The Best Online Stores - Amazon Holiday Shopping

After arriving at Amazon's home page you can easily search for any product by typing the product name in the search bar and pressing the "Go" button (marked in red) as shown above.

To search for the best Medusa costume(or any other product) you will want to see the ratings and read some reviews.

This is easily done by choosing a specific department, by either using the drop down box at the top, choosing a department on the left, or choosing a department on the right by clicking the small down arrow, as outlined with red in the picture above.

Amazon makes it easy for you to drill down to the specific departments when searching.

After choosing the department for your search, you will want to sort the results.

The default sorting for everything is "Relevance" and this is great, but what we want to look at is the "Average Customer Reviews" as this will tell us what other customers think about the product.

You can easily change the sorting by using the drop down box on the right hand side as shown in the picture above.

Once you have your search results sorted, you can easily see the ratings (Gold Stars) under each product and how many reviews each product has (the number next to the Gold Stars).

Notice that the first product listed has a four and a half star rating and the second product has a five star rating, this is because the amount of reviews also plays a part in the product's placement in the results, the first product may have only a four and a half star rating, but it has 16 reviews, whereas the second product is a five star rated product but it only has 2 reviews.

When finding a product that you are interested in, clicking the picture or link will open the products detail page, giving you a wealth of more information about that product.

On the product's detail page you will see the ratings again (Gold Stars), amount of Customer Reviews (Number beside the Gold Stars) and the amount of likes produced by this product.

You can also see the details of the product including sizing information, what material the product is made from, care instructions and much more.

In many case there will be even more information when you scroll down the page.

But what we are really wanting is opinions from other people that already own the product, and we can see this by clicking the customer reviews link located beside the Gold Star ratings as pictured above.

When you click on the Customer Reviews link you will notice a chart at the top left part of the screen that shows you a break down of the ratings, in this case you will see by the picture above that there were 10 five star ratings, 4 four star ratings, 1 three star rating and 1 one star rating totalling up to the 16 reviews listed.

You will also notice near the middle of the screen "The Most Helpful Favorable Review" Vs. "The Most Helpful Critical Review". These are the reviews that were rated by other readers as helpful in their buying decision and create a quick glance at the best of a good review, both good and critical.

Like I said earlier "Not all reviews are good" and that is important because if they are all good all the time then it may be an indicator that they may not all be sincere.

Scrolling on down, you will be able to read all the reviews for what ever product it is you are searching for, in this case the 16 reviews about the California Costumes Women's Athenian Goddess Costume (yeah in case you are wondering, it's another affiliate link... what can I say... :)

Also you may be wondering why I searched for the Medusa Costume but the number one result after being sorted was the Athenian Goddess Costume, I believe it has to do with the tags used by the seller of the product and/or tags placed on the product by other customers, either way it dosen't happen often, but it still makes a great Medusa Costume too. :)