For years now many of us who regularly buy things online (or at least window shop online if you’ll pardon the pun) have spent some time time poking through websites and forums designed around enduser reviews of the products we’re interested in. For those of us who don’t have a Consumer Reports account, or find their reviews have become less rigorous over the years, there are a multitude of websites that cater to the natural human urge to not be ripped off. Now you’re beginning to see the customer review feedback right on the manufacturer’s own websites!

This would have been considered heresy a few years ago! What manufacturer would allow customers to post whatever they wanted about their products on the manufacturer’s own website? Certainly the only customers that would take time to post anything would be those who are are pissed off enough about something that didn’t work or didn’t live up to their expectations that they needed to vent their dissatisfaction, right? At least that’s what I suspect most manufacturers were (and probably still are) thinking.

Sites like Toms Hardware, CNET, epinions, and Amazon have built business models around regular folks contributing their opinions on the various products they sell. Depending on the number of reviews and how well they are written, you might stand a good chance of identifying a poor product or a good one thanks to the information these contributing users are kind enough to offer up. But the skeptic in me is always suspicious of all reviews and reads every one with a critical eye. At least I could imagine that since these sites often offer competing brands that they wouldn’t censor bad comments about one, since sales would just be slanted to the other brand.

Now the bigger manufacturers (at least in the computer industry) have decided to bring this customer reviewing process in-house, and display customer feedback right on their own webpages. I can only assume these posts are undergoing some form of moderation. I haven’t signed up as a reviewer on any site, so I can’t speak to the process itself. If you shop for a Dell or an Apple product today, you’ll see the stereotyical 5 star rating on the various products, just like Amazon has and be presented with a bevy of reviews by folks we are led to believe are real customers. If the reviewing process is now being hosted by the manufacturer, what assurance do I have that the bad reviews haven’t been suppressed, or that the good ones aren’t really by the manufacturer’s own engineers? We can’t assume a truly ‘independent’ review (like you might find on Consumer Reports) from the sites that sell multiple product lines, how can we assume anything like independence when the reviews are hosted right on the maker’s site?

I’d like to believe this is a great new day where manufacturers are finally realizing they can’t hide their bad products anyway, and want to harness this customer feedback data in order to drive real product improvement, but I’m just way too cynical to really believe that. It’s just a lot easier to data mine if you control the database. In any case, it’s an interesting development that manufacturers are beginning to harness the web technologies that drive successful web marketers like Amazon and other database driven, dynamic content, blog and forum-based sites.