Writing Product Reviews: Advice that Just Might Make The Sale

When I'm not working on my website, or I have some down time, my favourite passtimes are playing my ukulele, singing or reading a book. My husband often laments that he can lose me for hours if I get into a good book. It could be worse. I could be down the pub or out spending money we don't have on clothes that will be out of fashion in a fortnight.

For someone who is blind and a book lover like me, the invention of the Kindle and its subsequent apps has been a true game-changer. I used to get quite grumpy and envious of all my friends who could walk into a bookshop and browse around the bookshelves, picking up a book and reading at wil. Often blind people would wait forever for a new book to be transcribed into audio or braille and more often than not it would take months if not years. So, when everyone else was reading The Dark Tower by Stephen King, I was still on Pet Cemitary. It is Stephen King and the release of his latest book that prompted this blog post as yesterday when I was looking at the reviews, i found myself becoming extremely infuriated with people who wrote what I consider to be a pointless review. People who do that or answer a question about a product they are supposed to own with "I don't know" just drive me crazy. So here's what happened and some advice that might just be helpful.

When I looked at King's latest offering, Elivation, on Amazon Kindle, I saw that the average rating was 2.8 stars out of 5. Being a huge Stephen King fan and reading pretty much everything that he has put out since the 1990s (and a good portion of his back catologue) I was understandably curious. Why such a poor rating? So, I thought I'd go and look and what I found after reading 3 reviews was that I was utterly infuriated by two out of the 3 reviewers. More about that in a minute, but this lead me to think and hence why I'm here writing this blog post today.

So, as I said in the previous paragraph. I read 3 reviews of King's latest work, one of which i found extremely informative and the other two just made me furious! The first bad review was the first one I read so I was already bristling. This reviewer called the book a complete waste of money and said it was garbage with no substance or plot. Well that's fine. He's entitled to his opinion. He also said that he would be considering very carefully whether or not he would spend any further money on buying King's works after this. Again, that's his perogative, but given King has written no fewer than 58 works of fiction, over 200 short stories and 7 piece of non-fiction, I think he's allowed to have the odd weak piece. And, in my opinion, King's works are just that, weak on occasion. Anyone who can write anything that worthy of publication ought to be commended whether you consider the work to be good or not. I certainly couldn't.

While this first review did make me cross, it was when I read the second bad review that I really did get mad. This person wrote that they could not tell me whether or not it was a good or a bad story because they had returned it the instant they had received it. I'm afraid I did go on facebook and have a real rant about this. Why is it that people waste time writing a review about something to which they clearly no nothing about, have never used or have any intention of doing so. It takes up space and frankly, it wastes my time. It's the same when you ask a question on amazon about a product. The amount of people who respond with "I don't know" or I don't have the product any more because I sent it back" is utterly unbelieveable and when you report these people to Amazon because their comments are not helpful nothing is done.

This lead me to think about the whole blogging process and the writing of reviews. Firstly, it's really really important that when we do write our reviews, we put ourselves in the shoes of the potential customer and give them all the information we would want to know ourselves. So many people, including myself, make purchasing decisions based on people's reviews. Just last month, for example, I bought a pair of boots that were what I would consider to be expensive but when I read the reviews, one person said that they had bought them for her mother who had arthritis in her feet and she never had them off. This sold me immediately as I too have arthritis in my feet and, being blind, I walk everywhere. I did buy these boots and the reviewer wasn't wrong. I have hardly had them off either.

However, you don't necessarily have to own the product to review it either. I learned in a course I bought some years back that you could use people's reviews on amazon or wherever the product is from in order to create your own. You don't blatantly copy the review but have a section in your post that says specifically "What do other customers think? Not only does this make your review credible but it also shows that you have been honest. Put in some bad points too. While some people moan about really insignificant stuff, you do find some gold Nughurts in there about possible cons of any product. While you want people to buy, it is important to provide a balanced view and list some cons as well as pros.

What are your experiences with product reviews? Do people who post pointless reviews and questions annoy you too? Do you have any other points you'd like to add? I'd be interested to hear them.