We do lots of online shopping and we see lots of reviews posted for a product. There are chances most of the reviews might be genuine and few might (sometimes majority of reviews) be fake. It’s highly difficult to separate out the genuine reviews for a product from the huge list of reviews. But thankfully the CNET reviewer Dong Ngo pointed out few tips to identify the fake product reviews. He says, most of the time the vendors would have left reviews to promote their products and by smear competitors.
Well, here are the few tips from Dong Ngo.
All credits to the product without any negative sides or totally pointing out negative sides for the good quality product
There are chances that every product will have at least one or two glitches. If you find a review that had only praises for the product without any downsides and with 5 stars as “Perfect” or “Absolutely the best” are might be fake (may not be, but mostly such reviews are biased and will be a review of the vendor). So, just think before totally agreeing.
Similarly if the review had only listed the downsides of the product, then probably it could been by the competitor.
Look out for the names of the Reviewer
Most of the fake reviews would have been from the names that are just a variation of the another screen names, for instance – such names will be meaningless random names starting with few alphabets and ending with random numbers. Because such reviewers’ would never use their original names.
Reviewing only the products from the same vendor or of only few vendors
Most of the fake reviewers would have been employed by the single vendor or by few vendors, Of course not by all the vendors on a Shopping website. Those reviewers would have the habit of reviewing only the products of those vendors and not the other products.
Review dates
Don’t agree to the hands-on reviews of the product that were released recently. For example, the real consumer would not have experienced the product so quickly. Such fake reviews would have been posted immediately after the product launch. And look out for the dates of the reviews, be aware of the 5 star reviews that were posted during the same day or around the same dates., those were flooded in a hurry by fake review accounts.
Of course, the tone of the review…
The reviews that speaks commercially or describes the features of the product might be fake. For example, a genuine reviewer might not explain the feature of product (which would be already available in the product description), whereas he would be interested only to convey his experience with the product and not the features of it.
Finally, Dong Ngo says these tips may not be perfect to identify the fake reviews, but can help you to guess the fake one. Our thanks to Dong Ngo post on Cnet.
Happy and Safe Shopping!
