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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

I find this very useful for Amazon reviews too. If all the 1-star reviews are complaints about delivery or nonsense like that, the product is good. If they're all calling out a specific condition or a bad design feature, that's more than likely an actual problem with the product (e.g. frequent dead pixels on monitors or hiss on wireless headphones or some other annoyance).

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I've recently been focused on the 2 or 3 star reviews because they're a bit more balanced and level-headed.

Of course take it into the context of the overall rating distribution for the product.

I take the count of five-star reviews and divide by count of one-star reviews. "Oh, it's an 11, that's a good product," I say to myself. Then I check the one-star reviews to see what people find problematic.

Not true, many complaints on delivery delay can point otwards a totally over-run company with eternal wait-times or massive scale up problems.

Anything that has multiple sellers it becomes completely irrelevant, especially if you have Prime and mainly get Prime deliveries.

It's got nothing to do with the product at all.

Unless you want delivery.

But delivery problems usually have nothing to do with the seller and will happen pretty much to any product at random.

Most of the time delivery problems have everything to do with the seller. The point is that the seller and the product should be separated in reviews of the product.

Sellers are the delivery companies' customer.

If there are a lot of delivery problems, it means the seller has chosen a poor delivery company which reflects poorly on them.

I don’t think that’s not necessarily true. I don’t know how it works now, but at one point I know that delivery companies like Postmates would take the end customer’s order, pay for it, pick it up, and deliver it, without the restaurant (necessarily) knowing that the courier wasn’t the actual end customer. In that case, clearly the bad delivery experience isn’t the restaurant’s responsibility, although at some point they might decide they need to take action to resolve the problem.

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