When it comes to beauty products and services, what is your most trusted source for review? While the ‘Best of Allure’ stamp of approval is well trusted by beauty consumers, isn’t word of mouth more powerful for an appearance-altering product or service?
That could be why Sephora recently enhanced its rating and review system at sephora.com.
When it comes to beauty services, I am indebted to the various online critique sites. And yes, I leave reviews as well to enhance the practice for other salon junkies. A question that must remain on our minds is how reliable are these reviews from our virtual friends? What doesn’t stop companies from writing their own positive reviews about themselves?
Sephora’s new highly monitored system has a number of improvements that attempt to avoid these falsehoods and bring the relevance of online reviews to a whole new level. First, they provide guidelines for users who wish to review a product including reserving the right to disapprove a review. They also safeguard the expert reviews with “badges” that appear next to their user name. The improved review system also features a question and answer forum function that allows the beauty seeker to ask a specific question of the user community.
Have you ever known a company that posed as a customer and made comments about themselves in an online review environment? Do you think Sephora’s improvement will be emulated by other online user critique interfaces?
