to Search for Users and Shops
• New and revamped logged in member homepage experience

Further, we are doubling down on our commitment to improving the experience for all our designers, shop owners, and shoppers alike. We believe that by improving how users on Shapeways can interact and provide feedback, we can improve sales for all shop owners.

Ratings and Reviews - Share your thoughts

As heavily requested by many Shop Owners, we believe that another way to increase your sales is by increasing the confidence potential shoppers have in your designs and products. This can be accomplished by creating a smart system that allows shoppers to leave reviews and feedback on your products, and that's what we're here to explore.

To kick us off, we have a few open questions for you guys, but would also love to hear all your thoughts and feedback specifically in regards to product ratings/reviews:

Some Questions

• To what degree would ratings and reviews help a potential shopper gain more confidence in a product?
• What would help a Shop Owner in receiving a product review from a customer?
• What if there is a dispute between Shop Owner and Customer over the content of a rating or review?
• Should highly-rated products get a boost in Marketplace and/or Search results?
• How does this factor into the current Shapeways review processes, both for rejections and quality related complaints to CS?

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic!

I've only been thinking about this for a few minutes here so think of this as a first impression more than anything but;

As a small shop owner that barely broke triple digits in payouts over 12 months I can't see how reviews would be anything more than yet another obstacle for smaller shops to overcome. This is still the case even if ratings don't influence things like search/marketplace placement. It's just a numbers game, a single bad review will have a huge impact on an item if that's the only review it has, sure it might balance out once you get a statistically significant of reviews but that's less likely to happen if you don't get a bunch of positive reviews first because bad reviews erode customer confidence, whether it's warranted or not.

To touch on the idea of Reviews somehow affecting how an item shows up for searches or the marketplace is something I don't want to see. From my perspective it's a "the rich get richer" type of scenario because if someone is getting enough reviews on a product to the point that it's "highly-rated" chances are they don't need as much help with marketing as someone smaller who is struggling. Now if/when you guys fix/replace the search I wouldn't be opposed to there being a way to SORT results by rating but I wouldn't want the results changed by rating behind the scenes as it were.

There is also the quirk of simply "updating" or re-uploading a model to clear out reviews, because it wouldn't make sense to have those persistent when the First to Try Success rate isn't.

Overall I think part of the problem is that as designers we have(at the moment) almost no oversight as to what you guys ship out besides the initial design. I mean, to be blunt, you guys aren't willing/capable of telling designers WHY/HOW a print failed and dropped their success rate yet having Reviews would, potentially, put a notable amount of power in the hands of customers who might not have any understanding of the process. In my eyes it'd require you guys to actively investigate negative reviews to determine where the fault stems from, was it an issue with the design simply not being suitable, something on Shapeway's end(packaging, QC ect ect) or is the customer simply wrong?

To be honest, given teh current state of things I don't think you guys are ready to take on that kind of responsibility yet. There are so many other things that will help all designers like customizable shop layout, functional search, ironing out the First To Try system ect ect), some designers(orientation, detailed feedback on failed prints prior to outright rejection) compared to reviews that would mostly help items that already see a lot of traffic/sales.

Off the top of my head I'd rather have something concrete, like showing the number of times something has been printed successfully. That doesn't rely on hoping that customers come back to leave a review that could easily be misinformed or just flat out false(regardless if there was malicious intent or not).

I'd second that and most of the points you so eloquently made here. Personally I'm more concerned about things directly related to product quality, like being able to input notes about a model such as don't polish my face off and the continuing print orientation debate (willing to pay for the machine space for some models I have huge time investments in), price it into the code. In terms of marketing I've often wondered why the same products keep showing up in the trending page, is it a self fulfilling prophecy? Will adding a post to the 'feature this' section really get eyes on for potential inclusion (he says having spent nearly 3K on product development purchases)? Without naming names I've even seen what I consider a dangerous product constantly promoted on the trending page.

Thanks for your query, and for your reply CybranKNight.

-Shea

I agree with commenters that Shapeways should carefully weigh benefit to customers against problems for shopowners before doing this. And that it sounds like a bad idea.

Having effectively a user forum attached to every product, which may need moderation at any moment, or may be simply out of the designer's control, is a huge liability. Legitimate content aside, I can't stress enough how little I want to deal with the abuse potential here. The existing product comments are already mostly spam. I'd like to see SW show some commitment to dealing with that -- systemically, not piecemeal -- before setting us up for more and worse.

More importantly, until the high incidence of customer service problems between Shapeways and customers, that are not the fault of designers, can be brought down, we really cannot have this. It's too soon.

A review system would make sense in a mature high-volume marketplace, where technical obstacles have been ironed out and there are statistically significant eyeballs for everybody, but here today, we're not that marketplace. My best advice is if you must do this, make it opt-in at the product level.

But I wish you'd take the same developers and fix search first. And put back multiple categories. And implement product variants and sets. And do some of the other longterm outstanding requests. A lot of other things would be more useful right now.

I agree with everything said here. Here is my addition: Truckloads of bugs are still desperately waiting to be fixed. Don't lose the focus: the core of your business IS 3D printing. Ratings and reviews would add ebay kind of problems nobody needs.

This. (Also, how ironic that the fifth message in this thread was a blatant spam ad that stayed up for quite some time.)

Even if there were no other issues to be solved first, I do not think that a rating system would add anything useful unless the overall sales numbers were high enough everywhere to drown out the inevitable noise - praise from sockpuppet accounts, fake complaints from competitors or malicious trolls, dumb customers who downvote a product just because it was not delivered the next morning or they ordered the wrong size.

Just look at a couple of amazon reviews or any hotel/restaurant booking site.

Nah, should have been done at the very beginning. Too late in the game to do it now I feel.

Thanks for the thoughts so far.

This is definitely a complex issue with important perspectives from all sides.

Question: what if, at first, we didn't expose any of the ratings and reviews to the public? Rather, we only allowed Shop Owners and Shapeways Customer Service to access the contents. This would achieve several things:

[list type=1]
[*] Feedback loop from Customers to Shop Owner about the Products
[*] Privacy
[*] Proof of concept with no obligation to ever present these data publicly
[/list]

How would that affect people's opinions on this topic?

What would be the improvement over the current options of (a) leaving a comment on the model page (b) sending PM ? (Allowing customer service access to ratings and reviews would even be a step backwards over option (b) as far as privacy is concerned)

If my guess is correct, Shapeways has already decided to develop and use a rating system. Is this thread only here to cherry-pick some feedback about how to implement it ? -Even if most people would much prefer to see this dev brainpower used to fix bugs-

- Uploading a new model is slow [would like to write slooooooooooooow]. Uploading a picture is cumbersome. Waiting for the system to have calculated prices for every materials is very long, because ofall the computations needed (unwrapping).

In addition to this it still requires a certain level of commitment and involvement from Shapeways due to teh fact that Designers currently have very little oversight in regards to their products aside from orders they make for themselves. This also doesn't change the idea fo reviews that are incorrect, malicious or spam.

To me it seems like the idea of Reviews came about as a way of creating a better feedback loop for designers which is a noble intention but as one of the designers I can't see how this will help more than stuff like better tracking on print failures prior to all out rejection and settable Orientation which would result in better products going out to customers which should result in less unsatisfied customers.

Many review/feedback systems I am subjected to are worse than useless because the current expectation is that everything must be perfect and anything less than 10/10 (or 5/5) is a FAILURE.
My personal opinion is that expected/average service should merit an average rating and that an extraordinary rating (9 or 10/10) is only relevant if the service provider did something extraordinary (usually to fix a problem).

EG1
The ebay system may be somewhat relevant to professional sellers but the expectation that everybody get 4.4/5 average (or whatever it is now) means a buyer has very few real options for leaving feedback.

EG2:
I recently bought a car and the dealership had posters up proudly proclaiming that they always deliver 10/10, how can this be valid as it must mean the average is 10 as well. If so what's the point of the other 9 numbers? I was also told that any salesman who got an 8 or less would be grilled by their boss. (I've had this experience from 2 different franchises.)


IF you do some kind of feedback please keep it very simple, EG Would you recommend this product? Yes/No/abstain

Customers who aren't familiar with how the objects are made and the limitations of 3d printing will give less than perfect ratings because of stepping, polishing granules, rough surfaces, and other things that are out of the control of designers. And in line with what Nick Hawkins said, shoppers are conditioned to avoid products rated less than perfect or near perfect.

Anything that reduces shop owners' income also reduces Shapeways's income. I assume Shapeways wants designers to continue to sell their products through this site so that Shapeways can get a cut of the markup, and not drive designers to buy their own stuff (sans markup) to resell on other sites like Etsy, eBay, etc.

I doubt Shapeways income is based on the tiny cut they take from the Markup, I'd assume the the markup cut is mostly for to cover the cost of transfers/payouts where as the profit from a print is built into the pricing model for the various materials.

I do agree with the rest of your points though.

Still be a timesuck for designers. Still no upside. Still a poor use of resources.

I agree with fx that that it sounds like you've already implemented this, and now want it rubber-stamped.

No.

Are you sure that cut is not the Paypal cut?

Still, less sales (at SW), less profits (for SW), also more "handle your business" (Etsy, etc), more 3rd party suppliers (= not SW).

Didn't we once have likes on products? Wouldn't it be enough to simply bring back that capability?

Hasn't that capability morphed into "favorites" (with the added benefit that a guestimated half of them are from spam accounts registered to put a link to their duvet shop, carpet or escort business in their profile) ?

Even if it was just a "web frontend" sub-team of developers tasked with this ratings&reviews project, I believe their time would be better spent fixing and improving the materials pages (why do people have to ask here if the steel is magnetic, why are new customers misled into thinking the black strong&flexible is solid black rather than dyed, why is the raw steel still named stainless when the appearance of the composite is nothing like regular steel) , improving visibility and content of the tutorials, adding documentation to the 3dtools so that newbies are not tricked into overengineering edges and surface details that routinely get flagged as too thin,...

Many review systems are bogus and are not a sientific measurement tool of quality. They are often used to put the competion down or boost your own.
That's my opinion anyway.

My sentiments too Michael! If a product has thousands of reviews then it can be useful because the corruption ratio will be too low to make a difference. While a product with only a handful of reviews is subject to being degraded by false reviews.

Another thing to keep in mind is ROBOTS! Yes robots. These are artificial intelligent software programs that have been programed to simulate human activity online and do all manor of text based interactions to cause the masses to be manipulated in various ways. Currently, this kind of software is in the hands of the elite, like military cyber warfare departments and the upper echelons of organized crime, but eventually, over time, it's going to trickle down to the ordinary people and they'll use it to wreak havoc on things like text based review systems.

Oh and, did you know one can buy reviews for ones products?