How many times have you seen a product on Amazon or another site, or a restaurant or hotel, with 4- or 5-star reviews and been disappointed by it after your direct experience?
This is because the review system on Amazon (and other websites) has been gamed. In this article, I’m going to tell you how you can spot fake reviews and I’ll show you a couple of websites that can help you sort the real reviews from the bogus.
Finding the Real Reviews
Fake reviews flourish for certain types of products, as mentioned above. In general, book reviews are honest, but there have been notable cases of authors or Public Relations agencies trying to game the system. (One notable “number one” Amazon book reviewer who wrote 30,000 reviewers turned out to be a fraud.) Movie and CD reviews are also mostly honest; people don’t judge cultural items the same way as for tools, cameras, or toys.
Genuine Real Reviews and Fake Reviews:-
Real reviews tend to be long and well written, though not perfect. To verify the quality of a review, click on a reviewer’s name to see how many other reviews they’ve written; if they are all for similar products and all five-star reviews be suspicious. Fake reviewers also submit a lot of reviews in a short time, so look at the dates on their reviews as well.
Free products given to reviewers have long been a problem with Amazon and other sites. Prolific reviewers get offered lots of free products in exchange for a “fair and balanced” review, but Amazon is trying to stamp out that practice. Now companies are giving deep discounts as much as 99% off so the products still show up as “verified purchases.”
There are some websites that can help you find which reviews are real. They use a set of algorithms to determine the quality of reviews based on their length, the language they use, the number of reviews the reviewers have written, and more. Just yesterday, I was looking for an accessory for my camera. I need some step-up rings; these are used to put filters on lenses whose diameter is different. I checked a number of brands on Amazon and checked their reviews, a site that has analyzed several million reviews. The one I selected has an A rating, meaning that over 90% of reviews look like they are honest.
Bear in mind also that posting a lot of bad reviews can be a tactic used by competitors to attempt to downgrade products. It is increasingly hard to trust reviews, but the best way is to look for serious reviews is to find those that say a lot and check who wrote them. Some reviewers have a long history of writing reviews and are more trustworthy.
There are plenty of people trying to trick you on the internet and fake customer reviews are one way they can take advantage of you. With these tips and a better understanding of the review process, you can help ensure that your purchases are better informed.
According to research, you should beware if a review,
Lacks detail.
It’s hard to describe what you haven’t actually experienced, which is why fake reviews often offer general praise rather than digging into specifics. “Truthful hotel reviews, for example, are more likely to use concrete words relating to the hotel, like ‘bathroom,’ ‘check-in’ or ‘price.’ Deceivers write more about things that set the scene, like ‘vacation,’ ‘business trip’ or ‘my husband.’,” explains the research release.
Includes more first-person pronouns.
If you’re anxious about coming across as sincere, apparently you talk about yourself more. That’s probably why words like ‘I’ and ‘me’ appear more often in fake reviews.
You Can Submit Reviews at WOWPilot. It’s free.
