Third-party sellers need to get good reviews and high search rankings for being noticed on Amazon. Meanwhile, attracting real buyers is not easy; consequently, some sellers use reliable deception-paid reviews. According to the research by the ReviewMeta platform, a considerable percentage of all reviews from e-commerce leader Amazon were fake (Woollacott, 2017). The website removes only some paid and suspicious customers’ assessment that can mislead the site’s visitors when buying low-quality products. In particular, the vast majority of the 12,000 reviews for the headphone category have recently come from unverified buyers (Woollacott, 2017).
For analyzing the reliability, the customer’s review of headphones was taken. Fake reviews can be recognized by paying attention to the following points. These are the word and expression being used in the report, customer’s profile, and other appraisals created by this person and the time and date when it was published. In fake reviews, words, and expressions, superlatives of adjectives and adverbs are more like regular advertising. Besides, recurring phrases are a clear indicator of purchased reviews. For instance, in the customer’s evaluation of headphones, there are several examples of marketing slogans like “Get this. It works. Well” or “If you want good sound protection, there is no doubt that these will do it for you” (Customer Review). Valid names and the presence of an avatar in many cases are signs of the real buyer. Strange pseudonyms or a common name combined with the most common surnames – most likely are not. Thus, the name “Hope Pusher” cannot be indicated as a real person, although, the user has a profile photo and two images accompanying the text.
Moreover, the number of reviews in total contains 1825, making it doubtful whether this person purchased all these items. Besides, this review is extensive, but not detailed, as there is not enough information about the technical characteristics and experience of use. The bulky text seems to be an advertisement. It can be concluded that the full review can be considered a fake one and paid out despite the photos presented.
References
Customer Review. (2016). Amazon. Web.
Woollacott, E. (2017). Amazon’s fake review problem is now worse than ever, study suggests. Forbes. Web.