A study released last week by The E-Tailing Group has found that a surprising amount of online shoppers not only rely on customer reviews, but use them more so than traditional modes of product information such as retailers, sales associates, advertising, etc.

I’ll link you to the article at the end, but what it basically says is that more and more people are relying on user-generated content to affect their purchasing decisions. I, for one, do this all the time. I scoured Google when it came to getting a case or shell for my iPhone. I looked at Apple’s site, Shopzilla, Ebay, etc and read review after review. What I found was a lot of conflict, especially between the hard case and soft case crowds, but more consistency in the soft case/rubber shell crowd. So when I made my final decision, I bought a rubber shell, based mostly on the reviews I read. I purchased my shell at a store, not online, and didn’t even see this particular one in my search.

In contrast, a few years ago when laser levels were all the rage for the handyman, I went to Sears to get my dad one for Christmas without previous review. I asked a sales associate about which level was the best in my price range and he proceeded to read the product specs off the side of the box. I asked him if he used any of the other ones, or the one he was reading from, and he had not. At this point in my futile quest for information I relied completely on branding and bought a Titan laser level kit which was more than I wanted to spend, but I figured, what the hell, it’s got a nice box and a high price ticket; it won’t be bad. So a week or so later I see my dad with his old bubble-between-the-line level and I ask him why he isn’t using his fancy-pants laser level. Apparently the alignment was off, making it a totally useless instrument.

So what I did was basically throw away my time (I had a receipt so my Dad could exchange it and not waste my money too) on a product because I didn’t have any idea what I was looking at and neither did the sales associate. What the company told me, on the side of the box, was that this product was top of the line, professional, etc, etc which turned out to be a load of crap and, to quote Tommy Boy:

The reason why they have a guarantee on the box is because they know all they sold you is a guaranteed piece of sh*t. Hell, I can take a crap in a box and slap a guarantee on it for you, if that’s what you want.

And he wasn’t lying, at least not about laser levels.

So in the end what was missing in my transaction was an honest reaction to the product in my hand. It would not only have saved me from wasting my time and money, but pointed me in the direction of a better product, and what the E-Tailing study tells us, is that I’m not the only one who feels this way. User generated content is becoming a very real discussion among consumers and retailers need to analyze and use this information if they want to keep customers coming back. The educated customer isn’t going to blindly trust sales people anymore when there are whole sites dedicated to testing, reviewing and rating products. To bring up another elucidating Tommy Boy quote about why we don’t always trust the salesman:

You can get a good look at a T-bone by sticking your head up a butcher’s ass… No, wait. It’s gotta be your bull.

And to tell you the truth, I and many folks like me, aren’t taking their bull anymore.

Social Shopping Study 2007