Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Virtually every E-tailer today embraces the sales-increasing power of customer reviews—and almost no one thinks that tampering with those comments is a wise move. But a recent study from New York University throws a delicious new nuance into the discussion, having found that cleaning up the grammar and spelling of posted comments can sharply increase their sales impact.

The premise that consumers would find more articulate and intelligent-sounding comments more persuasive is as logical as it is disconcerting. It's disconcerting in that it reopens the "should we change the comments in any way and, if we do, how far should we go? And, who should do it and what should the rules be?" debate. Is the boost in sales worth the higher copy editing costs? Are automated systems (Zappos has been using Amazon Mechanical Turk for just such an effort) sufficiently accurate? Here's a frightening one: If you go the copy edit route, are you obliged to do it for all comments? What if you only cleaned up the positive reviews, leaving the negative ones verbatim, hoping the typos and poor grammar will dissuade other shoppers from being discouraged from buying?

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