Author: Sogyel T. Lhungay, VP, Insights
Let’s start with a conversation I’ve had one too many times: I ask an eCommerce professional how they measure a product listing’s success and they sheepishly admit - “Our rule of thumb is to meet or beat a 4.0 star rating”. If I press them on their rationale, I get some variation of “it feels right” or “someone else told me”.
Sure, having a 4.0-star product rating is something. But the idea that you’re set if you just hit or surpass that single, magical product review threshold? That’s not just simplistic—it’s downright archaic.
Star ratings don’t exist in a vacuum. Consumers don’t just look at a single product’s rating; they compare it to others on the very same shelf—digital or otherwise. Shoppers see four or five alternative listings with a 4.2 or 4.3 rating, and suddenly your “mission accomplished” 4.0 starts looking suspiciously lackluster.
That’s where some eCommerce teams slip up—taking a one-size-fits-all approach to competitive benchmarking. The reality is far more nuanced, especially in competitive consumer markets like CPG, Food & Beverage, and Consumer Electronics. A product’s “must-beat” star rating depends on the category. Sure, 4.0 might be respectable in one space, but middling in another. And if you don’t know the actual benchmark you need to beat in your specific category, you’re flying blind.
Take the Health & Beauty space as an example. The overall average star rating benchmark of several key categories (based on our analysis here at Yogi) is 4.03. Not bad. But that average conceals more than it reveals.
That’s a 0.68-star gap—a chasm in eCommerce terms. If you’re in the deodorant game, your bar is lower to clear. In a category where the average is sub-4.0, landing a product at 3.8 or 3.9 might already put you in a leadership position. Meanwhile, if you’re a facial cleanser brand, you need at least a 4.3-star rating to truly stand out against competitive brands. Anything less, and consumers might dismiss your product out of hand.
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The story gets even more interesting when you slice data by subcategory. Let’s zoom in on Haircare. The aggregated average is 4.04 as shown in Figure 1. But the average masks subcategory variation. If you lump them all together, you miss the fact that dry shampoo consumers are generally less satisfied with the existing offerings in the market, so brands creating these products can not only set more targeted goals, they can also invest in researching what unmet consumer needs are ripe for delivering on.
Let’s take a quick look at how I arrived at these numbers, because if the data’s skewed, the insights usually are, too.
Leveraging Yogi’s AI-driven consumer feedback solution, I analyzed 393,441 reviews spanning from January 2018 to January 2025. That set is meticulously filtered to remove:
By focusing on full-text, non-incentivized feedback, we get a more honest cut of what real customers think about a product. It might not be as impressive as what you see at a glance on Amazon but it’s a lot more accurate.
Keep in mind, I’m only showing the simplest example here. While the 1-to-5-star scale is the universal starting point for many consumer brands, the real power of competitive analysis is unleashed when we use AI-based consumer insight tools (like our Yogi platform) to dig into why those stars are being handed out. You might have an overall 4.2 average, but what if people are repeatedly complaining about your overly perfumed scent, thick consistency, or bafflingly complex product instructions? If you don’t know that part, you’re not fully equipped to keep your consumers happy and those sales on an upward trajectory.
This gets to the heart of why setting the right category benchmarks matters: it’s about context. Being the best in your niche requires a close look at both the quantitative (star ratings, sentiment score) and the qualitative (phrases, themes, keywords) aspects of feedback. And if you’re beating your rivals on most attributes, but losing out on something as minor as a bottle’s pump design, there’s your next priority for innovation.
Let’s retire the gut-feeling benchmarks for good. The true benchmarks are contextual, category-specific, and ever-changing. If you’re trying to keep pace in a fiercely competitive marketplace, you need a dynamic approach—one that understands category norms, accounts for the boundaries of your competitive set, and hones in on the deeper reasons behind every rating.
In a future piece, I’ll delve into how to leverage conversation theme frequency and sentiment analysis to stay genuinely ahead of the pack. For now, remember: the only meaningful target star rating is the one that puts you ahead of your immediate competition—and that’s rarely a neat, round number that some colleague mentioned to you once.
Author’s Note: All figures reflect 393,441 filtered reviews from January 2018 to January 2025, analyzed and cleaned by Yogi’s AI-driven consumer feedback platform.
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