Thanks to the tremendous response for my previous article on #GoogleNow, I am now motivated to write more and finish off those drafts pending for a long time. Here goes one.

This weekend, I did some research on customer ratings on 3 popular ecommerce websites of India: Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal. I wanted to record the ratings and see if I can deduce any interesting patterns. Before starting this research, I did not really have an objective. I was not sure if I would get anything interesting out of this or not. It was more of an experiment than anything else.

Firstly, I could see that electronics and books had the most number of ratings. So, most of my recordings were focussed on these two segments so that I have enough data to validate.

Ratings Pattern

One strikingly interesting thing I observed: For any good electronic product with decent no. of ratings, the shape of the ratings almost always is like this:

Peculiar shape emerged for customer ratings of electronic products from Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal.

For almost every product, no. of 5 star ratings were more than 4 star, followed by 3 and 2 but there is an increase in 1 star ratings.

This kept me thinking… I wanted to plot this data on some graphs.

Electronics: Happy Customers & Pissed off Customers

For each product, lets say,

X5 = No. of 5 star ratings X1 = No. of 1 star ratings t = Total ratings Percentage of really happy customers, C1 = X5 / t Percentage of really pissed off customers, C2= X1 / t

I plotted C1 and C2 of different products across the three websites.