Many people are unaware that eBay offers product reviews on listings, but now they’re expanding them to the UK and have also added three new fields.
Product reviews are of eBay’s push to offer a “product catalog” (along with Product Identifiers) to give it a boost in Google search results, as we reported in June of 2015.
Because eBay doesn’t organize products the same way Amazon does, it can be confusing. We found a listing for “The Silver Palate Cookbook” with “5 ratings” showing under the listing title, and another listing for the same book showing “14 ratings.” Yet another listing showed zero stars with a note, “Be the first to write a review.”
The product reviews presumably display depending on the ISBN or UPC code (aka Product Identifier) that the seller enters for the listing.
We also noticed that newer reviews now have three pieces of information associated with them. A review left by a buyer in January for the cookbook example above showed it was a “Verified Purchase” in used “Condition” and showed the name of the seller (“Sold by”). It appears anyone can now leave a product review, whether or not they have just purchased the book, though we have not verified that point as of yet.
The March 22nd announcement by eBay UK was short and to the point:
Hello,
We’re excited to announce that product reviews are now available on eBay.co.uk, on desktop and mobile web.
You’ll start seeing product reviews linked to eligible listings from today. And in the next few weeks, we’ll start inviting buyers to review items they’ve purchased on the site.
Product reviews will be available on our app in the coming months as well, so stay tuned for further updates.
Regards
The eBay Team
In January, we reported that misinformed buyers can cause problems for sellers when leaving product reviews – readers noticed that some buyers were leaving product reviews as seller feedbacks. That meant a buyer with a poor buying experience could leave a negative for a product instead of for the seller. Whether eBay clarified the messaging to buyers after that is uncertain.
