Check the authenticity of reviews posted on Amazon before validating your purchases.
Who hasn’t already been disappointed with a purchase made on Amazon when buyers’ reviews were overwhelming? False reviews posted on Jeff Bezos’ site have become commonplace and do not spare any product category.
In question, unscrupulous brands and sellers, who offer free products on social networks, via a promotion code or a PayPal refund, in exchange for positive ratings and comments.
Don’t trust “Verified Purchase”
By proceeding in this manner, sellers try to cover their tracks, but more importantly ensure that they get positive comments stamped “Verified Purchase”. The system put in place by Amazon to ensure that a comment posted has been published by someone who has purchased the product on its platform is therefore very far from reliable.
Even worse, some sellers put a little flyer in the boxes of their merchandise explaining to buyers that they will get a voucher valid on Amazon, in exchange for a review of the product purchased. If nothing indicates that the comment must be positive, the buyer has every interest in his comment being … if he wants to receive his gift.
Read negative reviews first
If the item you want to buy on Amazon got ratings from other buyers, read the negative reviews first. Generally, people are more likely to post a comment when they encounter a problem with a product. You will most certainly learn a lot more from reading the negative comments rather than the positive ones.
Positive comments that are too well structured and accompanied by photos or videos should be taken with a grain of salt. If people took that long to post a positive review about a product on Amazon, it’s very likely that they received a gift in return.
In addition, certain products sold in France and which would not have comments are often sold in other countries. Where reviews are available in other languages, Amazon indicates so. If you are multilingual, don’t hesitate to take a look.
Install an extension in your web browser or an application on your smartphone
While some fake reviews are easy enough to spot, others can lead to doubt. To stop being fooled, tools have been created. ReviewMeta is one of them and comes as an online service, web browser extensions, and Android and iOS mobile apps.
Once installed, ReviewMeta allows you to check with a few clicks whether the comments of the article you are eyeing are legitimate.
The choice of this service is not due to chance. ReviewMeta is one of the few, if not the only tool at present, to work with the French version of Amazon. FakeSpot, another service similar to ReviewMeta exists, but is only for the US version of Amazon.
1. Download the browser extension or mobile app
Start by downloading ReviewMeta. Available in the form of a Chrome and Firefox extension, but also available as an Android and iOS mobile application, the service allows, using an algorithm, to analyze the comments published on Amazon to deduce the false rate. review before estimating the actual rating based on legitimate reviews.
- Download ReviewMeta for Google Chrome (Free)
- Download ReviewMeta for Firefox (Free)
- Download ReviewMeta for Android (Free)
- Download ReviewMeta for iPhone (Free)
2. Analyze an article
Open the page for an Amazon product that you covet. At the top right of the browser, the ReviewMeta icon displays a number: this is the “adjusted” rating of the product viewed.
Please note, however, that this adjusted rating does not lift the veil on the legitimacy of the opinions and ratings published. Click the button to launch the full product analysis on ReviewMeta and wait.
From a smartphone, you must first go to the page of the article you want to analyze, from the mobile web browser, or from the Amazon application. Then just press the share button in the product sheet, then select ReviewMeta to analyze the URL of the object in the application.
3. Interpret the result
The ReviewMeta analysis result page is in English, but its interpretation should not pose a major problem.
For the analyzed product, ReviewMeta displays three types of alerts: Pass (green), when comments are legitimate, Warn (yellow), when reviews seem suspicious, and Fail (red) when the extension has found false comments. .
4. View detailed analysis information
Go down to the page of the analysis carried out by ReviewMeta. A Report Card section provides an overview of the elements tested by the ReviewMeta algorithm.
For each criterion analyzed, you find the same alerts seen previously: Pass, Warn, and Fail. Clicking on each element takes you directly to the detailed section displayed further down in the analysis.
We then discover several interesting statistics that allow us to put abnormally positive opinions into perspective.
ReviewMeta indicates, for example, the number of comments that have been deleted, or an estimate, in percentage, of the number of users who have given their opinion only on the tested product, and much more.
It is therefore advisable to carefully consult the results of the analysis proposed by ReviewMeta which, if not perfect, at least gives an idea as to the authenticity of the comments and positive ratings.