(Unfair) Importance of Newest Review

I was on a product page that had 562 reviews with an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars. 96% of respondents said they’d recommend this product to a friend. That’s amazing, right? We’ll, it depends.

While the overall stats are impressive their latest review was very negative:

This one negative review stopped me on my tracks. It’s silly to focus on the latest review when the next 4 have 5 star ratings, but who said shoppers were rational??

So, what is the etailer to do? They have 3 options:

1: Moment the review came in they should have posted a review reply stating they’ll fix the situation.
2: They could have sent an email blast to people who made a purchase in the last 60 days but didn’t post a review. This would effectively push the negative review lower.
3: They could have added a graphic like this to the right of the review:

Option #3 can only be used sparingly. If you apply this tactic for every negative review then it’ll lose its potency. Use it only once on a popular product page.