What do you think when you found a best seller book while browsing on Amazon? Will you ‘add to cart’ right away? Well, that might not be the case. Recently I have bought lots of stuff from Amazon and I noticed that this ‘best seller’ effect has a huge impact on my decision making. And it draws me in some interesting questions.
First and foremost, is it just a ‘crowd’ effect? More people will choose a product if more people buy it. This can create a hype and anyone who is not too picky will just pick the product right away. For others, that’s where reviews come in. There are top reviews which got most of upvotes talk about how the product is not that good. This does not necessarily make the product become worse compared to the high overall voting result. However, they can be good hints for us to check if we are okay to forgo these, we can just buy it anyway.
Second, is your taste the same as the taste of majority people out there? Don’t be surprised or embarrassed if it’s not. But, if your taste is not the same, why do you care, just check out the product on your own. It might not be that simple because we don’t trust our own judgement sometimes so we want some evidence to make a decision and voting is a very obvious evidence. But, have you ever finished using a product or watching a video and wonder I don’t understand why so many people like it? Yah, I got you. Some of these people might just be biased, they have a good feeling about the product or the video even before digging into it so their brain will try to make sense accordingly and they end up giving another upvote, how ironic!
Third, is there another equally good option but does not catch your eyes because it does not have a ‘best seller’ badge? Weigh the best seller and this one, you may end up choosing the latter one. What tells us is that not having a best seller verification does not mean a product is not good. Just as one can be a good writer but he is not popular because he might just be hiding himself :)
Fourth, what do you want? Do you want quality over price, or vice verse or both? The best seller is so maybe because it matches with the need of many other people. It might just be good, not great. Like it can be good in quality and also good in price so it becomes irresistible because it takes away the burden of “making trade-off” that anyone is afraid of.
That’s it, simple but not easy to get a sense of. I’ve been there.
