Back in the day when I first discovered Amazon (my first order was in 1995). I thought about what a great place it was to get some books. Amazon started in July 1995 as a website that sold books and nothing else. The creator of Amazon, Jeff Bezos thought about the future of the company as having fantastic growth opportunities and possibly becoming the largest online retailer in the future. I think he may have been correct.
By-the-way, a couple of interesting tidbits I found while researching this column. One of the first names for Amazon was supposed to be Cadabra.com (like abracadabra) but Mr. Bezos was told that may not be good as it could be confused with “Cadaver” (yes, just like a dead body) which would not be good. Later he thought about and registered the domain names of Awake.com, Browse.com, and Relentless.com. If you try those today, they may still take you to Amazon.com. There may be others. Also, the original logo for Amazon was represented by the letter, “A” with the Amazon River running through it.
But back to my beginning thoughts. I used to like and appreciate Amazon reviews. The reason being that before you decided to purchase an item, you could check the reviews of other buyers. Some reviews may be good and some may be bad. But as I always said and say today, “Toss out the top and bottom ten percent of them and go with the middle for a more realistic assessment.”
However, today the review system has been abused by some owners and competitors of items for sale. There are some people out there who earn a living by doing fake reviews of products on Amazon and many other online sales sites. They either over promote its features capabilities or degrade its actual worthiness. Just think if you owned a Widget Factory and you had 3,000 employees. You could ask all of your employees to do a great five-star review of your latest widget. Then your product would be purchased by people expecting the best. Also, a competitor does the same thing in the opposite direction and your sales drop.
First off, Amazon says it works hard to stop “paid” reviews since they skew reality and give false impressions to buyers. What things can you look for to indicate a fake review? Here are some contenders. Many are grammar and spelling errors. Everyone spells words wrong (especially since autocorrect) on occasion may confuse words like, “there,” “their,” or “they’re,” but not consistently. Sometimes the verbiage may be constructed so it does not quite make sense. Many reviewers’ native language is not English, and they handle it poorly. Next, would be generalizations. Like for a baseball bat, it may say something like, “works really well,” “well designed,” “looks great,” “great color,” or some other non-detailed review. A real review may say, “my 8-year old kid made a couple of great hits with this bat,” “this reminds me of a major league bat,” “it looks and feels like the one I broke 4 years ago” or “I have been looking for a bat like this for years.”
You can also look at the reviewer profile by clicking on their names. See if they have done 5,000 reviews (warning) or 15-25 like many people. Also, read some of their other reviews and see if they sound or look similar.
There are other things you can check but those are my basics. Multiple sites online offer to review the reviews on Amazon for fakes. The one I like the most is ReviewMeta.com. If you are a statistics/numbers lover you will enjoy it. You copy the link for the item from the Amazon product, and paste it on the ReviewMeta site. It will evaluate and give you lots of information and even an educated guess at what may be a more accurate rating.
As I have said before, “Caveat Emptor.”
