RatingCount

RatingCount refers to the total number of individual ratings submitted for a particular item, such as a product, film, review, or user-generated post. It is typically stored as a non-negative integer and is often presented alongside the item's average rating.

While ratingAvg or ratingValue conveys the central tendency of the opinions, ratingCount conveys the sample size. A larger ratingCount generally increases confidence in the reported average and can influence ranking, search visibility, and trust signals. Some systems use ratingCount as a factor in Bayesian or weighted averages to mitigate the effect of small samples.

Implementation commonly tracks ratingCount together with ratingSum or with a precomputed ratingAverage. When a user submits a new rating, ratingCount increments and ratingSum increases by the rating value. If ratings can be updated or removed, the logic must reflect that. In distributed systems, ratingCount may be cached and eventually synchronized with the source of truth.

In user interfaces, ratingCount is shown to indicate how many users contributed to the rating and to provide context for the average value. Zero ratings is a special case; many UIs display a prompt to rate or show "no ratings yet" rather than a numeric value.

Potential issues include integer overflow in extreme datasets, race conditions in concurrent writes, and inconsistencies across replicas. Clear semantics about whether ratingCount includes only verified ratings or all submissions, and how deletions are handled, help maintain data integrity.