The first thing people do when deciding whether to buy something online is check the customer reviews. A quick scan of the most recent reviews can tell you a great deal about whether a product is worth your money.
Unfortunately, there are unscrupulous sellers who commission positive reviews in order to mislead buyers into purchasing their second-rate goods. This deceitful practice means buyers often waste their time trying to return the inferior product and even lose their money in some instances.
So how can you check which reviews on Amazon can be trusted? Which Amazon reviews are fake?
The Best Amazon Fake Review Checkers
As a buyer, it is important to arm yourself with the right tools to weed out those sneaky fake reviews to avoid losing your time and money. Read on to find out the best tools that will help you identify fake Amazon reviews.
1. ReviewMeta
ReviewMeta is a customer review checker that analyzes reviews using a wide variety of tests to return a rating based only on legitimate reviews. ReviewMeta's goal is to identify and remove 'unnatural reviews' using data and algorithms, and show what unbiased shoppers really think of a product.
Using ReviewMeta is simple: just copy and paste an Amazon URL and press Go. ReviewMeta will return an Adjusted Rating of reviews from only legitimate buyers, with the 'unnatural' reviews filtered out.
ReviewMeta will also tell you the percentage of customer reviews that are "unnatural" alongside a Report Card that awards a pass, warn, or fail from a number of categories such as the number of acceptable unverified purchases, and suspicious reviewers.
Besides Reviewmeta's browser analysis tool, there are also Chrome, Firefox, and Edge browser extensions, and iOS and Android apps.
2. Fakespot
Fakespot promises to help you identify and avoid shady sellers who use dishonest customer reviews. The company uses propriety AI technology to detect suspicious activity by analyzing billions of customer reviews.
It's easy to find out how authentic a product's customer reviews are—just enter a URL in Fakespot's analyzer and it will return a review grade between A to F based on the authenticity of the customer reviews. An adjusted customer rating will also be provided that re-calculates the customer ratings of a product after excluding the suspicious ratings.
Fakespot also provides an overview with information that you might find useful, such as the most common words found in the reviews, and how much deception is detected in the reviews.
Fakespot's browser extension has a few extra features that are not present in the webpage analyzer, such as whether a seller is approved or poorly rated and recommended product alternatives.
In addition to the URL analyzer accessible through their website, Fakespot is also available on both Chrome and Firefox extensions, and Android app, so you'll always find shady sellers no matter how you shop. Sadly, Apple removed the iOS version from the App Store.
3. TheReviewIndex
TheReviewIndex detects suspicious patterns in customer reviews by crawling data and using neural networks to return insights.
To use TheReviewIndex, paste an Amazon product URL and press Summarize. TheReviewIndex will return an Overview with a score out of 10, and a Spam Test result of pass, warn, or fail. Scrolling down, the Review Summary has a handy feature that groups reviews by categories like Price and Reliability and whether the reviews were mainly negative or positive in regarding the category.
The Spam Test detects abnormal reviewer behaviour like if there are a large number of reviews from new users and how active they are on Amazon overall.
TheReviewIndex URL analyzer is accessible through your browser, as well as Chrome and Firefox plugins.
Be a Savvy Shopper
You might be able to tell a fake review from a real one if you know what to look for. However, fake reviewer techniques continue to evolve to avoid being detected by Amazon.
Your best bet is to remain skeptical of everything you read online, and stick to the brands you know best.