Seems like there are at least three fundamental types of fake reviews now
Totally generic cut’n’paste “This product works exactly as expected! 5 STARS!”
Unrelated to product “Amazon took too long to ship this product. 0 STARS!”
and now there’s an even worse third type,
For a completely different product “The bluetooth works great! 5 STARS!” for something like a surge protector. Seems mostly for cheap electronics
I can sorta see an argument where fake 5 star reviews help sell stuff to people who can’t be bothered to actually read the content of the reviews, but most of these products are true junk and I assume it can’t be cheap to deal with the customer service fallout from selling garbage-tier products? Or do people just not bother to return stuff to Amazon at all?
Then read the analyses, some of the stuff aren’t big red flags, but it can show you patterns where fake reviews are actually making a crap product better than it realy is.
As for Amazon, they will fix it when the incentive to do so is high enough.
I just read an article that puts in in perspective.
Some of those five star reviews are purchased. That way, with more five star reviews, you move up in Amazon’s customer ranking system. You get better…something.
But the downside is, say I have a business competing with your business. So I secretly buy five star reviews for YOUR business, and then report you to Amazon for buying feedback. Then you get suspended. And there is practically no appeal in this process.
It doesn’t matter you didn’t buy the reviews. In Amazon’s world, you’re guilty with no proving innocent. All you can do is admit you bought the reviews and accept your punishment.
Amazon doesn’t care.
I miss the old days, when competing business would just post one star reviews on their competition. But people got wise. Now they use Amazon itself as a weapon.
So how can someone “purchase” 5-star reviews, either for their own product or for a competitor’s product? If I buy a Super Duper Widget and leave a 5-star review, can I go back and leave another… and another… and another… etc. for the same product thus giving it more 5-star reviews than my single purchase should dictate? For some reason I was under the impression that one can only leave one review on the product purchased. Your post makes it sound like I can pay some monetary amount to somebody / some company to post fraudulent 5-star reviews using bots or something (maybe that’s the case and I just answered my own question).
Paid reviews were a thing, and reviewers getting free stuff in exchange for a "honest " review were once common. I got quite a bit of swag doing that. And yes, my reviews were generally favorable, but I only asked for things that it looked like i wanted to get anyway. I did leave a few scathing 1 stars when the free product was crap, however.
However, those days are gone.
Pretty much, there are very few fake reviews nowadays. Sure, maybe a buddy will leave one for author friend or something, but since in order for your review to be visible, you have to buy it from Amazon, even those are few.
I’ve seen that quite a bit. I think what happens is that a vendor takes their products that have lots of good reviews (fake or otherwise) and then edits it in such a way that they’re selling something different but maintain the reviews.
Another thing that usually tips me off is when an item has, say, 700 reviews but 600 are 1 star and 100 are 5 star. None of the five star reviews will be verified purchases and the reviews will be long winded.
Sometimes, once in a while, it’s not that the reviews are fake, but the quality of the product went downhill. For that reason, I’ll typically put the reviews in chronological order. I’m less concerned about the reviews that are considered ‘most helpful’, and more concerned about the ones that came in over the last few weeks.
WRT paid reviews. Those absolutely still happen. There’s plenty of “vine voices” and reviews that start with “I was given this product for free in exchange for an honest review”. Here and there I’ll report them to Amazon or leave a comment on the review mentioning that it’s a paid review and probably shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
What bugs me about all that is that Amazon says here “Amazon provides Vine members with free products …” but here they say " if we find evidence that a customer was paid for a review, we’ll remove it. "
So, I can’t give you $5 for a review of my product. I also can’t have you buy it, then give you a refund for a review. But I can have Amazon give you my product for free and that’s okay.
Let’s also keep in mind that all these people know full well if they start giving bad reviews they won’t continue to get free stuff.
Amazon very definitely cracks down on paid reviews, they dont happen anymore, much.
Vine is different. Yes, you get a free product, but you dont have to leave a review, and you especially dont have to leave a good review. Nothing will happen if you leave a 1 star review. Many do.
Check out some of the reviews for the Three Wolf Moon t-shirt, a horse mask (the one with thousands of reviews) or the best one of all (that I know of), Veet for Men.
Grab a hankie because you will laugh that much, and be prepared for a total timesuck.
Personally, the way I prefer to use reviews is to look at the bad reviews (there are bound to be some), and see what’s bad about them. If they’re just about trivial things that I don’t care about (or which I do care about, but have decided are acceptable tradeoffs), then it’s a good product.
There have been Amazon Mturk assignments cleaning up reviews but I haven’t seen any in a while. The ones I’ve done you mostly look for foul language, nonsensical reviews and outside links.
Another issue I have seen is that mulitple versions of a product often share a single review page. This leads to the reviews that say “I wish this had feature X”, when the description clearly says it has feature X.
Yes, this greatly annoys me when I’m buying movies. They’ll throw all the reviews for different editions in together even though the editions might be significantly different.
Last weekend I was looking at phones on the Verizon Wireless website, and noticed an awful lot of four and five star reviews that were something like “I’ve only had it two days! Great phone!” Not terribly helpful…
I also noticed a lot of reviews that were tagged as being part of a promotion. I assume that means the reviewers were paid for the reviews?
I was looking for some phone accessories recently and found a whole class of items that routinely had ~100 fake 5 star reviews. All reviews posted within a week or two of each other, all 5 star, any new reviews were 1-2 stars complaining about the product being worthless garbage. I needed a whole new filter for judging the reviews.
I got an ad on Facebook for a knife. Long story short, it’s a decent but mediocre knife with a price higher than it’s worth and good marketing. I read a review on that knife in Wired, and they said right out of the box it’s as good as knives costing four times as much, but he consulted with two experts in knifemaking and they ran hardness tests. They said the real test of a knife is how well it holds up after a year, after you have to sharpen it and so on. The Amazon reviews were generally glowing–because people reviewed it the first week they bought it. They still hadn’t found out that it gets harder and harder to keep an edge on it.