Just one more star: Amazon confuses with new rating display

Amazon apparently revised the display of user ratings for offered products. In Germany, only a single star can be seen in the product overview instead of the familiar five stars. Next to it is the average user rating as a number, i.e. about 4.5. You can also see the percentage of reviews that gave more than four stars.

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The new star system from Amazon: The number of ratings is hidden in the overview page. It still appears on the product pages.
(Image: heise online)

The absolute number of reviews given can no longer be found on the overview page, which is displayed when searching for products, for example. This can have an impact on how a product is perceived: The Nvidia Geforce RTX 4070 Founders Edition is shown in a sample by heise online with a full five points. “4+ stars: 100 percent,” it says there. What Amazon omits in this view: The ratings are based on just four user reports.

More information at a glance

This was immediately apparent in the previous view, the new variant only reveals this information when you move the mouse over the star or call up the product page. In practice, even very few positive reviews could lead to a product being displayed as a flawless 5-star item at first glance – a possible incentive to work with fake reviews. The new star ad can be seen both on the website and in the mobile app in Germany.

Only by mouse-over over the star can you see the exact breakdown of the user reviews in the new rating display. Nothing has changed on the product page itself.

(Image: heise online)

But the new display also has advantages. Because in the new view, Amazon shows additional information at a glance – for graphics cards, for example, the size and clock speed of the video memory, for televisions, the display size, resolution and screen technology. The only question is whether the two could be combined.

Test or final implementation?

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It is still unclear whether the changed display is a test. According to a report by Android Police, this indicates that the new rating view has not been implemented in the US home market. Instead, the new star ranking can only be seen in selected countries – such as Germany and India. Amazon did not immediately answer a request from heise online.

Amazon has been dealing with fake reviews for years. Even AI text generators such as ChatGPT have recently been increasingly used to automatically write reviews on Internet portals such as Amazon. There are also providers who offer the creation of fake reviews as a service for a fee. On the other hand, Amazon is taking legal action.

(dahe)

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