Identifying Fake Amazon Product Reviews
Nearly all of us shop on Amazon, it’s the easiest way to shop these days; Amazon knows what you like, they ship fast, Amazon reviews are insightful, and you don’t have to fetch your wallet when you are shopping from various places in your house, like your bed or (ahem) other rooms that start with a “b”. And, they provide us with what we believe to be unbiased reviews. Or do they?…
Do you know how to spot products with fake reviews? It’s actually easier than you think. Most fake reviews have some of the same characteristics in common; unverified purchases, phrase repetition, suspicious reviewers, incentivized reviews, among others. And while Amazon apparently can’t keep up with their verification process to help their buyers (too bad!), other 3rd party sites like Fakespot and ReviewMeta do! Just simply copy and paste the URL of the product you are looking at on Amazon and voila! the site will return their unbiased grade after analyzing the reviews. ReviewMeta even has a toolbar that you can use with your browser for faster look-ups.
Just to give you some insight as to how many products tout untrustworthy reviews, we did a search on Amazon.com for “bunion corrector”. And then filtered the results to show us only products with a 4 star rating or above. Of the products listed, nearly 85% of them failed (with a D – or worse! – grade) on Fakespot.com. An example of an Amazon bunion corrector that is rated highly on Amazon.com is shown below, and given a grade of an “F” through Fakespot.com. You can click through the image below to see why the item’s reviews have been graded so poorly. A few other items with VERY HIGH Amazon ratings but FAILING Fakespot.com grades are also shown below.
4.5 out of 5.0 stars on Amazon.com
4.3 out of 5.0 stars on Amazon.com
5.0 out of 5.0 stars on Amazon.com
It’s unfortunate that we’ve all probably been duped by phony reviews simply because we put our trust in Amazon.com to present us with honest, unbiased information about products we seek to spend our hard earned money on. We rely on those reviews to make educated purchases, and trust Amazon to filter out bad actors so that we can make the best decision for ourselves, and our family members.
As for the honest players like Bunion Bootie, their results get pushed down in the list of search results because phony reviews trump their verified and honorable rating of 3.7 out of 5 stars among actual reviews from verified buyers. Our customer satisfaction rate among our website buyers is north of 92% and while Bunion Bootie is not for everyone, you can see by our A rating by FakeSpot.com that our reviews are genuine and Bunion Bootie respects the feedback from our customers and makes no effort to inflate our ratings.
In other categories, “bluetooth speakers” for example, in the first 10 product listings, 2/3 of the products were “problematic” based on ReviewMeta’s analytics. Diet pills and other supplements also included large amounts of biased reviews according to an article in the Washington Post. One Amazon customer, Eric Hall, 53, a research chemist and Amazon Prime customer, even went as far as to say he no longer trusts products/brands with five-star reviews. He sees them as a sign of potential fraud rather than superiority. Click here to read more from the Washington Post.
Remember to always do your homework before you purchase because only You can look out for You.
