I am a big fan of shopping on Amazon.com. The prices are usually competitive and the variety can’t be beat. Being online, it makes comparison shopping a breeze. Most of the time I am shopping for a specific product from a specific brand. Sometimes when I am looking more generally and weighing my options, I have had a few times when I seem to be faced with no good choice as all of the products have negative reviews. Other times, a product seems too good to be true with so many glowing positive reviews.
I know plenty of people run bots against Amazon products or pay people to shape the reviews in their favor. Instead of trying to reviews the reviews, there are two websites that can help judge the trustworthiness of a product’s reviews. There are great tools to add to Amazon price tracking tools previously posted like The Tracktor or CamelCamelCamel.
Fakespot grades reviews on Amazon products. It will assign a letter grade to a specific product and another grade for the company after you paste in the URL to the page. It shows you a percentage of reviews that are believed to be genuine as well as providing a summary of the reviews and a “word cloud” to see what words stand out from the reviews.
As an added bonus, Fakespot also grades the reviews on a business’s Yelp listing.
ReviewMeta works similarly to Fakespot, analyzing reviews on products against Amazon.com and other country-based Amazon sites and BodyBuilding.com. It presents the average rating from Amazon and then provides an adjusted rating that takes bot reviews into considerations. It takes into consideration suspicious reviewers, reviews using the same phrases, and many other indicators that would designate a skewed review system. It then shows a section of Most Trusted Reviews so you can see what the trustworthy reviews have to say about the product without falling for any hype from bots.
