Reading Peer Reviews and User Ratings

More and more, shoppers are turning to the web to buy auto parts and are not afraid to describe their opinions on the overall “experience.” As online shopping has increased, consumer review sites such as epinions.com, consumersearch.com and consumerreview.com have become ever more popular. These sites are meant to be ‘unbiased’ portals where you can submit your rating on auto parts, rate the store you used or rate the overall “experience.”

Epinions.com is quite possibly the biggest of these consumer review sites, where myriad products are reviewed alongside travel, restaurants, destinations and web shopping sites. Your choice of auto parts might even make an Epinions “top 10” as rated by its users. You should consult these ratings before buying auto parts as there is no better benchmark than an extensive review of your purchase. Epinions.com also offers shopping capability, as well as message boards and a member center for frequent users.

Like Epinions, consumersearch.com has extensive lists of product reviews, but unlike Epinions its reviews are generated by ‘professional’ sources (i.e. Consumer Reports). For instance, aggregate reviews of auto parts are compiled and put into order from ‘best’ to ‘worst’.

Links to both Epinions and Consumersearch can be found on the pages of this catalog.

Consumerreview.com follows Epinions’ lead on reviews, allowing users to rate products. It just doesn’t do as good a job, with fewer options for reviewers to pick. However, it is a good place to cross-reference reviews from Epinions, as any good consumer should.