I Use them 100%, but The 5-star review system is archaic

[BobGW]

The 5-star review system is archaic.

Let me first say that 5-star reviews are a successful part of my eCommerce strategy and also everyone I know that is successful as well.

Why are they out of date?

When you look at something with a total of 400 four-stars reviws on Amazon, what does that tell you? Almost nothing if you don't read why it was not 5 stars. It could be something Amazon automatically fixes and you don't care about. Thus it's 5 stars. It could be an issue you really care about. It's now more like 3 stars or the real 4 stars. Different products have different types of things that cause less stars, not always obvious, good, or bad.

Thus I propose a new system, one that you can read the rating and know what it means. It's called 3-Levels 5-Stars.

It would vary per industry. For shoes it would be, like:

Walking Shoe Sold Online

1. Matches Fantasy of Style I want: 1-5

2. Logistics Like cost and if it was broken on arrival: 1-5

3. Usability, Usefulness, Durability: 1-5

The goal is for 80% of the people to not have to look any farther than the three-level five-star system. Otherwise, everybody has to read every four-star review to know for sure what's up with that product. Same with 3 stars. 4 and a half stars. Just expand the little 5-star thing the world's  got going to include three categories.

You could also have a variation statistic for those that don't know that 4 reviews isn't a big enough set not to have variation in outcome, but that's only an extra addition.