Original research
Do baby product star ratings mean anything?
We analyzed the star ratings of every rated product in our catalog — 6,470 products carrying 27,929,309 parent ratings between them — to find out whether the number on the listing tells a parent anything useful.
Figures recomputed from the live catalog on 2026-09-07
71.8%
of products score 4.5 stars or higher
181
products out of 6,470 score below 4.0 — the lowest is 1.6
-0.085
correlation between price and rating, across a 7996× price range
What we found
Almost nothing scores badly. 71.8% of products sit at 4.5 stars or above, and 77.5% fall in the narrow band between 4.4 and 4.9. The mean is 4.56 with a standard deviation of 0.30 — meaning roughly two thirds of the entire catalog sits within a fifth of a star of the average.
The floor is the more telling number. Only 12.3% score below 4.3, and just 181 products in the whole sample fall below 4.0. The lowest rating we found anywhere was 1.6. If a scale runs from 1 to 5 but in practice everything lands between 4.4 and 4.9, it is not a five-point scale — it is a half-point one, and the half-point is doing very little work.
Price explains none of it. Across a range from $0.25 to $1999.00 — a factor of 7996 — the correlation between what a product costs and how it is rated is -0.085, which is to say none at all. Paying more does not buy a better-reviewed product.
The distribution
Every rated product in the catalog, bucketed by star rating.
Method
We took all 7,278 active products in the Cradle & Care catalog. Of those, 6,470 carried a verified star rating and a rating count, and form the study population; products without one were excluded rather than assigned an estimated score. Ratings and rating counts are retailer-reported, predominantly Amazon, and represent a snapshot rather than a live figure. The price correlation is a Pearson coefficient over the same population.
Limitations, stated plainly
This is a curated catalog of products that already passed our vetting, not a random sample of everything sold. Products with poor reputations are underrepresented by construction, which almost certainly raises the floor we observed.
So the defensible claim is not “all baby products score above 4.3”. It is that even after filtering to products worth considering, star ratings barely separate them — which is precisely the situation a parent faces standing in front of a shelf where everything already looks well reviewed. A random sample of the whole market would widen the spread; it would not make a 4.7 meaningfully distinguishable from a 4.5.
The data
The bucketed distribution behind the chart, as CSV:
Happy to share the underlying per-product figures with anyone writing about this — [email protected].
How to cite this
Cradle & Care (2026). Do baby product star ratings mean anything? An analysis of 6,470 products. Retrieved from https://www.cradleandcare.com/research/baby-product-star-ratings
Why we can publish this
We take no affiliate commission and no brand pays to appear on this site. A publisher earning a percentage of every sale has an awkward relationship with the finding that the ratings they display do not separate the products they link to. See how we work →
Written for parents rather than researchers? Read the guide version →