Have Online Reviews Lost All Value?
Have Online Reviews
Lost All Value?
The internet is so saturated
with 5-Star praise—some genuine, much paid for—that it’s difficult to know
which sites you can trust
By Rebecca Dolan Sept. 27, 2019 1:49 pm ET
YES
TRY TO SHOP for
toothpaste on Amazon and dozens of brands pop up with identical 4.5-star
ratings. Crest? Colgate? Tom’s? Does it matter? Even if you try to
differentiate based on reviews, you face thousands to comb through—and odds are
a good number of those are fake.
Chris McCabe, who evaluated seller performance while employed at
Amazon and who now runs a consulting firm for its retailers, estimates the
number of inauthentic reviews on the site to be around 30%. Amazon estimates it
at less than 1% and said it spent more than $400 million last year alone to
protect customers from reviews abuse, fraud and misconduct, leading to action
against more than 5 million reviewers. Even so, “Amazon doesn’t have the right
defenses,” Mr. McCabe said.
Amazon is just one of many sites
where shady practices show up in reviews. In recent years, an increasing amount
of information has surfaced about how vendors hire click farms to post positive
comments about their products. TripAdvisor recently
reported that, last year, its review analysis system rejected 1.4 million
submissions out of 66 million.
Sephora.com reviews came under scrutiny in 2018 when emails
posted to Reddit revealed that some staffers at skin care brand Sunday Riley
were sent instructions for posting positive product reviews, including tips to
create multiple fake accounts. Sunday Riley acknowledged the emails at the time
via its verified Instagram account stating, “Yes, the email was sent by a
former employee” and defending its actions by adding that “competitors often
post negative reviews of products to swing opinion.” Sunday Riley didn’t
respond to emails requesting comment. Sephora responded by sending a link to
its terms for posting reviews, which require registering with an email.
The quid pro quo nature of digital relationships on apps like
Uber has created ratings inflation; riders and drivers rarely score each other
below four stars for fear of retaliatory ratings—especially since a low score
can get you locked out of hitching future rides.
Online influencers generate a different kind of biased review;
many who post about brands on social media are compensated with money or free
products. Often, influencers are vague at best about these connections,
unlawfully misleading at worst. In 2017, the FTC sent a letter to 91
influencers outlining the need to “clearly and conspicuously” disclose material
connections in captions. A simple “thanks” to a brand, the FTC said, doesn’t
make a connection sufficiently transparent for shoppers.
The only reviews you can absolutely trust are those from people
you know, so many sites battling review scams offer ways to share
recommendations with actual friends. And if you’re still looking for
toothpaste, you’re better off asking a dentist anyway.
NO
REVIEWS HELP GREASE the
wheels of online shopping and help people mitigate risk when they hand over
cash on the internet. “Unfortunately, reviews are the only way for us to gauge
if a seller or product or business is actually of good quality,” said Saoud
Khalifah, CEO of Fakespot, which is among the growing list of watchdog sites
that use algorithms to analyze the authenticity of online praise. “You can’t
physically touch it, you can’t physically judge it, so you need the opinions of
others.”
Through searches on aggregating sites
like Amazon, Yelp and TripAdvisor, reviews continue to
significantly impact where and how consumers spend their hard-earned dollars.
And even though the sleazy antics of some influencers are well-documented, many
of their fans continue to be convinced by paid posts.
So reviews aren’t going anywhere. But there are ways you can
ensure you’re using them smartly. “The biggest thing I tell people is to read
the reviews, don’t just notice the 4.8 stars,” said Tommy Noonan, founder of
ReviewMeta, a site that analyzes Amazon ratings.
Most online retailers have systems in place to detect fraudulent
content, looking for things like repetitive language, large numbers of reviews
written on the same day or from the same IP address and 5-star reviews that
don’t even mention the product in question. But it’s difficult to keep up with
the volume.
With a heavily reviewed product, view the sheer volume of
comments with skepticism. Nathalie Nahai, author of “Webs of Influence: The
Psychology of Online Persuasion,” pointed to statistical data collected by
three universities including Stanford, published in “Psychological Science,”
that suggests customers are more likely to buy a product with a high number of
reviews, even though products with fewer reviews might be of better quality.
ReviewMeta and Fakespot are useful
sites for estimating the authenticity of product reviews. Simply copy and paste
an Amazon link into ReviewMeta, and its system will estimate the percentage of
fake reviews and calculate an adjusted star rating. Fakespot similarly runs
algorithms to identify suspicious patterns and profiles from links for online
retail sites like Sephora, Steam, Walmart and Best Buy .
Once you’re assured that a site has a higher percentage of
authentic reviews, fellow shoppers are a great way to get a read on a product
without having to do excessive in-store recon.
If all else fails, and you end up with a 5-star-rated dud,
return it. When Mr. Noonan can’t find options that pass ReviewMeta’s test, he
takes advantage of Amazon’s generous return policy. “I was recently buying a
MacBook charger—a category where all the products seem to have really questionable
reviews—so I bought two,” he said. Hopefully he left a nice review for the one
he kept.
How
To Catch a Fake / Five tips for spotting a shoddy online review
1.
Not everything that glistens is gold.
“If you look at an item’s breakdown, and everything is
five-stars, and there’s hundreds of them, that’s a red flag,” said Saoud
Khalifah, CEO of FakeSpot. Instead, a mix of ratings, from one to five stars,
suggests the reviews may be more authentic.
2.
Bad reviews can’t always be trusted, either.
When Chris McCabe, who runs a consultancy for Amazon retailers,
needs to use online reviews, he stays away from those that seem very repetitive
and “total slams” that don’t mention both pros and cons. Both indicators can
suggest a fake.
3.
Not all online retailers are created equal.
Yelp has one of the most aggressive review-monitoring systems.
Consumer alerts pop up on some business’s pages warning customers that the
venue may be engaging in review manipulation, based on suspicious activity.
4.
Don’t give in to influence.
The FTC’s guidelines to online influencers are strict. Hashtags
like #ambassador or #sp (for sponsored post) aren’t sufficiently clear. If they
were given money or free products, they’re legally required to make it
unambiguously clear. Follow those who do.
5.
Basic writing and grammar skills are key.
If you look at a critique’s grammar and spelling, “you can
figure out if it’s originating from a review farm in Asia,” said Mr. Khalifah.
“If to English speakers, [reviews] don’t make sense, that’s a really telltale
sign something is off.”
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