ATLANTA — The star ratings you look at when you shop online may not lead you to the best quality products.
Channel 2 consumer investigator Justin Gray spoke with a researcher Thursday for Channel 2 Action News This Morning. He learned that lower-priced items often get higher rankings than they are worth.
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Billions of people buy online every year.
“Household items, food sometimes, a little bit of everything,” online shopper Norris Isler said.
“The convenience. It’s right there the next day,” Arlean Yound said.
Many online shoppers rely on reviews and those star ratings.
“What we found is when people are rating a product, they don’t just consider the quality. They also consider the price when they purchase this product,” said Ying Zeng with the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Zeng found in a scientific study that those stars aren’t always trustworthy. The people in the study considered price above all when handing out star ratings.
“There are cheap things that might be of very low quality. But because they are cheap, when people are rating them, they think they have a good quality price ratio. And that’s what biasing their ratings,” Zeng told Gray.
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The product with 4.8 stars might not perform the way you would like it to. But Zeng admits even she finds ratings hard to navigate sometimes.
“It’s just so attractive to see this combination of a high rating and a low price,” she said.
She said if a higher-priced item with a lower rating is on sale, you should consider it.
“It’s probably a very good deal because the rating is considered, is anchored at its previously high price compared to something that’s cheap, but now it’s no longer that cheap,” Zeng said.
“There’s no doubt that when people are reviewing something the more they paid the higher their expectation,” Channel 2 consumer adviser Clark Howard said.
Howard said instead of relying on the ratings, read the reviews.
“I read a lot of reviews before I make a decision because you never know which ones are fake and which ones are real,” he said.
Zeng agrees with Clark. Read the reviews, even the ones that are AI. She says those sift through hundreds of comments and identify patterns that make it easier to spot key complaints and strengths of a product.
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