Humans are social animals. It is evolutionarily advantageous to share resources and information with one another - here’s a carrot, there’s a lion, etc. This inborn behavior persists even in the digital space, where we lean on one another for companionship, community, and - the big one - information.

The feedback is often quite honest, too:

30-second History Lesson 🤓

The product review came along in 1999 via websites like RateItAll, Deja, and Epinions - by early 2000, these sites had racked up over 1 million reviews. It was a viable way to crowdsource research - and once the use case was proven, the stage was set for Yelp and Amazon to light a fire under product reviews, and make them a baseline standard in eCommerce.

Fun Fact: When Amazon rolled out the verified product review, and were unashamed to showcase the negative ones, critics told Jeff Bezos he was insane. They claimed he would sell fewer products - and wasn’t the mandate to sell more products online?

Bezos didn’t relent, deciding that the obligation was to the shopper, not the seller - Amazon’s mandate was actually to enable customers to make good shopping decisions, not just to sell as many products as possible. Good on ya, Jeff.

Product Reviews Are Good for Cannabis 🌱

Legal cannabis means legal manufacturing means legal innovation. That is to say, when cannabis is accepted as an industry, entrepreneurs will push the boundaries of form factors. We’re not just joints anymore.

Tinctures, vape carts, beverages, cookies, mints, pre-rolls, wax, RSO - to the untrained eye, current product offerings are insanely intimidating. Budtenders often lack in training (and often fall back on non-scientific strain recommendations - ‘this sativa is for energy’), and brands will espouse whatever virtues they need to pull customers in.

Where should a consumer - especially someone new to cannabis - turn for objective information about products?

Product Reviews Are Good for Conversion 📈

The behavior around seeking out product review information is well-trained and persistent; people expect it.

In fact, when a shopper views a product review on Jane, they are 50% more likely to check out than if that product did not have a product review.

That’s a 50% relative lift in conversion. I can’t say this loudly enough. I’ll try, though:

THAT’S A 50% RELATIVE LIFT IN CONVERSION

They Must be Verified ✅

I can hear some of you now, especially you brand managers - “Brian, what about all of the fraudulent reviews on old-school cannabis platforms? Our competitors leave bad reviews on our products and it hurts, not helps, our business.”

2 things:

• Reviews shouldn’t be open to anyone with an account - like it or not, there are mischief makers online. To avoid the nonsense, all reviews should be verified - from real customers that actually purchased the product

• There should be a mechanism to govern bad behavior - e.g. all users can weigh in on whether a review is helpful or not

Brands, it turns out, should be the biggest proponents of sourcing lots of product reviews - it’s the most efficient way to solicit objective feedback from real customers.

Here’s How the Tech Works 💻

Q: So why aren’t verified product reviews commonplace in cannabis?

A: Because it’s hard.

Think about it - in order to source many reviews quickly, stores must ‘standardize their data’ - meaning they must indicate, somehow, that a Canndescent Calm pre-roll is the same as the other Canndescent Calm pre-rolls being sold elsewhere, even though it may be logged differently in their point of sale.

A visual:

tl;dr 📖

• Verified product reviews are necessary to achieve optimal conversion rates

• Brands should leverage reviews, wherever possible, to measure their product’s popularity and inform future roll-outs

• Verified product reviews require data normalization

• It is Tuesday