Barnes&Noble.com Customer Reviews Upgrade
In order to differentiate from competitors (e.g. Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc), the Barnes & Noble Product Team wanted to put more focus into giving our user's more specialized book-focused content. One obvious way we saw to do this, was by revamping our customer reviews experience (which was very basic). After a lot of research, we decided to implement with a 3rd party called Bazaar Voice who is a leading customer reviews vendor.
​
Project Milestones:
-
Integrate 3rd party vendor (Bazaar Voice) on both Desktop and mdot websites
-
Create Product Data feed for catalog of ~14M EANs
-
Migrate ~11M reviews from legacy vendor (Gigya) to new vendor
-
Identify what we need to track and implement proper analytics tracking
-
Ensure integration is built to adhere to SEO best practices
​
Before
​
(User forced to Sign In / Create an Account to leave review)
After!
Features
Sorting
​
Users can now sort reviews by want is more useful to them. Previously, we only sorted by "Most Helpful".
Review by Rating
Users can now see the breakdown of the star ratings. By clicking on these bars, they can also filter the reviews by rating.
Filtering
Users can now filter reviews by Star Rating, Reader Type (which we collect when the user writes a review) and if the "Review Contains Spoilers" (which we also collect when the user writes a review).
Tagging
Users can tag the book they are reviewing with things like "Unreliable Narrator", "Coming of Age", "Quick Read", etc. BN can also use this crowd sourced data for other parts of our site.
Spoilers Tag
All users must confirm whether or not their review contains "spoilers". If so that is marked clearly on the review. Users can also sort their reviews on whether or not they contain spoilers.
Specialized Forms
We ask different review questions based on the category the item is in. E.i. We have different forms for adult books, children's books, movies, toys, etc.
Staff Reviews
We allow Barnes & Noble booksellers to write reviews. We badged them with a special bookseller review to differentiate their reviews.