Shopping Site Reviews - Be Careful!

It all started when…

I was looking for a different kind of phone mount from the one I already have, for the warmer weather. This one looks like a pretty good one. The rating, 4.8, is one of the highest I’ve seen for any product. That makes me nervous. Anytime you come across a product that has a very high rating like this one, you should go through the reviews much past the initial first page of reviews to see if the product is “gaming the system” for higher ratings. The sad thing about this particular product is that is actually still looks pretty good. The reviews are almost all fake, and I’ve reported all the profiles that had more than one review. This is the worst case I’ve ever seen(and I do a LOT of online shopping). If you look at the picture above, you’ll see many tabs open. Each one that has a “P” is a profile of a “user” that I reported. If you spot some fakes, please take a minute to report that profile too. It really could make a difference to get more accurate reviews. Spotting these were pretty easy since many of them said exactly the same thing, had about fifty reviews per user, and were rating almost all of the same products.

AMAZON!(and all the other shopping sites)

Quit letting users submit more than one review for any one product!

Amazon already has a way to edit a review, so I see no reason why any product should have more than one review per person. I can understand if a product has the same name, but a newer product that may be improved, or made worse, but for the exact same one, no.

I use the OneTab utility that will save open tabs so you can go back to them later. This link is to all the tabs you see in the picture above with the product and the profiles. http://bit.ly/FakeAmazonReviewsList

I’ll be very interested to see what happens to the reviews on this page and if the seller is allowed to keep selling on Amazon. From the time I started reporting profiles, until I started writing this page, the number of reviews dropped from 305 down to 292.