Success by Indirection

Last century, when designers at Amazon.com decided to include negative reviews alongside positive ones on their product pages, you could almost hear the book publishers, music distributors, and device manufacturers whose products were being sold by the online store pound their collective fists on the table. How the heck does Amazon expect to sell more products if they allow people who may not even be actual, paying customers to publicly trash them?

At first blush the Amazon decision is counter-intuitive. It would seem that allowing anybody to say anything about an item would cause it to sell poorly because someone, somewhere, would write one rotten apple review of it and spoil the bunch.

That didn’t happen, though, and the decision Amazon made is very similar to decisions other successful online companies have made recently that are starting to bear fruit. These decisions all have one thing in common: the more tools you provide customers to help them solve their own problems, the more they use them, and the better your site does as a result. Even if you allow for things like negative opinions.

This was an indirect path to success for Amazon. Allowing both sides of the story takes a lot more work than telling only one side. This goes for all types of web sites: being honest is really hard work. If you write, you have to tell both sides of the story even if you lean heavily toward one of them. If you sell, you have to be realistic about what people are buying or they will never come back after they find out you’re lying.

In contrast, the direct path would be to try to control the message for each item being sold on Amazon. That means any potential customer only hears about how great the product is, even if it isn’t really so great. You can still find this type of bias in the publisher’s review that is included on most book pages.

Increasingly, however, people are turning to third parties such as other users to give them unbiased information. It is this indirect, long-term strategy that has paid off tremendously for Amazon. To this day they continue to allow people to write scathing reviews, knowing that as a whole they will be more valuable that way. After all, some items really are terrible, and you’re doing someone a favor if you tell them about it before they lay out their own money to find out.

Indirectness is an underlying secret of the success of the reviews at Amazon, and for all systems used for recommendations. Though they are difficult to create, they give users the tools with which to make better, more informed decisions. Knowing what not to do is nearly as valuable as knowing what to do.