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Buyer confidence is U-shaped: high for the first buy, then it drops and then comes back as people gain experience

Buyer behaviour


Reader Note:
This finding pools the four review datasets covering wine, beer and cosmetics, not the photo-rating experiment. Confidence was inferred from review language with the Certainty Lexicon rather than asked directly in the field studies. Experience was proxied by how many products a person had reviewed over time. These are US-focused platforms and self-selected reviewers rather than all buyers.
Evidence:
Observed behaviour
Vendor interest:
None
Sample:
Multimethod source: 1,046,922 wine notes from 30,141 CellarTracker users; 1,451,766 BeerAdvocate reviews from 32,563 users; 984,573 RateBeer reviews from 19,679 users; 229,267 Sephora reviews from 11,994 users with at least 10 reviews; plus an experiment with 801 Mechanical Turk participants.

Good for

Comparing yourself against a similar segment, and choosing what to test next.

Not for

  • Saying that one thing caused another, or predicting what you would get.
  • This was measured in one market. It may not hold where you are.
  • This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.

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