Sometimes Amazon reviews seem suspicious to me. I've seen products from companies I've never heard of with hundreds of overwhelmingly positive reviews and the same thing for books that I've seen with low scores on other sites. Maybe it's me just being paranoid though. I always look for negative reviews first for products with high ratings. When I look at games on Steam I automatically filter out the positive reviews because many of them are subjective. I used to give in to buying games with positive of high ratings and reviews but I try not to rely on them anymore. I probably should've posted this in the product review section by the way.
I'm right with you on the Amazon thing...but then again that's how I'm feeling about a lot of reviews in general lately. Some of them just seem TOO overwhelmingly positive. It starts to not even feel realistic at all.
It is easy to spot fake reviews. They normally do not sound genuine as they are written by people who have never had any experience with the product. They will spend so much writing about how the product is so good and fail to mention some of the defect it has. I do not trust reviews about products from China I have nothing against the country.
There are companies who will pay you if you write a review for their product, so that's why you might see glowing reviews everywhere. As curious as this might sound, but I always look out for spelling mistakes. I can sense if a person is genuine or not by the choice of their words and mistakes. I like people who are critical and list the ups and downs of their experiences.
I don't trust most of the reviews anywhere because I have seen companies trying to pay for reviews. I like the Amazon Vine program because you know they actually got the product. When there is a lot of reviews for one product then it seems more valid than most other ones. It has to have decent grammar but most importantly, it should sound real.
You are totally right about Amazon!! I thought I was going crazy about that. I went to buy an energy supplement there once and all the reviews were raving about it in a very suspicious and shady way! I, of course, did not buy it. I also don't trust reviews on Youtube. I always look for the disclaimer, because very often the person doing the review is getting paid to review it. That is why you need to be careful who you trust!
All review on a shopping site like Amazon I definitely will not even read. I'll go there to see if I can buy their product their cheaper than I can elsewhere. Otherwise, depending on the product I want to buy I'll find reviews about the product elsewhere on the net. I I read a few objective reviews then it will be easy to decide if it is the right product to buy or not. Do your research elsewhere then go to your preferred shopping site to buy the product. If you rely on buyer reviews, you might regret it.
Though I love shopping Amazon, I have a first person account regarding paid reviews. I've worked with oDesk since 2009 and met some characters though most clients are legitimate. Last year, a prospect contacted about doing some PR work for a music company. Since I'm a marketing major, this sounds great! Anyway, they said that details would be discussed during a Skype interview. They stood me up with no explanation until I withdrew my application and then I got an apology along with a request to reschedule. Reluctantly, I did and once we got everything together, I found this was not a music company like Sam Ash or Warner Bros. This was writing Amazon reviews for acoustic guitar lessons. Thing is, I don't play any instrument and shortly afterward, I found the thing to be so messy that I dropped out before campaign launch. The job paid pennies so there was no loss except time.
I trust some of the reviews on Amazon, but I also check the reviews on Walmart.com and a couple of review sites. If I'm trying to decide whether to buy a video game, I check IGN's reviews or watch a gameplay video on Youtube. I know that some of the reviews on Amazon come from hired shills so I only pay attention to the ones that talk about the pros and cons of the product.
I trust forum reviews the most. Simply because those people have nothing to gain by endorsing a product. They are not associated with the company at all. I do not trust Amazon reviews because most of those sellers purchase reviews. There are ways to do that. There are online sites that offer them for a small fee. For that reason i do not trust them. YouTube is a good source for reviews also. It is a user site. That means people always give unbiased opinions.
One of the things to watch out for is a rash of reviews all on the same day or all in the same month. Those are often the paid reviews. Check out 'my other reviews' for each username on each review and you'll find the fake reviewers. Often many sites offer the same products as Amazon.com and they pull the reviews from Amazon without saying that's where they're from, so don't trust them just because it's on another domain.
I recently discovered that there are companies out there that pay for reviews, positive reviews that is. I never knew something like this existed until I done a random search on another topic. I'm so glad I hardly ever read reviews now. Why should I when 9 times out of 10, they are fake? Who wants a random fake review? I'm not even sure I'd look at reviews as an honest thing anymore. I can't believe companies actually do this.
I never trust amazon reviews, ever. So many knee jerk 1 star "this didn't work right for me!!!" "this company sucks and is evil!!" waaaahmbulance crap or the opposite. I never trust any kind of book review for nutrition related stuff either, I know for a fact that the writers can and WILL post overly positive stuff to curve the scale. I learned that the hard way when I was a far more naive person. Really, the only trustworther reviews are from people you know or that have tastes like you whom you talk to or reads their blog. Professional reviewers are a joke and user reviews on any site aren't that much better.
I thought at one point Amazon switched over to only allowing you to review products that they have a record of you purchasing through there. Did they do away with this or something? I tried to review an Iced Tea maker I had bought at Wal-Mart, warning others that it's a piece of junk and leaks all over the counter, but they wouldn't let me review it because I hadn't purchased it through Amazon. However I've regularly seen ads on these micro job sites wanting you to write fake reviews for various products on there, so maybe they changed their policies. I haven't written a review on Amazon in a long time. Come to think of it, I do recall hearing about some high profile authors getting busted for penning their own positive reviews under aliases.
When it comes to video games for instance, I never look at the "official" reviews, or the most famous website reviews like IGN or Gamespot. I got a friend of mine who works at Square, he told me reviews are easily "bribed" instead I turn to youtubers, and see for myself. Especially negative biased youtubers.
I don't trust reviews from people who don't have the tag that they have purchased the product for themselves. I sometimes see reviews from people who don't seem to have bought from Amazon, and I'm seriously wondering why they would even allow this. I think most of them are just fans of competing brands and some might even be paid by them to leave negative reviews, which I think is awful for the market since it just stirs up confusion and it lessens the accuracy of results in the capitalist market due to dirty tactics.
I do most of my shopping on Amazon, and I always skim through and make sure most reviews have the "Verified Purchase" tag. The more expensive or important the item is, the more thought I put into it. Some people leave bad reviews because they ordered the product assuming it would do something it wasn't intended for. This seems to be pretty common in electronics for some reason. If I'm unsatisfied with the reviews, I look the product up on other sites to make sure it's not just the seller reviewing it. Another thing with Amazon, they tend to lump reviews for similar items together. A lot of sellers will sell multiple things, for example they'll have a silver pair of sunglasses, with the option for other colors. If you click on that, it'll take you to things that might not even be the same product (one might be aviators, the other might be cheap reading glasses) but all of the reviews will be on the same page, so it's a case-by-case basis.
I tend to ignore the quick reviews, the ones that are less than 20 words are not worth me taking into consideration. I also check out the good reviews and the bad reviews, you have to read each in equal measure to get a good feel about the product.
I think 99,9% of all reviews on the internet are commercially driven so I stick to reviews of consumer organisations or use my own common sense instead ;-)
