Web Shopping: Bots and Beyond

Review Sites

Whenever I'm looking for a good book, I call my bud Keith, who reads more tomes than a caffeinated college kid cramming for finals. If electronics are on the agenda, Brian's my man. And clothes? I consult Emily, my teenage daughter, of course.

Unless you know exactly what you want when you shop, you probably also begin your task by asking friends for advice. The same applies to the Internet, where product review sites can serve as your shopping guides.

Product review sites cull assessments from experts or from real people who have used the product you want. They can help you determine which digital camera you need, or just help you research an item you plan to buy offline at a store. But the difference between an expert site and one that uses consumer reviews can be the difference between a well-written opinion full of facts and a vague endorsement or a flaming condemnation of a product.

Both types of sites have their pluses. Expert sites compare products and name the best in a category. Consumer review sites offer real-world evaluations of a specific product. One note about expert sites, however: Some of them have relationships with the merchants who sell the goods they evaluate. ConsumerSearch, for example, receives fees from vendors (disclosed in its FAQs) to include links to the vendors' sites alongside reviews.

Just as I started my spree, Productopia, my favorite pro review site, went belly-up. Productopia was my choicest pick because it covered more types of products than any other site. But now I had to switch gears and delve into multiple review sites, each covering a limited variety of products.

Picking a Product

I went first to Imaging Resource, which specializes in digital camera reviews (you can also get PC World's product reviews). "What's the Best Fax Machine" sounded like a good source for info about fax machines, and Outside Magazine, I thought, would cover fleece pullovers. But these two sites were no help. The fax site, for instance, offered advice about features to look for but gave no product recommendations. And the only clothing appraisal Outside offered was one on waterproof jackets.

So I turned to Active Buyers Guide, a product decision maker. Product decision makers are great when you don't know which brand suits your needs. Active Buyers Guide's digital camera wizard, for instance, helped me determine which features were important, such as the unit's picture resolution and the number of shots it could store in memory. Based on my designated criteria, the wizard recommended the Kodak DC-280.

For a second opinion, I went to ConsumerSearch, an expert site that aggregates reviews from publications such as Consumer Digest, Consumer Reports, and PC World. Editors at ConsumerSearch choose reviews based on how current and comprehensive they are, and then tally the publications' votes for a product score. ConsumerSearch gave the Kodak DC-280 its top pick, based on reviews from four publications. By combining that recommendation with the product's high marks from Active Buyers Guide, I concluded that this was the camera for me.

Consumer Retorts

When it comes to buying advice, however, expert reviews suffer from one problem: Each judgment reflects the view of a few people at most. That's why it's helpful to visit a consumer site such as ConsumerReview, Deja, or Epinions. Like the pro sites, these let you search by product name ("razor scooter"), type ("fleece pullover"), or category ("Business & Technology"). And both ConsumerReview and Deja list the top-ranked products in a category. Epinions doesn't show a best-of list, but it does let visitors rate reviewers, so you know whose opinion to trust.

Unfortunately, consumer reviews vary widely in quality. Some are as terse as a TV Guide blurb, while others ramble on like a drunken uncle. Deja.com leans toward the former style. "Warm and cozy!" for instance, didn't tell me much about a fleece pullover I was eyeing. Epinions is at the other end, with lengthy opinions that are rife with misspellings. ConsumerReview falls in the middle.

Consumer review sites are also sparse on categories. All three sites were swell for recommending electronic goods, but weak on clothes, toys, and books. None reviewed the Lego set, and only Deja and Epinions offered a pullover suggestion. Epinions alone gave me reviews for the Razor scooter and the book.

My biggest complaint with these sites is what I call the People's Choice syndrome: Products rate high not because they're great, but because many people buy them. For instance, ConsumerReview ranked the now-discontinued Nikon Coolpix 100 as top camera, but none of the 30 sources cited by ConsumerSearch rated it best.

I advise using expert sites to compile a list of the top goods, then heading to consumer review sites to read what real people think about those products. That's how I settled on the Kodak DC-280 camera and the HP LaserJet 3100 printer/fax machine for my small-business office.

Best Expert Review Site: ConsumerSearch aggregates professional reviews from trusted publications. Best Consumer Review site: Epinions has the largest selection of reviews, for more than 150,000 products.