Show HN: Recurring reviews to track the whole lifecycle of a product
buyforlife.com
buyforlife.com
Have you ever been annoyed about an Amazon review saying "Package arrived flawless after one day, 5 stars"?
I want to change the way people review products. I'm now introducing "Recurring Reviews". After every year, the reviewer will receive an automatic reminder to assess the condition of the product and if the reviewer is still happy with it. This is how we can follow the whole lifecycle of a product.
We're in general interested in items that are built-to-last, not in being annoyed for each purchase on an annual basis. If you would like to make an impact in the "buy for life" arena, I suggest you carefully select your vendors to actually produce items that are worthy of that label. Quality builds a reputation over time via word of mouth, not via online reviews.
(This might still be a workable approach if you can give trusted reviewers a platform to highlight what they consider the best & most reliable, but you'll still need to vet those reviewers carefully)
It'd be interesting to collect reviews from established reviewers (rtings, Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, etc) and create an average score too.
e.g. clothing built with more sustainable and/or more performant materials may not be 'buy it for life', but to some may be a better item.
How do those get reviewed over time? For example I have a few different wool sweaters - my favorite one I've bought twice and yet falls apart more rapidly than others.
One example of this brought up is https://www.econtalk.org/elizabeth-pape-on-manufacturing-and... - where in the interview she states her clothing items aren't built to be 'for life'.
If you filter by those and still find that this product has a shorter lifespan than comparable products then idk.
On your about page you say:
>> Part of our solution is the automatic scraping and aggregation of data from all over the web. In addition, we are partnering with different organizations that provide us with verified sustainability data.
I don't understand how scraping the web is useful to you. Can you explain?
I also don't understand how partnering with orgs will provide you with verified sustainability data. What type of organizations are these?
>> We want to help you finding products and brand that reflect your values. That's why we collect a lot of information about a brand, i.e his manufacturing practices, certifications, warranty or repair service.
How do you suppose you'll match a user to a brand (or to a collection of brands)?
>> We are not in a position to assess such data, so we are partnering with different companies and standardisation bodies that assess sustainable production standards.
That sounds like a deliciously hard problem to solve. Are you hiring? Or are you looking for tech partners?
In the Uk I use Which? to get an idea of what’s good and what’s not.
Funnily enough on your homepage I saw the Miele vacuum that I have had for 12 years. Just yesterday I was marvelling at it as it wound up the cord flawlessly after all these years, 6 house moves and zero maintenance.
Have you ever been annoyed about an Amazon review saying "Package arrived flawless after one day, 5 stars"
Amazon doesn't allow that kind of review, I'm sure some slip by but they do have policy against this and enforce it.
It happens and is annoying, regardless of policy.
One problem I have with BIFL is that the people who post are usually posting an older version of the product that has survived through time. However, many times manufacturers will change up the product to be worse such that if you bought the same product today, it would not last as long as the older version did. In other words, people posting on BIFL are exhibiting survivorship bias. Is this something that can be solved here?
The problem with this subreddit and part of the reason why I started my website was summarized pretty accurately by another user:
"I joined this sub for the purpose of buying stuff like lifetime warranty backpacks, tools, camp gear, kitchen wear ect. Yet this sub has basically became an Instagram for the old shit people find in they're grandparents house which offers no benefit to me now. I'm not going to buy, nor could I even find a kitchen aid mixer you grandma still uses from the 70s. Most stuff back then was made to last, we know that. I want stuff thats still made today with quality."
But seriously, one way to leverage survivorship bias is to buy the old thing that survived. Hence why old used Toyota pickups are still expensive.
> "I joined this sub for the purpose of buying stuff like lifetime warranty backpacks, tools, camp gear, kitchen wear ect. Yet this sub has basically became an Instagram for the old shit people find in they're grandparents house which offers no benefit to me now. I'm not going to buy, nor could I even find a kitchen aid mixer you grandma still uses from the 70s. Most stuff back then was made to last, we know that. I want stuff thats still made today with quality."
So that's the problem, I don't want to buy old stuff, I want to know what to buy today that will last.
When I was a kid I would buy tons (probably literally) of discarded computers from warehouse sales. Most stuff wouldn't work, but the few parts that survived being thrown into piles and shoved around by forklifts tended to be rock freaking solid and last for years.
Consumers voluntarily providing their data to empower other consumers has a lot of potential.
Sticking in your "Buy for Life" lane:
1) Act as a central location to register warranty information to get a true number on defects.
2) Have consumers initiate disputes through your service to get a truer reading on the ethical metrics of a business.
Might have some synergies along these lines with https://donotpay.com/
Anyway - great work and best of luck !
I've only had these for a few months, so I'm not ready to state definitively any review on its durability. All I can say now is that they've performed well for the first few months.
Should I add them as a product so I can be updated for a recurring review now or wait a year to add them?
On the other hand, I wonder how quickly it'll become annoying. If you have more than a few of these products, getting badgered to update your review every year for each of them might get tedious. Perhaps gamification and/or some other sort of incentive could help, but I'm not sure.
Also, if I've had something for 5 years and it's still going strong, I doubt I'll be able to add much new info at year 6 - unless it broke down of course. So perhaps decreasing the frequency of reviews slowly over time would be useful. Perhaps something Fibonacci based, so you'd review after year 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13,...
I think an unexpected side benefit to this sort of system is a reminder that you've got stuff. Why have more. Or to make you value quality. Like buying good quality tools.
Just a thought, but rather than a 'condition unchanged' link, randomly pick one of your review metrics and give the user a single click option to rate on that instead.
Another option might be to invite them to reply to the email with any follow-up thoughts on the product to add to their review.
I'll be happy to help you if it's two minutes once a year, and I think that's all the info you need.
"...rating by default is the equivalent of saying "everything is okay". That rating is made without you having to lift a finger. You only have to lift a finger to change it to "awesome" or to "sucks" or to add a elaboration for others to read."
Also, the final section of DefaultReviews [1] may also help solve your inevitable problem with faked reviews. Pull requests welcome.
[1] https://gist.github.com/iL3D/59df64947d42828d848ebfc1651a312...
I strongly believe the "review & rating" model itself, for influencing purchasing impulses, is the broken part!
I've bought a few things with AMAZING reviews only to be super disappointed and had to escalate the issue to credit card company to get my money back. I've also tried to put honest reviews only for them to be deleted and my account being blocked.
Wow, I never would've guessed (and doubt I've bothered to read) - I'm already living on the edge (in the UK) by pouring it in the drawer instead of putting the cap directly in the drum anyway - I'll check that later...
Here's my biggest concern (given that I've considered building in this almost exact space before): how do you get people to overcome the extra cognitive friction in using your product versus just whatever they can find with Google? Is there basically a cold start break point you get past where the product has enough product review detail that originates on your platform that it becomes an authority and destination?
I like that a lot. As you can tell, I'm already personally sold on the need for the product based on the shoddy and compromised quality of product reviews on major channels like Amazon. I think it's a big problem. I just don't know what the big fix is going to be.
Some ideas to take it further (maybe on the blog):
- Products for which there is no good bifl version, and advice on what to aim for instead. (E.g. the ecologically least-bad disposable one?)
- Other purchases with longer time horizons and tradeoffs. (E.g. roofing material, cars)
Also, do you have a plan to wrestle with the complexity of a product's revision over time? For example I heard Vasque boots got way worse when production went overseas. Pyrex glass types, etc. One thing I'd hope to glean from your site is how to identify the good version of a thing, and to know whether I can still find a new one or need to look for a used one.
That sounds awfully close to something I would consider had the potential to eventually evolve into an absolute killer feature.
I'm a developer and would love to help out building the site if you are interested, email is in my profile
Why are you focusing on recurring reviews instead of doing a “Show HN” about the platform itself?
Only clicking through to the home page did I realise that this “review system” is not a product in its own right but a new feature of an underlying platform.
Totally agree with you that this would have been better served as a call out to the wider platform, which I might add, does look great.
If the person gave a good review to a bad product then I could contact them directly and say "Why'd you say that product was good?!" and/or remove them from my "trusted reviewers".
It's something Facebook could do that would work well, but of course Facebook isn't trying to be useful to consumers.
- A Buy For Life badge/widget that companies could integrate on their website and pay us a fee.
- Providing anonymized product data for market research. I.e where do most leather boots break first? What are the stress points of kitchen knives? etc.
- And the most obvious one: affilate links
"Package received. Haven't opened it yet"
Or "Product received intact. Haven't used it"
I used it to buy some durable socks - pretty sure they make it out of the same stuff the Abrams tanks are made of.
Starting the process of adding a review, and I see I can pick USD, CHF, or EUR. Here in Australia, f.e., I wouldn't use any of those. : )
Originally I thought I had no way to say I was in Australia, as the drop-down (search) showed only a half dozen countries (and one large collection of countries - Asia). Diving in to the review process and I see you can add a country during your first review creation, which solves that problem nicely. I suspect letting users add new currencies may be inviting future fracas!
And the saying "you get what you pay for" doesn't hold out anymore either. Lots of things nowadays are both expensive to buy and cheaply made.