Since starting my blog, I’ve been drawn in more and more by the consumer market. With products of all different types flying at you from every corner of the Internet, it’s incredibly hard to ignore. But secretly… I love it. And I’m proud to be a part of it. Over the last year, I’ve had the opportunity to review and test out a whole bunch of products from beauty, food, clothes and even pet care. Although it can be quite taboo, a blogger openly admitting that they love doing product reviews and love being sent stuff for that purpose, I do love it and I won’t hide it because it’s a privilege and I’m proud to have worked hard to the point where I’m trusted with this stuff. Not only that, I love raving about products I love to my online readers and friends which I know they might be interested in.
Today I wanted to share a few of my points on why I think products are benefitting from the Internet.
Easily accessible: Everyone is online these days, more people are online than not online and whilst physical shopping (as in, going out to shops) will never go out of style, the convenience of online shopping has made life a hella lot easier for a whole bunch of people. Products can be found everywhere – even if you have no idea what you’re looking for!
Online exclusive: I also love that small businesses can benefit greatly now by having online exclusive shops and websites. Had it not been for the Internet, so many creatives would not have a business and not be able to share their passion and their work with just about everyone. Smaller businesses are being included on big blogs, websites and gift guides and it’s fantastic!
Reviews: It’s all very well going into a shop but I think one of the main positives are the extensive amount of product reviews which can be found online now on blogs, product review websites such as Sensible Reviewer, Amazon and just floating around on Twitter and Facebook. We listen to our peers and people similar to us. If anything, we’re likely to trust them more. I’ve lost count of the amount of books I’ve bought from a review I’ve read from someone else.
Trustworthy reviewers: I don’t know about you but I am much more likely to listen to and trust a blogger who is similar to me, has similar interests in products and who has a loyal track of readers and followers than a random review in a magazine or newspaper. I think the personable effect blogs and bloggers can have on other people are one of the main reasons why blog and website based product reviews are such a huge success.
* This post may be sponsored in return for payment and/or products. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Love this post 🙂
Something I also consider a great benefit of the internet on the consumer market is that it will help people weed out the bad items. These items will get negative reviews and will force companies to rethink/redesign these items because so little of them are sold if there are many bad reviews. I’m not thinking about items that have a couple of bad reviews, but items that are genuinely horrible in design, don’t do as promised etc.
I agree that I almost always buy a book now because of some raving review. In the past all you had to go on was the blurb, so hurray for Goodreads, Amazon and blogs !