Andy and Jake are pretty excited that WalMart.com, as of Thursday, is allowing customers to rate and review all the products it sells. That's right, all of them. The feature was rushed into implementation after a testing-phase produced twice the number of expected customer submissions.


This is an interesting move that puts the pressure on everyone else. Other retailers will be pressured to follow Wal-Mart's lead, and add the same ability at their sites, if they haven't already.
And Wal-Mart can use low customer ratings as leverage against suppliers to dump products that aren't well-received. According to Reuters, "In the future, [Walmart.com Chief Marketing Officer Cathy] Halligan said Wal-Mart could interact with customers who post reviews and the reviews could be used to make decisions on which products Wal-Mart sells."
Call me a cynic, but I think that's more of the motivation for Wal-Mart to adopt a ratings system, than wanting to "empower" its customers.
But either way, its "blog" still sucks.