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Whatever you’re shopping for this holiday season, shop smart.
The internet gives us a community of voices who share their experiences and opinions about popular products, and that’s a good thing. It helps you make decisions and gives you more confidence about a purchase.
But some sellers stoop to fakery to get your attention – and your money.
Don’t be misled by the dishonest folks.
Here’s how you can spot fake online reviews.
Online selling is super competitive. Imagine how easily a single product posted on Amazon could get lost in the bowels of the site.
Indeed, Amazon has millions of products for sale at any given time.
“Amazon is very competitive and a lot of sellers will make a great product and be forced to create fake reviews in order to start selling,” said Tommy Noonan, founder of ReviewMeta.com, a free tool that analyzes reviews on Amazon.com.
He notes that of course, that’s not the ethical way to go.
But it’s not about ethics, for many sellers. It’s about making money.
Then you’ve got sellers who may not have a great product, or who are willing to do anything to get their wares noticed.
Fake reviews are one of their most effective tools.
Even if a website tries to monitor and remove fake reviews, the platforms have become so large that it’s hard to manage every listing in real time, said Saoud Khalifah, the founder and CEO of Fakespot, a free site that analyzes reviews from Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp and Walmart.
That means consumers need to get smart about online reviews.
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There are several strategies you can use to examine reviews with a critical eye.
First, check out the dates the reviews were posted. If many were posted on the same date, they deserve a closer analysis.
The image above shows a Fakespot analysis of a product on Amazon with 31 reviews, Khalifah said.
“This product looks like Apple AirPods, is a fraction of the price at $36.99, and is rated 5-star,” he said. “However, all the reviews are five-star and they were all posted on Nov. 20, 2018. These are red flags that the reviews are probably fake.”
Fakespot’s analysis of the product showed that in addition to the dates and the exclusively five-star reviews, the reviewers are all unverified purchasers who are using the same writing style across all of the reviews.
Unverified purchasers are those who never bought the item they’ve reviewed, so how could they know how great the product is?
Next, take a look at who is actually posting the review. Simply click on the reviewer’s user name and check out their profile.
Khalifah said if a reviewer profile shows an abnormal number of reviews, whether on a single day or spread out, it’s a giveaway that something else is behind their glowing opinions.
The reviewer was probably compensated for the reviews, Khalifah said.
“It looks like someone went on a shopping spree when in reality they were given the products for free in exchange for a five-star review,” he said. “A real consumer would not have this many reviews because they would have had to spend a small fortune to purchase those products.”
Fake reviewers may also try to make their profiles look more legit by seeding random one-star and two-star reviews to distract consumers from the fact that most of their reviews are five-stars, Khalifah said.
Of course, it’s impossible to research every reviewer when a product has hundreds or thousands of reviews, so consider using one of the fake review spotting sites we’ve mentioned here because they do the legwork for you.
Noonan said some paid reviewers are instructed “specifically not to leave a disclaimer or mention the quid-pro-quo arrangement anywhere in the review.”
He said you should be suspicious if the reviewer uses the same marketing language found in the product description.
“Maybe they say something like ‘I love the Extended Range Wifi Boosting Technology (TM) when I use these In-Ear High-Quality Soundtech (R) Bluetooth Headphones,'” Noonan said.
How often do you speak like that about any product?
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Some incentivized reviewers do share that they were compensated to review a product.
“What usually shocks consumers is when they find out that most major brands use incentivized reviewers to boost their products ratings online,” Khalifah said.
Amazon does this with Vine, an invitation-only program that asks trusted reviewers to post opinions on products, sometimes even before the product is released. Selected reviewers get the product for free, and they’re asked to post a review – good, bad or otherwise.
Khalifah said Fakespot doesn’t believe incentivized reviews are reliable because the reviewer is not actually buying the product. Also, the incentive to keep receiving free products causes the reviewer to keep giving five-star reviews, he said.
“It is difficult to tell if a review is incentivized unless the reviewer discloses what they received for review,” he said. “Amazon does a good job of labeling its Vine reviewers, but there are still a ton of incentivized reviews on Amazon that are not part of the Vine program.”
We don’t want to make you paranoid. When it comes to reviews, yes, be suspicious, but don’t assume everything is made up.
If you see a product with a preponderance of five-star reviews, it could simply be the sign of a quality product.
But no product or shopping experience is perfect all of the time, Khalifah said.
“Real consumer reviews will rate the product and the online shopping experience by providing details such as how the product functions and if it arrived on time or damaged,” he said. “A product with all five-star reviews and very few details besides ‘this product is great’ or ‘I love this company/product’ should be further scrutinized.”
Watch out for reviews that aren’t meant for the product you’re reading about.
Noonan calls it “review hijacking.”
This is when sellers steal reviews from other products that are different from the one they’re actually selling.
“You’ll be reading reviews for a screen protector and you’ll see reviews that say, ‘I loved this case!’ or ‘This charger was great,’ even though the product for sale is a screen protector,” he said.
The image below shows exactly what Noonan means. There are more than 700 reviews for the screen protector, but the reviews come from 567 different products, ReviewMeta found.
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There are plenty of ways a seller can manipulate its reviews beyond total fakes.
Sellers might aggressively remove negative reviews, Noonan said, so most of what you see will be the positive ones.
“This could create a ‘collective falsehood’ even if there isn’t a single ‘fake’ review,” Noonan said. “It’s always recommended to actually read the reviews themselves rather than just rely on the numbers alone.”
Others try to give themselves a positive boost from their fans.
“What about when a brand has a massive, loyal Instagram following and asks their followers to all go leave them reviews? That’s going to be a skewed sample population, but you couldn’t argue that those reviews are ‘fake,'” Noonan said.
There are times when someone will post fake negative reviews about a company.
(Read about what happened to this small business when bots targeted his company on Facebook.)
ReviewMeta offers what it calls a “Brigade Warning“ when it finds what appears to be negative fakes.
Noonan said the most egregious instances are for highly polarizing books, especially those from political figures.
He said it’s less common for one merchant to go after a competitor with fake negative reviews.
“If you think about it logically, would a seller rather spend their resources getting their own listing 100 fake positive reviews, or getting each of their 100 competitors one fake negative review?” Noonan said. “Especially considering that each of those competitors will likely report that negative review and try to fight to get it removed.”
When you’re looking online, if you see something questionable, use the tools that are available to you for further research.
Both ReviewMeta.com and Fakespot.com make their money through advertising, and both sites say companies that have fake reviews cannot buy off or otherwise influence the websites’ anti-fake review posts.
ReviewMeta.com said it has a very strict policy to never remove any pages from its site, nor will it adjust its algorithm specifically for any individual product or brand.
“We believe that all products should be analyzed with the same set of rules and the results should be published for all to see,” Noonan said. “What good would our tool be if we were changing or removing pages just because we received threats from brands?”
Noonan said ReviewMeta.com offers brands an opportunity to post an official response, which ReviewMeta.com will link to at the top of the page for every one of their products. Here is an example.
ReviewMeta.com is free, and it allows you to paste any Amazon product URL into a search box and you’ll get a detailed report on the product’s reviews.
Fakespot.com is also free, allowing you to cut and paste a URL to get a report. It covers reviews on Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp and Walmart.
Fakespot also offers a Chrome extension that allows users to get real time Fakespot Grades that will display while you shop on Amazon.
Because Amazon is, well, downright huge, we wanted to know more about what the company does to combat the fakes.
An Amazon spokesperson said the company realizes that millions of customers make informed buying decisions every day using its customer reviews.
“We take this responsibility very seriously and defend the integrity of reviews by taking aggressive action to prevent abuse and protect customers from dishonest parties who are abusing the reviews system,” Amazon said.
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This has to be a shared responsibility, though. Amazon is so huge that it needs its customers to be a part of the solution.
Customers can report suspicious reviews using the “report abuse” link under every review, and Amazon investigates each claim, the spokesperson said.
“We suspend, ban or pursue legal action against these bad actors as well as suppress all known inauthentic reviews,” the company said.
Amazon said it makes significant investments to detect fake reviews, using automated systems and machine learning, which the company said allows it “to scale quickly and respond to abuse faster.”
And when it identifies a company that has abused the system, they’re suspended or banned from Amazon. In fact, the company said, it has filed lawsuits against more than 1,000 defendants for “reviews abuse.”
“We give more weight to newer, more helpful reviews, apply strict criteria to qualify for the Amazon verified purchase badge and enforce a significant dollar amount requirement to participate in our community,” Amazon said. “Customer reviews are one of the most valuable tools we offer for making informed purchase decisions and we work hard to make sure they are doing their job.”
Khalifah said Amazon, and the Amazon community, does a good job of reporting sellers who try to game the system. However, because Amazon is so large, it is hard for them to catch everyone fast enough.
“We’ve noticed that Amazon usually removes fake reviews a month or two after we identify them,” he said.
So reviews may not come down in time for some consumers.
Noonan agreed that Amazon does a pretty good job of monitoring reviews on its site.
“I think that Amazon gets a lot of heat from the public about their reviews, but for the vast majority of products, there’s really no major issue,” Noonan said. “ReviewMeta.com has also detected literally millions of deleted reviews on Amazon, so they are clearly taking action against some sellers.”
Noonan said he frequently sees products that were full of fake reviews disappear from Amazon.
But, he said, it seems that for some of the most competitive categories – especially for products with low manufacturing costs and high margins – the competition appears to be driving sellers to break the rules and get questionable reviews.
That means you have to keep your guard up.
Shop smart, Jersey.
