By Sean Captain
Some companies may think they know the perfect time to ask customers to leave online reviews: the weekends. After all, people aren't as busy, so they won't mind the intrusion, right?
But that strategy can backfire in a big way -- because customers tend to give lower reviews on weekends than they do during the week.
That is the conclusion of a recent study that analyzed 400 million reviews across 33 e-commerce, hospitality, entertainment and employer review sites in countries including the U.S., China, Brazil, Germany, Iran, Israel and South Africa. The reviews ranged from 1996 to 2024, depending on the site.
Overall, weekend ratings were 0.04 of a star lower, on a scale of one to five stars, than ones on the weekdays. They ran the gamut from an average of 0.01 star lower on Amazon.com to 0.33 star lower on German employer-review site Kununu.
Those are averages from a range of reviews that could include some very low scores -- and the researchers say even slightly lower ratings can have outsize effects. According to the researchers, Amazon listings get a median of three reviews apiece. A product with a four-star average rating would drop to 3.25 if a one-star review were added, which could push it down in ranked search results. And a recent negative review could turn off shoppers, the researchers say.
Miserable now?
Why the weekend drop-off? Researchers analyzed the reviews and found people who only posted on the weekend used a larger number of words such as "sad" or "miserable," and fewer mentions of friends, family and social interactions. So, people who take time to write reviews on the weekend seem to feel more socially isolated, and their negative feelings carry over to what they say about products, services or companies, the researchers say.
On top of that, employer-review sites generally showed the biggest negative effects on weekends, leading the researchers to speculate that people thinking about work on the weekend would be grouchy.
"It's a different kind of people that come out during the weekend to write a review, and those people...tend to review more negatively," says Andreas Bayerl, assistant professor of marketing at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, who conducted the study with three other researchers at different universities. "If you start to reach out during the weekend to the people, there is a higher chance that you will collect negative feedback."
The exceptions
Only seven of 33 review platforms defied the overall pattern. Some got identical average ratings on weekdays and weekends. Others, including movie-review site Rotten Tomatoes and car-shopping guide Edmunds, got a ratings bump on weekends. The study didn't give explanations for the outliers.
Another anomaly: During Covid, the weekend effect disappeared. In response to a Wall Street Journal inquiry, Bayerl broke out a sampling of results for Yelp by year. From March 2020 through most of 2021, the ratings were roughly the same on weekends as on weekdays. "I think it makes a lot of sense, because during Covid, weekends and [weekdays] were mixed up," he says.
Write to reports@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 12, 2026 16:00 ET (20:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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