How do you tell if reviews are real or fake? In an article on PCMAG they site a review of 1,000 US shoppers with only 16% feeling very confident that they could detect fake reviews on Amazon. While 78% acknowledged that Amazon reviews were an important part in deciding rather to buy a product.
As a consumer there is no definitive way to know if a review is real. So, if you are like the 84% of those Amazon shoppers that were not completely confident they can identify reviews that are legitimate, you at least know that you aren’t alone.
Fortunately, there are ways to develop the ability to spot legitimate reviews and tools are becoming increasingly available for little or no cost to assist you. Considering the amount of money at stake with the potential purchase of inferior products each of us could purchase over time, these skills and or tools could more than pay for themselves.
Educating ourselves has always been some of the best time and money spent. This is true rather it is to prepare for future employment or to avoid poorly made and or dangerous products. So, let’s talk about some of the techniques used in finding helpful and accurate reviews?
Start out by avoiding reviews that are either overly positive or overly negative. Overly positive reviews can be from paid reviewers that are creating these for products by the hundreds. Overly negative reviews are increasingly common on marketplaces where competitors will employ people to create a flood of bad reviews. Their goal is to lower a seller’s ratings and potentially remove them as the top product in a segment.
When seeing either lots of incredibly positive or extremely negative ratings it is important to dig deeper to see if the reviews aren’t being used to game the system either for or against a product. Look at a product’s long-term rating to get a broader view of how this item has performed over time.
Another way to check reviews is to review the reviewer. Look at their history of reviews to get a sense of if they are a consumer, or a professional reviewer. This is easy to find by clicking on their name in an Amazon listing. Other marketplaces usually have similar links to assist you in knowing more about a reviewer.
You can also use Amazon’s Verified Purchase label that shows up in a person’s review to find individuals that have bought the product. This too however does not tell the whole story. Since buyers who are professional reviewers could have either had their item purchased for them, or they were compensated for buying it themselves. They then leave a review as instructed being either positive or negative.
Tools are starting to emerge in this fight for truth. None claims to be able to with 100% accuracy determine legitimate from fraudulent reviews. However, tools can help us move through more reviews faster.
Fakespot has a website to insert review pages from, an Android and IOs App, and a Chrome extension. In the website version you paste the URL of the item’s sale page (where the reviews are) and tell it to analyze it. From there it gives a grade to the product. The Chrome extension places a box to the right above the Buy Box and either offers a grade or gives the option to Analyze reviews. From there it will grade the item like the website version. While a step in the right direction, Fakespot will not always be able to determine a rating on a product if there are not enough reviews or it can’t determine from the reviews their legitimacy. We also found it slower than the competition. Fakespot does work on several marketplaces including Best Buy, eBay, Sephora, Walmart, and of course Amazon.
A site we were impressed with is ReviewMeta. This tool is for Amazon only but in our experience provided significantly more data faster, which we found valuable in our decision making. In fact, as an Amazon only tool of choice moving forward. It provides ratings to the reviews and shows both the most potentially truthful review and the most deceptive. They also list Suspicious Reviewers, Overlapping Review History, Most and Least Trusted Reviews, Trends Unverified Purchases, Phrase Repetition, and many other paramaters that could be helpful in making your decision. ReviewMeta has extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. It also has apps for Android and IOs.
The importance of understanding the quality of reviews is becoming even more vital as time moves on. Covid-19 has only accelerated the move to online shopping. Here choices are much vaster. Private label products have grown exponentially giving us opportunity to try new products both good and bad. Independent reviews will play an even more vital role going forward and our ability to understand the genuineness of them will be vital in making our purchasing decision.