When we were in the planning stages of the site, we had a look at a lot of other review sites. Not just local review sites, but every type of review sites to see what works and what didn’t.

What we didn’t want the site to be was one of those reviews where every review is either 5 stars or 1 star. A good example of this is eBay. Look at any user feedback there and it’s nearly always along the lines of “recommended A+++++”. Another example is Amazon, most of the products on there have lots of 5 star reviews, due to the fact that mainly fans of the products will be the ones who review.

Obviously, we’re in a different market to eBay and Amazon, but we all know even looking at one of our rivals right now, their 5 latest reviews are four 5 star reviews and one 1 star review. We thought this wasn’t helpful to anyone. How can anyone decide if a business is any good if every business gets the same amount of stars?

This is why we put meanings with our star rating, with 3 stars being ‘As expected’ and so on. We felt this was a fairer way to review. Of course, we were expecting there to be more reviews above three stars than below it, due to various reasons. People tend not to go to bad businesses in the first place, users might get more put off giving a business 1 star if their profile is next to their review, etc.

However, with our rating system, we’ve found that people are much more likely to give 3 and 4 star reviews rather than 5 and 1 star reviews. Our average review score is 3.50, almost exactly half way between 3 and 4 star in fact, which is a lot more useful than everything being 5 stars.

We like giving people good recommendations, that’s part of what we do, so the only way to do this is with accurate reviews and clearer, precise ratings.