Do people trust online ratings in marketplaces?

Reppy Network
Jul 22, 2017 · 3 min read

The sharing economy is a fast rising industry, the growth of which is entirely dependent upon trust between its users. The model allows people to share their items, accommodation, vehicles, etc. with anyone. Sharing an underused assets with a stranger can be risky. The fear of damaging one’s own belongings is sometimes enough for some individuals to stay away from this system. In fact, it is the trust between the users, based on their online reputation, that is the key element to overcoming this fear. Successful past transactions of users lead to positive ratings and reviews by their peers, which, in addition to other elements such as the verification of identity and the display of social media accounts, creates a profile that people will genuinely trust and want to engage with. Such rating and review systems are widely used in this field, as they are highly relied upon by users who are used to ratings from other sources (other ecommerce platforms, or even movie reviews). Other advantages of these are the ease of implementation, the speed at which a user can rate the other, and its general clarity.

However, since we like to put things into question, we decided to test how users of the sharing economy actually feel about the current rating and review systems in sharing economy marketplaces. We distributed an online questionnaire to users of the various platforms. The results may surprise you…

Why users don’t leave reviews

For half of the participants, it takes too much time to give reviews… which is why they do not give any. Coming up with things to write is timely and unsatisfactory — in fact, 42% of the respondents find it difficult to describe their experience. All in all, users are not interested in giving reviews, they are interested in using the service, and they do not want to spend additional time on the website. 29% indicated that they do not see the point in writing a review if their experience was standard (as expected) and 10% of respondents stated that the information in reviews is not useful or relevant at all.

On the flip side, the majority of respondents stated that they like to read reviews before making a purchasing decision. Reviews can help them to have a better idea about the users based on their previous transactions. Text comments tend to be less subjective than the star ratings because people have to think about what to write.

But, do users trust star ratings?

Considering how long star ratings have been around, you would think that users trust them. As a matter of fact, you’d be wrong. According to our study, most of our respondents did not find star ratings trustworthy. Star ratings are seen as too subjective, they do not give users a holistic view of the situation, and since every person is different, the meaning of 4 or 5 stars differ for everyone.

To sum up…

We can see that there is a clear need to improve the current rating system in order to increase trust — the most valuable element in the sharing economy, and the real driver of transactions. Despite their use of obsolete rating systems, marketplaces such as Airbnb, Uber and BlaBlaCar are successful — but this is mainly due to the timing of their creation, their global reach, and their business model. Today, new marketplaces are created every day, and unfortunately, they take example from the big players.

To better address the problems of smaller marketplaces, and to support their growth, Reppy, created an innovative and dynamic rating system. See how Reppy can help your marketplace to grow and run smoothly.

https://www.reppy.co
Reppy Network

Written by

Reppy is a new kind of ratings and review system that also offers marketplace analytics for sharing economy companies.

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