Ecommerce Product Reviews - Show All, Most Recent, Sampling?

[Kingof5]

Just curious what you guys are doing in the way of displaying product reviews on ecommerce sites. I couldn't find much on best practices here so I'm turning to the Moz community.

We're moving our main site to Magento and plan to launch it in a few months. Some of our products have 1,000+ reviews and we're wondering what the best way to show them is.

I'm thinking just put them all on there (provided it doesn't slow down the page) to increase unique content per page, more keywords, etc. We've also thought of showing just the 50-100 most recent reviews or filtering the reviews and showing a sampling we choose.

Thoughts?

[S_Curtis]

I like the way Amazon puts a few of the most helpful reviews as a lot information in a reviews is pointless with lots of them just saying great or rubbish.  It also puts the latest in a side bar so you still get those. Amazon also gives a balance of critical and favourable.

I think a 1000 on a page would be too much and I can't see how that wouldn't slow the page. I'm also not sure how Google deals with high words counts.  I know that keyword density as a key factor is long gone but it is still a factor so it you swamp the page with unhelpful reviews it might negatively impact the page.

[customerparadigm.com]

I would organize reviews by most recent as it would show visitors what the latest thoughts are on the product and they can better learn what they are looking for, especially if the products have changed in anyway such as new formula, packaging, etc. A sampling would be fine for a testimonials-like page but might obvious to customers that it's not entirely truthful if they are all only good-great reviews on the product pages.