 Consumer Reports provides an excellent service,
conducting extensive and unbiased testing of big-ticket products,
canvassing over 100,000 people each year for their assessments of all
major US consumer brands, and providing helpful consumer advice on
major services. But there's only so much that this subscriber-funded
union can do. When it comes to local brands, and many services, you're
still on your own. If you're not an American, CR is not very useful
(the Canadian edition has a 4-page Canada insert, but it just contains
information on Canadian availability, Canadian prices and contact
information for American products, not information about uniquely
Canadian brands). In recent months I've tried to find a better deal for
home and car insurance, get advice on fireplace inserts and home alarm
systems, and deal with Dell's atrocious service. I searched in vain for
useful information to help me with any of these challenges.
There are lots of online 'consumer' sites, but their objectivity is
suspect. Amazon and its clones have a feature that allows you to rate
and review books, music and other goods, but they tend to attract only
positive reviews, and taste plays such a big role in preferences for
books and music that the predictive value of these reviews is marginal.
Private organizations like CNet include both 'expert' ratings of
hardware and software, and 'average user' ratings of consumers,
including comments. But these lack rigour (how do we know people didn't
vote twice, and that they aren't affiliated with the product they're
boosting?) and high enough numbers of ratings to be meaningful. They
also are generally just "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" ratings, and don't
differentiate between ratings of product quality, features,
performance, value for money and repair service.
What we need is an independent Consumer Information Exchange that will
allow anyone to rate any product or service, on quality, features,
performance and reliability,value for money, after-sales service, and
overall rating, or to post useful FAQs or caveats on any product or
service. This exchange needs a facility to register and verify
consumers providing ratings (to ensure they are independent of the
product they're rating, and only vote once). It also needs space for
comments to provide context for the ratings, and an ability to computer
median ratings and warn readers if the number of ratings is too small
to be reliable. Ideally, the exchange should be self-managed, with an
ability for any registered user to enter new brands of products and
services as well as add a rating to one already in the database. It
should also allow the user to indicate price paid and where they bought
it.
This exchange should not be that difficult to set up and maintain. Its
main requirement is a lot of space to accommodate millions of brands
and ratings, and a simple but powerful search tool.
What do you think? What other functionality is needed (I think it
should be as simple as possible)? How might we launch it and fund it?
This is yet another way we could tap into the Wisdom of Crowds, and
give us all another tool in the endless struggle against rapacious and
irresponsible corporatism.
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