Google SEO, Amazon Reviews, AppStore Reviews, Facebook News. Fakes are everywhere. Fake it till you make it [0]. If you really think about it, everything around us has a grain of fake. Ads, startup pitch desks, TV, people relationships, politics. Everything! I almost feel like we're fighting the wrong problem.
Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
121–130 of 273 posts
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fakes I’m not too worried about, I can usually spot those. The problem is that many categories are flooded with garbage products with inflated reviews. Try to find a bathroom scale. Tons of choices with 4.5 stars and above, but most of the reviews are fake, so it would take hours to sort through the choices and find a decent product. Same for most things I’ve wanted to buy recently (hiking poles and a daypack are two…
They need to give customers a way to sort by review counts in a time-weighted fashion. In other words, a product with 1,000 reviews and a 4.5 average that had been sold for five years would rank higher than a product with 1,500 reviews and a 4.8 average that had been sold for three months. This would help identify the quality products from stable manufacturers.
> They need to give customers a way to sort by review counts in a time-weighted fashion. In other words, a product with 1,000 reviews and a 4.5 average that had been sold for five years would rank higher than a product with 1,500 reviews and a 4.8 average that had been sold for three months. This would help identify the quality products from stable manufacturers.
Major improvements have been needed in Amazon's search ranking for years. The fact that it's little better than it was in 2002 tells me they don't really care to fix any of the issues with their shopping experience.
Dear anyone at Amazon: please read this and implement the suggestions: http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
The deluge of low quality, rebranded, foreign built junk is a real problem for Amazon. A search for food scale[0] for example gives you a whole page of similar (many exactly identical with different brand names) pieces of garbage - they have massive, consistent weight drift and drain batteries like it's their job, and yet they're rocking thousands of 5 star reviews. [0] https://www.amazon.com/s?url=search-alias%3Daps…
This exact issue caused me to use Amazon a lot less. these days, I check Consumer Reports for a review and usually buy their recommendations. Most of the time, still on Amazon - their delivery is still top notch. But - not all the time, as there are now viable alternatives that do 2-day delivery well enough. For example, I started ordering some stuff on Walmart.com. A lot of things that are “prime pantry only” on Ama…
> But - not all the time, as there are now viable alternatives that do 2-day delivery well enough. For example, I started ordering some stuff on Walmart.com. A lot of things that are “prime pantry only” on Amazon are available for the same price on Walmart.com, without any restrictions.
There's also local retail. If you don't mind a trip to a store, you can size up the product in person and go home with it the same day. I'm my experience, the prices are often competitive with Amazon, too.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#124Last night I finally abandoned a book that was absolute trash, but had 83% 5-star reviews on Amazon. Looking at the reviews now, I see that most of them are written by people who only write 5-star reviews (it has an F-rating on Fakespot). Feeling like kind of a dummy right now.
Name and shame!
Not the OP, but this reminds me of a similar experience I had with a book called Space Opera a few months ago. Don't remember where I first heard of it, but it was being touted as comparable to the Hitchhiker's Guide. All the reviews on Amazon were 5 stars, and since the kindle version was only $5, I bought it without checking further. It turned out to be a pretty disappointing read, and nowhere near the caliber of anything in the Hitchhiker's series. I remember while reading it wondering how could all the reviews have been so good. I just checked fakespot, and it had an F rating with 92% low quality reviews as of April 25 [0]. I then had fakespot update the analysis, and it's now a D, with 41% low quality reviews [1]. So it seems like the fake reviews were bought to get things jump started, and now real reviews are catching up. Now that I think about it, it's probably a fairly common way for authors and/or their publishers/publicists to get the early sales and hype going.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/PWFTTbV
[1] https://www.fakespot.com/product/space-opera-7ea7cc4e-4bae-4...
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#125"Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic" Get the hell outta here. Look at literally any product and you'll see a plethora of obviously fake reviews. The worst I've noticed? Check out headphones. 500+ 5 star reviews for cheap Chinese products all over the place. In fact, anything that's around 500 5 star reviews is probably mostly fake reviews.
I believe it. It's just very misleading.
Amazon obviously has a huge catalog. There's lots of niche products, where quite honestly, there just isn't enough money for fake reviews.
Not to mention some products like books, where most seem to be real.
The question Amazon isn't answering -- and what I think you're getting at -- is something like for top products in certain products like electronics -- what % are fake?
The answer to that I would wager is >50%.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#126There was a great Reply All podcast on this topic. Between it and this NPR article, and recent personal experience, I'm seriously questioning whether I want to continue my Prime account.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
You really should never be shopping on Amazon for high margin products that are easy to fake. This means perfume, cosmetics, sunglasses and name brand clothing. These items are cheap to manufacture (even the real ones), but get their high perceived value from brand. Those Raybans you love? A $250 pair costs Luxotica around $5 to manufacture. So items like these are common to fake because the fakers can often get a pr…
Fakes I’m not too worried about, I can usually spot those. The problem is that many categories are flooded with garbage products with inflated reviews. Try to find a bathroom scale. Tons of choices with 4.5 stars and above, but most of the reviews are fake, so it would take hours to sort through the choices and find a decent product. Same for most things I’ve wanted to buy recently (hiking poles and a daypack are two…
Faced with hundreds of junk offerings, sometimes a high-to-low price sort gets the quality product onto the first few pages. Doesn't work if there are many "packs of 50" though.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#128I use fakespot for analyzing Amazon reviews. It’s better than nothing.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#129Jeez, I don't think it's possible for this writer (Ryan Kailath) to be any more milquetoast if he tried. Amazon's reviews are completely bullshit. I never buy anything from Amazon (or Yelp, or...) without running the product page through Fakespot.com to check for fake reviews.
Re: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For
#130I've been burned multiple times by this; the worst was a pair of remote control off-road trucks for my sons' Christmas presents. They had hundreds of 5-star reviews and both units worked for maybe 5 minutes each. Within days of Christmas, the listing was flooded with 1-star reviews from other conned parents with very similar stories. The number of products impacted must be far over the 1% claimed. There are whole cat…
I can handle getting some crappy set of headphones but a big let down for a child's Christmas is just so upsetting to a point that maybe I've got unaddressed issues. I have a toddler and I think I'll gladly pay the premium to buy Toys R Us stuff I can touch and play with in the store.
> Toys R Us
Um, I have some bad news for you.