Berlin (dpa) – Some view consumer forums on the Internet as a democratic medium
that helps consumers determine how much truth is contained in promises from
manufacturers. Others regard the forums as “a vast plethora of dubious
opinions”.
Regardless of where the truth lies, one thing is for sure: consumers’ opinions
matter to other consumers. And nowhere is this more evident than on the
Internet.
In the United States, Web sites such as Epinions.com, at www.epinions.com, have
developed a loyal following and cultivated a profitable business by providing a
forum in which consumers can tell others about their experiences with vendors
and products.
“People have always asked their friends for buying advice on a variety of
products,” Cyndi Singer, a manager at Epinions.com, a web site specializing in
offering consumer opinions, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
“The Internet removes the barrier of geography. Now you can ask everybody your
friends know, and their friends, and so on, all at once,” Singer said.
Europeans are now also taking advantage of the Internet to find advice from
other consumers. After a recent merger, only two of the three largest consumer
forums founded last year remain: the Ciao.com (www.ciao.com), which operates in
five languages, and dooyoo.de, at www.dooyoo.de, which for now is a Germany-
only consumer Web site.
At each location, users can voice their opinions about a product and receive as
compensation either money or Web miles, which can later be traded for
merchandise.
Currently, ciao.com – after merging with amiro.de, which was based in Cologne –
offers Web surfers over 150,000 opinions on products ranging from CDs to vacuum
cleaners. About 1,700 opinions are submitted every day. Each is assigned to one
of 13 categories and appears on the site instantly, says ciao.com’s Franziska
Deecke.
At dooyoo.de, approximately 2,000 new submissions arrive daily. The company
claims to have 125,000 posts available on the site.
At ciao.com, so-called Category Captains determine which category a message
belongs in, and weed out pure garbage. Dooyoo.de works in a similar way. Both
companies believe the quality of their messages is improving.
As with U.S.-based Epinions.com, both of the European ventures believe that
quality control is handled well by the users themselves.
“The reader decides if a posting was helpful or meaningless,” says Deecke.
Adopting the system initiated by Amazon.com, users rate postings, which are
then prioritized based on the ratings.
For example, a message rated as “informative” will be bumped up on the list.
Ciao.com pays a small sum to the poster of a message every time it is called
up.
Another mechanism that has helped improve the quality of consumers’ feedback
regarding products is a reduction in compensation. While initially every post
was rewarded with a fairly substantial sum, the rate was reduced
recently.
“In the beginning, students and youngsters posted reviews of every single movie
they had ever seen,” Deecke admits. But those days are over.
Wolfgang Springborn, head of the press office with Stiftung Warentest in
Berlin, Germany’s foremost consumer protection agency, still thinks researching
online takes too long.
“You need to peruse a large number of individual opinions, provided by people
you don’t know and whose competency you can’t judge.”
Some experts view the situation similarly. Web sites that publish consumer
product reviews are “a vast plethora of dubious opinions,” says Helga Zander-
Hayat, the legal counsel with one European consumer protection agency. Zander-
Hayat points out that companies could submit posts praising their own products
or disparaging competitors.
Dooyoo.com spokesperson Renee Kautel thinks such allegations are unfounded. No
respectable company would engage in such dubious conduct, he believes.
Furthermore, Kautel points out that Dooyoo.com employees would notice if
various postings suddenly voiced similar opinions. “We’ve never seen something
like this happen,” Kautel says.
Ciao.com’s Deecke also does not believes that companies are hijacking the
forum, but for a different reason. “The manufacturers aren’t taking us
seriously at all,” Deecke says.
In the future, however, Deecke concedes that there could be a problem. But she
points to the Category Captains, which would also notice if the volume of posts
for a particular topic suddenly increased. To go undetected, manufacturer
sabotage would have to be highly sophisticated.
Instead, Deecke expects the relationship between manufacturers and forums to be
more of a partnership. While manufacturers hitherto had to rely on costly
market research to determine how consumers responded to a product, they can now
access a multitude of opinions about their products to get a feeling for
customer response.
But regardless of their impact, one thing is for sure: consumer forums show
which groups of users have the greatest need to speak out.
Owners of washing machines, for example, are hardly eager at all to voice their
opinions – only four posts discuss washers less than 45 centimetres wide.
Owners of Alfa-Romeos, on the other hand, have submitted 151 posts.
