When I see a product with about ~50 reviews and they are all either GLOWING with praise, full of pictures, include videos, or otherwise clearly took more than a few minutes to write, it's a good tell the reviews are mostly paid for.
I don't know how to handle this from Amazon's angle... how about limiting how many items a buyer can review from a certain seller? Or force them to contribute a 3- or 4-star review every so often, instead of all 5's? (this one's too easy to game - you just buy a 30ยข irrelevant item every now and then and review it poorly.)
It's a hard problem to solve for Amazon, and I don't trust them to care enough to fix it. In the meantime, I stick with volume as my indicator for quality. It's very unlikely a company paid for nearly 2,000 5-star reviews, so products with LOTS of reviews are the ones I usually end up purchasing.
Now I'm confused. I used reviewmeta.com and www.fakespot.com for the first time on a product I'm thinking of buying (a fitness tracker). Reviewmeta gave a revised rating of 4.6, down from the Amazon rating of 4.8. Fakespot gave the product a rating of "F".
How am I expected to believe that these metareview sites, or others like them, are providing any better information than the original Amazon reviews?
I don't know how to handle this from Amazon's angle... how about limiting how many items a buyer can review from a certain seller? Or force them to contribute a 3- or 4-star review every so often, instead of all 5's? (this one's too easy to game - you just buy a 30ยข irrelevant item every now and then and review it poorly.)
It's a hard problem to solve for Amazon, and I don't trust them to care enough to fix it. In the meantime, I stick with volume as my indicator for quality. It's very unlikely a company paid for nearly 2,000 5-star reviews, so products with LOTS of reviews are the ones I usually end up purchasing.