alt Hacker NewsIf inventory was commingled, and you might not even get the item from the seller you picked, what was the point of the 5-star rating system?
Was it meant to rate the product, not the seller? If so, that’s probably not how most people understand it.
Replies
turnsout • yesterday at 4:08 PM
Yes, in Amazon's world, the star rating is for the product. Which is especially confusing on product pages with vastly different variants.
I always took the product rating as rating the particular item (regardless of where it was manufactured) and the seller rating as rating interactions regarding the sales/support/return process. I'm not sure what good having both ratings be the seller rating would be, or why one would look at the ratings of a single product to judge a seller's rep and vice versa.
The main problem I have with the way Amazon product ratings are structured is the grouping of products under a single rating. Particularly with electronics, e.g. the 32" variant of a monitor might as well be a completely different product from another manufacturer when compared to a 27" variant from the same product family - yet there can be a dozen variants under a single rating.