Tips for a Great Product Review

What’s the most important way that most people find out about which new products to buy, and which to avoid? Whether it’s groceries, clothes, or beauty products, the opinion of respected friends and colleagues is a big factor. It’s how sites Amazon have increased conversions, turning browsers into buyers.  Beyond asking your friends for their advice, the second best source sometimes is an impartial product review.

Product review is an ability to express or share one’s opinion about the product, whether it is good or bad. The essential questions that need to be answered to have a good product review are:

1. What does the product promise?
2. How well does it live up to this promise?
3. Is it a good value? for whom?

To answer these questions first you have to read the documentation to understand everything the product can do or at least what it promises to do. Of course, it always helps to have actually used the product yourself.  While you’re exploring the features, look also what the product doesn’t do – sometimes it’s easy to get sucked in with all the promises it makes, but remember that people looking to buy want honest opinions on the cons of the products as well.  Revealing the downside of a particular product won’t necessarily make someone decide not to purchase it – it just depends what their personal goals for the product are in their own life.

To avoid common mistakes when writing your review, first you have to avoid irrelevant introduction and do not recite the feature list.  Most of the time the merchant site will list the features, so you should only highlight the features (or lack of features) you feel are important towards the decision making process of whether or not to purchase the specific item you’re reviewing.  The type of online shoppers who do a lot of product research before making a purchase are the type to read your review, so respect their time.  There are usually many reviews for popular products, so keep your review succinct and include only what information might be relevant to the purchasing decision.

Keep in mind that you should also remain impartial, especially if the product was provided to you for free for the purposes of reviewing it.  Just because you got the product free it doesn’t mean that it’s a gift and you should thank the vendor by providing thumbs up review. You have to consider the matters most is the reader, who is a user group like you, and not the vendors “gift” because you’re telling someone how to spend their money. In order to avoid any compliance issues with the FTC, you need to also be sure to disclose when a product is provided to you for free.  Remember to consider, if not in the text of your review but just to yourself, you have to answer the question: would you spend your own hard earned money on this product?