Amazon is one company that’s always evolving and aiming to improve customer service. This makes sense, since Amazon’s core business is all about making customers as happy as possible. One of the latest ways that Amazon is aiming to cater to its consumers is to improve the Amazon.com rating system.

Why Ratings Matter

Customer reviews are essential to Amazon’s online marketplace business. Studies have shown that people will look at and consider reviews before buying an item through Amazon. This is why Amazon has developed a new system that will learn which reviews are the most important, and then improve upon those reviews. You probably won’t notice much change when it comes to buying things on Amazon right away, but the reviews that you usually look at are going to become much more relevant.

So how will the new system work? Amazon’s newest ratings tweak will give more importance to newer reviews. In addition, Amazon verified customer reviews will get more weight, and the reviews that people vote for will also be sent to the top of the review list. The result will be better reviews all around that can be trusted even more than the reviews that are currently part of the Amazon website lineup. The other big change is that Amazon will give 5 star ratings more weight - currently, a 5 star rating is just an average of all the other reviews a given product has.

Taking Things Seriously

When a company depends on reviews to stay in business, that company is bound to take fake reviews seriously. This past April, Amazon sued a number of smaller companies that were found posting fake reviews on the company’s website. This act has proven to buyers that Amazon’s reviews are carefully monitored and are not fake. With so many websites posting fake reviews, Amazon wanted to point out that its reviews were, and still are, really written by actual customers.

When rolling out any kind of new review system, a company like Amazon has to be particularly careful with what changes are made. If too many changes are made too quickly or not trusted by the general public, even a site like Amazon could be buried. As the company moves to make sure that all of the reviews posted on the site are indeed real, the hope is that more people will buy from Amazon and trust the ratings that are posted.

Updating Products

Another great update to the Amazon system is the fact that the company will now include small updates to products on the site. For example, if a company has made adjustments to a speaker sold on Amazon, those updates will now be easily noticeable when searching for that product through the website. So just when you thought that Amazon couldn’t possibly make its site better, these changes have rolled out - in the US at least.

There’s no word yet whether or not Amazon will be updating its review system outside of the states. Presumably, the company will wait to see how buyers in the states react to the new system before upgrading it elsewhere.