Bunion Splint “Reviews” – Can They Be Trusted?
Do you believe everything that you read on the internet? These days anyone can put up a web page and tout their opinion, and that’s great – here’s to freedom of speech! But before you believe that so-called bunion splint review posted on the interweb, look deeper at who wrote the review, and what their motivations might be.
No One Size Fits All
Let it be recognized that there is no such thing as a “one size fits all” solution to anyone’s bunion pain or condition. There will always be critics of even what appears to be the best, highest-recommended product, even Bunion Bootie. As a company, we strive to use customer feedback to improve our products and customer service continuously. It’s a “work in progress” and will always be, so we very much value the opportunity to improve our products and process thanks to the feedback of our customers.
Who Are The Bunion Splint “Reviewers”?
First, bunion splint brand owners put up an e-commerce website selling their product(s), then they write up a blog post called “The Best Bunion Splint of 2018” or something along those lines. Then (wait for it…) list their products FIRST (gasp!). To the average web-hunter the page looks legit, I mean after all it DOES show other products so it CAN’T be biased, right? Wrong.
Investigate The Authors of The Bunion Splint Review
A few different techniques can be used depending on where the ‘review” is posted.
Blog Post
Using a public and accurate domain ownership tool called WhoIs.com, make a quick search into who owns these review websites and you’ll usually do a 360 right back to the brand owner of the bunion splint. The same bunion splint ironically ranking #1 in the list. Clever. Creating a separate e-commerce website to distance themselves from the “best bunion corrector (or splint)” articles so they appear as if they were written by an unbiased third party. No wonder none of the other bunion treatment options rated very well.
Amazon
Oh yes, fake bunion splint reviews happen here too. And they come in droves.
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.
How Prevalent Is It?
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.
How Do We (Bunion Bootie) Rank?
Let’s see… The honest players like Bunion Bootie, our results get pushed down in the list of search results because phony reviews trump our 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.
What About Other Products?
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.
While we would never claim to be a panacea for all bunion sufferers, we take our commitment to helping people in pain seriously. As fellow bunion sufferers ourselves, we delight in the fact that we have a 92% customer satisfaction rating. Best of luck shopping.