I often fear that when looking up online retailers, that the reviews that you see might not be trustworthy. There is the risk not only of reviews being bought and hence artificially high, or of low or negative reviews being removed. How can you be sure that what you are seeing is how people actually think about the company? I don't want to get burned, but there are some items that I would like to buy, and they are only available from small, independent retailers.
You can try looking up reviews on YouTube. I've done that before and found people posted up videos of the product and gave a review, and used it so you can see how it works and if it looks of good quality before you purchase it. I'm sure you can find video reviews of most things from everyday regular people. Another way is to find online forums for that specific product. You'll see people giving their opinion. But for the most part, you can tell what is a fake review and what's not. You can also find out if the company or product has a social media site, and ask people on their page what they thought of it. Ask your friends on social media if they know anything about it.
I always try and find some reviews from third party sources if i can find it. Usually, from searching on Google, I will find at least one or two articles in blogs or some youtube videos that will give me a good picture of whether or not the reviews are accurate. Most of the time, the independent reviews I've found line up with the actual reviews on the site, and even the site itself as reviewers usually also speak about the quality of the service apart from the quality of the product shipped. If there are no existing reviews outside the site, I'd maybe stay away for a while until I find one, or I would just try them out first with a less expensive item.
Always check out the reviewer too, if they make a couple of reviews then be wary especially if it is only one and also look at what else they buy. In this day and age it's hard to find impartial reviews as some people expect too much and as a result give an unfair review. These days it's hard to delete a review unless the writer wishes to do so. When there are a number of high reviews I look at the comments and whether they say the same thing.
Read the review itself. How a review is written can give you a clear indication of whether the review is genuine or not. A genuine review will be objective. All reviews that focus solely on the positive attributes of whatever it is you want to buy probably is a fake review. Take a look around the net and find out what if anyone else has bought something from the retailers. If you can't find anything then head the other way.
You are right to be cautious, OP. In my days of trying to earn some extra income via the freelancer website, Fiverr, I came across quite a few gigs where people would purchase products from Amazon, and write a verified review. A positive verified review, regardless of whether or not the product in question did what it was supposed to do. People will do a lot of things in order to get ahead, so I wouldn't put it past some of these retailers if they were doing similar things to become more popular.
Exactly. I definitely trust online reviews, in fact, they're very important to me; I won't buy from a store without reading them. But if there are many positive and negative reviews, that oftentimes means something fishy is going on: the store may be leaving fake positive reviews, with real people leaving the negative reviews. For that reason, I always check the review section and don't just trust the overall rating.
There have been certain instances where I have trusted reviews, because they have had both positive points and negative points regarding the product, and then when the product actually arrives and I discover all of its faults, I will re-read the review sections, and a lot of the time there are more genuine reviews highlighting the faults that I myself have discovered. It is a little strange.
Truly reviews are not that accurate. When we shop online, especially for accommodation when we have a trip abroad, we check on the negative review. When there is only one negative and the rest of the reviews are positive, we can ignore the negative. Especially in hotels, we have been using booking.com for our last 3 trips - China, Malaysia, Vietnam - and the hotels we got are all good and they were all based on reviews.
Wonderful replies, many thanks! The idea of searching for online video reviews had genuinely not occurred to me, and I'm not sure why if I'm honest. It would be much harder to fake because you'd see the product itself, both how it looks and how it responds to use by the reviewer. What about reviews through a Facebook page-can the page owner delete negative reviews in the same way that they are able to delete negative comments that are posted to statuses, or to their wall?
Well, since the fake review stuff is so prevalent online, it is good to read multiple reviews. One of the things I like that Amazon is now doing is adding verified purchases. It is a good way to find products that people have actually used and reviewed. I make certain that I can get the products that have already been reviewed so I know what I am looking to buy has already been used by someone else.
I don't know if I trust any online retailer review, honestly. Most of the time, these retailers are probably posting these "reviews" just to boost the rep of their company so more customers will buy from them. Now, I'm not saying that EVERY retailer is being tricky like this, but it's always good to do your own research. I would ask around with your friends to see if they ever went through this retailer. Always look it up online through your search engines. I know that most of the time someone has written a review on something I need. Especially if it's a popular retailer. I hope you find the answers that you need!
I think going to sites likeLog In can help you check out if a site is fraudulent or not. Reviews can be quite misleading or fake, so I think searching for the retailer or site in question via forums or google will help you.
Lol. That is always something that I have been suspicious of too - whether or not the online retailers themselves were posting, or had posted some of the reviews. There are websites that review survey websites, and the ones with the good reviews that I have had bad experiences with personally, I often find myself looking at when the reviews were posted, and if there is a pattern amongst the names that reviews were posted under on certain dates lol.
I write reviews so I know that it's true. I find negative reviews too about sites. These negative reviews are very poignant. Everyone who writes reviews hopes it helps people trying to find out just the simple truth. I feel you can trust reviews.
The news broke yesterday that Amazon is actually filing lawsuits against over 1000 people who have been offering to post positive paid reviews on various Amazon product listings. One of the people offering the service even went so far to thwart their verification process by having the vendor send them an empty package, so they could have some receipt of the shipment as proof to show Amazon. Amazon tricked a few of these people by purchasing their services on Fiverr. As of this writing, Fiverr still hasn't removed the listings, and there are still folks up there offering to do this while others are getting sued. Strangely they seem to be suing the people doing the fake reviews rather than the vendors who were purchasing them or Fiverr for hosting the gigs.
Oh wow. Really? sounds serious. I am so happy that I didn't post a gig similar to this on Fiverr. It always seemed like a bit too much trouble to me, because I couldn't be bothered to have to get past the verification process, which is mostly why I did not go ahead with providing a gig such as this. I am glad that they are doing this though, because it sucks to spend money on something under the influence of a false positive review, and then the product is nowhere near as good as it is said to be.
I wouldn't trust video reviews because they are obviously doing it to monetize their channel and to go to all that effort means there is something in it for them. Most people (normal and real) wouldn't do this, and would do it as part of their part of their blog or website. As for Facebook, the person who runs the admin for the page can delete any comments and prevent people from commenting or deleting their own comments. I was on one site and wrote a nice post, but then the owner turned nasty and I tried to delete it. I couldn't, but I could edit it, so I edited it to ..., and in the end he deleted it.
I've found it's helpful to do a search on Twitter. Often, a company will retweet positive reviews/tweets about their product, so if you go to the company's Twitter page you will see those. But, if you do a general search on the company name, you'll also see negative reviews/feedback, so you can get a more well rounded opinion. Also keep in mind that some people will complain in an attempt to get things such as coupons, discounts and refunds.
Yeah, I am with Neobux and have been with them for quite a while now. I would have to say that when I click the adverts that have videos on the page, and people are talking about their new money making system in videos, It all feels rather scammy to me, and it makes me not want to go and investigate. So video reviews aren't always a good thing.
