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Analyze Amazon reviews for authenticity

Shopping websites like Amazon support review systems that allow customers to leave reviews for products on the site.

Designed to add unique content and information to shopping sites, ratings are often also used when it comes to an item's visibility on a site.

Customers who buy online may rely on reviews more than they rely on product descriptions to make buying decisions.

This in turn makes it very profitable to push reviews for products. This is called fake reviews, and it usually involves someone paying reviewers to leave reviews on a shopping site.

Some sites may prevent anyone but customers who actually purchased an item from leaving reviews, but there are ways around this, for instance by handing out free samples.

Analyze Amazon reviews for authenticity

While it is often easy enough to spot fake reviews, as they tend to always give the highest rating and glorify the product, it has become more difficult in recent time to distinguish between legitimate and fake reviews.

This guide provides you with information on two Internet services that you can make use of to analyze Amazon reviews.

Fakespot

fakespot

Fakespot is a free service that accepts any Amazon product or Yelp business link. Simply paste the link in the form on the start page, and wait for the analysis of the product to show up.

If the product is known already, results are displayed right away. If it is not, Fakespot starts to pull data from Amazon to analyze the reviews.

Fakespot grades the product reviews of the item, displays an adjusted rating, Amazon's rating, and provides you with information on the authenticity of the ratings.

It may for instance tell you that "there are indications of inauthentic/low quality reviews". The analysis digs deeper than that, as it provides you with information on the reviews.

It may give you words used to describe the product, the percentage of low quality reviews, and even information on inauthentic reviews, and why they were classified as that (automation, correlation with other fake reviewer profile data and languages).

Fakespot supports only Amazon.com, but no regional Amazon sites.

ReviewMeta

reviewmeta

ReviewMeta works in pretty much the same fashion. Paste an Amazon url into the form on the site, and the program will start to analyze the product if it is not already in the database, or display results right away.

The service will adjust the rating and reviews based on its algorithm, display a report card that highlights checks the product reviews passed, failed or looked suspicious, and lists most and least trusted reviews.

What follows is a detailed analysis of all reviews. ReviewMeta lists the ratio of one-time reviewers to reviewers who have left multiple reviews on Amazon, the percentage of reviewers without any verified purchases, phrase repetition, and a lot more.

ReviewMeta supports regional Amazon sites.

Closing Words

Both Fakespot and ReviewMeta provide an interesting service that you can make use of to verify ratings and reviews on Amazon. While you can use it to authenticate reviews for any product that you are interested in, it probably makes the most sense for mid-price and expensive products considering that you will spend time using the services for each product you are interested in.

 

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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