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Amazon Echo Dot, the hefty hockey puck of a device is a smart speaker which has been the best-selling Alexa device since its debut. It was also Amazon’s best-selling device during the 2016 holiday season apart from being the most popular item on Prime Day. The Dot’s value proposition starts with the price tag. Smart speakers are in general pure luxury devices, but things change when $50 gives you a stylish, fun and exciting toy that can play music and set timers, tell you the weather and keep your shopping list. And on days like Prime Day, when the discount drops the price to $35, Echo Dot becomes an impulse purchase.
Looking at the popularity, we decided to review the reviewers of this product by extracting the data from Amazon via our site-specific crawling solution.
Data
We extracted the following data points from the review page:
- Review title
- Review text
- Review color
- Verified review status
- Review date
- Review useful count
- Rating
- Reviewer rank
The total number of reviews were more than 56,000.
Our Goal
This study has the following the following goals:
- Distribution of ratings
- Number of review counts with time
- Distribution of review length
- Color preference
- Difference in average rating by ‘Vine Voice’ and ‘Non-Vine voice’
- Difference in average rating by ‘Verified buyer’ and ‘Unverified buyer’
- Sentiment analysis of the review text
Rating counts
Looking at the number of ratings given to Dot 2, we can see that maximum number of buyers have given 5-star and 4-star ratings with least number of buyers opting for 2-star rating. The mean value of the rating comes to 4.3 which again confirms the huge popularity of this product.
Review counts
Looking at the review counts since launch, it is evident that the last quarter garnered majority of the reviews with the first quarter of 2017 getting next highest reviews.
Review length distribution
Now let’s look at the distribution of the length of the review — maximum number of the reviews range between 100 and 200 characters. The average length stands close to 185 which means people in general have written about 1 or 2 lines.
Color preference
In terms of color, clearly black is the most preferred color with more than 40,000 of the reviewers opting for it.
Ratings by Vine and Non-Vine voice reviewers
Amazon Vine program invites the most trusted reviewers on Amazon to share their opinions on new and pre-release items to help their fellow buyers make informed purchase decisions. Amazon invites existing buyers to become Vine Voices based on their reviewer rank, which gets decided by the quality and helpfulness of their reviews as determined by other Amazon customers. Since, these reviewers get free products from the vendors, is there a chance the reviews are biased? Let’s find out by comparing the average rating.
Thankfully, both of them have almost the same average rating. Although Vine voice has given marginally less rating, we must understand that the number of non-Vine voice reviewers is more than 1000 times than that of Vine voice reviewers.
Ratings by verified reviewers and non-verified reviewers
Non-verified reviews are the reviews submitted by people who might not have bought the product via Amazon, but still might have experience of the product. Is there any difference between ratings by verified and non-verified reviews?
Clearly verified reviewers have given higher rating with average rating of 4.31 where as non-verified reviewers have given 3.79.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis was performed to gauge score based on polarity and emotions. The chart given below shows that positive sentiment is prevalent in terms of polarity and joy, trust & anticipation are the top three emotions. This is indeed in line with largely 5-star and 4-star ratings of the product.
Conclusion
Amazon’s product review platform shows that most of the reviewers have given 4-star and 5-star ratings to Dot 2. The average length of the reviews comes close to 185 characters with most number of reviews being posted in the last quarter. In terms of color, black is preferred in comparison to white. We also saw that rating given by Vine voice and non-Vine voice are almost the same while verified reviews have better average rating in comparison to the non-verified ones. Sentiment analysis shows that positive sentiment is prevalent among the reviews and in terms of emotions, ‘joy’, ‘trust’ and ‘anticipation’ have the highest scores.
