Ratings and reviews now outweigh discounts in online buying

What happened

New research from InfoTech Research finds that ratings and reviews are outweighing discounts and promotions as the deciding factor in online purchasing decisions. According to the firm, shoppers are increasingly using peer feedback and star ratings to validate a purchase before checkout, ahead of price incentives that have traditionally been used to close a sale.

InfoTech Research's Julie Geller, commenting on the findings, noted that accuracy in product information underpins this shift:

"If a brand cannot get the basic facts about its own products right, customers may question its reliability more broadly."

The research points to a broader change in how consumers build trust online — placing more weight on the collective judgement of other buyers, and on whether a brand's own product data is accurate and consistent, than on the size of a discount.

Why it matters

For customer experience and e-commerce leaders, the finding reframes the purchase decision as a trust exercise rather than a pricing exercise. Discounts have long been the default lever for driving conversion, but if ratings, reviews and factual product accuracy now carry more weight, then the parts of the experience that build credibility — accurate listings, responsive review management, visible social proof — deserve at least as much investment as promotional pricing.

The remark from Geller also carries a wider service-design lesson: small factual errors on a product page are not isolated glitches. They function as trust signals, and customers appear willing to generalise from a single inaccuracy to a judgement about the brand as a whole.

The Renascence take

Most organisations still treat ratings and reviews as a marketing asset to be curated, rather than an operational signal to be acted on. The behavioural reality is closer to the opposite: reviews are now doing the job discounts used to do, which is de-risking the decision for a customer who cannot physically inspect the product.

The real opportunity here is not "collect more five-star reviews" — it is treating product-data accuracy and review responsiveness as core reliability metrics, on par with delivery times or uptime. A brand that lets stale specs or unanswered negative reviews sit on a live product page is quietly training customers to distrust everything else it says, discounts included. Operators chasing conversion through price cuts while their product data is inconsistent are optimising the wrong lever entirely.