Introducing Product Reviews!
We made a new product review feature for the Web site. Check out all the gory implementation details!
Product reviews. You know, the little one-to-five star ratings with funny and informative comments that accompany product listings on e-commerce web sites all over the Internet? Yeah, we have those now.
Wait, don't you already have comments?
So glad you asked, and yes we do! The customer comments have been a great way to give folks an outlet to praise, condemn, ask questions about and engage in discussion about SparkFun products. They are a treasure trove of great conversations for many products - for instance I found the comments on the MPU-9150 9DoF board invaluable when I was building a project based on it.
The shortcoming of the comments section come up when customers like myself are actually looking to buy a product - does it work? Was it easy to hook up? Did it let go the magic blue smoke upon first power-on? The inquiring and informed shopper wants to know!
Enter reviews. There's a new tab on product pages for reviews, and if there are any it'll be the default tab selected. You can rate a product from 1-5 stars, and there is a text area for writing the actual review. As of now, you may only write a review if you have purchased a product. This is to cut down on fake or spam reviews, but we might revisit this in the future. If you have any ideas for allowing anyone to write reviews without having a bunch of bogus reviews in the system, please comment below! There already exists a flag for if a reviewer has actually purchased the thing (which will be helpful if and when we do open things up), but there's got to be a better way...
This is my personal plea: please write reviews! There are a bunch of fun computer science-y problems that come along with reviews. They are already sorted by "helpfulness" on the page, but as we start to get more ratings how do we sort products? This turns out to be not as trivial a problem as you might think!
So please, write reviews. Rate products. Give me a fun data set to play with :)
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new reviews feature of the site. If you have purchased from SparkFun before, I highly encourage you to go to the My Products page and write a review for a product you have purchased!
