Shopping on Amazon can be overwhelming in the best of times, but imagine trying to buy something without customer reviews.
Until early 2020, each time Amazon launched a retail site in a new country, the reviews section would begin completely empty—even if a product had thousands of reviews on amazon.com. This made shopping way more of a gamble for international customers, which had a negative impact on revenue.
Around that time, my team had planned to make small improvements to amazon.ca (Canada) and amazon.mx (Mexico) by adding a handful of reviews from amazon.com to these sites. However, since Amazon had over a dozen retail sites worldwide and was about to launch more, I quickly determined that the opportunity was far greater than making improvements to only two sites. I proposed a unified reviews experience, showing the same star rating and reviews for a product anywhere in the world.
I advocated for my vision, first to my team, and then to leadership. They agreed. This drastically changed our team’s roadmap for the year.
After about nine months, we launched an overhaul of customer reviews. This change aggregated product ratings across all countries, displayed up to 30 international reviews per product, added translation, and, thankfully, no longer suppressed reviews based on language.
This update boosted revenue, and had an overwhelmingly positive effect on the customer experience worldwide.
