What Are the Differences Between Ratings and Reviews?

Anyone who has spent enough time on the internet must know about the ratings and reviews that swarm across the internet for various reasons. But in case you are confused about its overarching presence and want to know more about it. Then you have landed in the right place.

What Are Ratings and Reviews?

Ratings and reviews are basically evaluations and judgments given by customers, clients or consumers to a specific business, professional or a service. Ratings and reviews are given based on the consumer’s experience and level of satisfaction with the specific service that they have availed. This system of rating and reviewing is intended to empower consumers who have the power to judge the businesses they are taking services from and to inform all the fellow consumers about the businesses.

So, the consumers have become dependent on the system whenever they need to buy something or have to avail a service of professionals. They heavily rely on ratings and reviews to choose a particular business. On the other hand, businesses too have become very cautious about the whole system and always strive to provide good service in order to get good reviews. They even end up employing unfair means to secure good reviews for their businesses. Although the system apparently seems great for the whole marketplace, it has developed many problems and shortcomings after it became omnipresent on the internet.

Differences between Ratings and Reviews

Ratings are the consumer evaluations and judgments containing stars, digits or any quantitative number that you often see in the form of the five-star rating system. It can also be on the scale of 10 or 100. So, no matter the scale, whenever there’s a number involved, the system is called a rating system.  On the other hand, reviews are the written judgment or evaluation that the consumer passes about a business or a service.

Most often we see that ratings and reviews go hand in hand and used in combination. Whenever you avail a service or do business with a professional you can review them on various platform. There are Facebook, Google business listings, Yelp and the businesses’ personal platforms and so many. There you will see that you have both the options of giving ratings and reviews simultaneously. Or at times, there is just the rating system and the review option has been kept as optional.

So, this is basically the whole ratings and reviews system explained in short. Although this system has become an integral part of the internet and how we do business nowadays. You must know that the system has become almost obsolete and useless for various reasons. Fake and biased reviews, so many businesses with same ratings and the inadequacy of the system are just to name a few. We will talk about it in details in some other time. Till now, just remember to be careful whenever you end up relying on ratings and reviews so heavily.