With Christmas just around the corner (don't the years seem to get shorter), it is time to make lists and get our shopping done in time for Christmas day. As savvy shoppers will know, some up-front planning before hitting the stores can save a lot of time and trouble and researching potential gifts online can be a great brainstorming exercise. If you've gone to Google, you have probably discovered the numerous Top 10 Christmas Toys 2011 Lists floating around the internet.
Somehow these tend to always contain a bunch of generic toys of dubious quality. Let's face it, who wants to fill our child's stockings with 10 minute throw-away Christmas gifts? But how on earth can one separate the good value toys - the ones that your child will get some good quality play time out of - from the low quality trash that will end up in the bin within a matter of weeks? While top ten Christmas toys lists that you see on the internet are numerous, they are far from reliable. So what is one to do?
There are a couple of things you can do to improve your chances of finding toys that will cut the mustard. Firstly you can visit one of the many customer review websites like Amazon.com. Review sites list products and allow customers to leave comments on items they have bought and used. Amazon features a simple 5-star rating system that allows customers rate a product from 1-5 stars. Product of exceptional quality tend to have a large number of positive reviews, so searching for products based on their rating can be a great way of quickly viewing products that other people have vouched for.
Searching by customer rating does not guarantee you will find only the best products however. If a product has only received one or two ratings, the results may be skewed and fail to reflect the "real rating". For instance someone who has just received the product as is particularly excited (as we often are when something new arrives), they may leave a complimentary review before noticing the products flaws. On the other hand a disgruntled customer who failed to read the product instruction manual properly may give an overly harsh rating based on the current level of frustration they are feeling (while generally lacking an understanding of the product).
Here is a method for avoiding skewed ratings:
1) Filter by products with a high average customer rating (at least four stars or more), but...
2) Only trust ratings that have a large sample of customer reviews (10 or more is usually enough)
With a large sample of customer reviews you get a much better indication of a products "real rating". Customers who have overly praised or criticized a product are filtered out due to sheer number of reviews. The downside is that many good quality products with only a few reviews get filtered out using this method, but no system is perfect.
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