... I always read the 1-star reviews and stop there. I don't trust anything else.
CBS News has a not-so-shocking story about fake online reviews at all of our major online shopping sites like Amazon, Walmart and others. I figured that was going on all along, particularly when you're buying something with only a few reviews. How hard would it be to get a couple of friends and family members to post 5-star reviews of your product?
Instead, I read the 1-star reviews and assume they are telling the truth. Then I ask myself if I could live with those faults in the product. If dozens of people are saying the thing falls apart or stops working after a week or so, I usually move on to another product. However, I neglect individual bad reviews about quality. Sometimes a bad widget slips through. If it's a restaurant review and they complain about the service, I typically neglect that as well. Slow service just means more time to chat.
In general, I'm looking for reviews that tell me the food is bad or the thing doesn't work as advertised. If I've gotten to the review-the-reviews stage, I'm already sold on the product, I just want to make sure it's not a mistaken purchase.
How about you? How do you weigh online reviews?
5 comments:
Many of the one-star reviews are also worthless. A lot of them are people who don't really seem to understand what the thing that they bought is even supposed to do or how it works, and I suspect that the problem isn't with the product. And, there are also a fair number of trolls who just want to be mildly malicious, and people who are reviewing the wrong product. In general, I pay more attention to the 2 and 3 star reviews, which I think are more likely to be people who actually read the instructions and know what they are doing.
Some of the one-stars are just as fake as the 5 stars.
I tend to look at what the over-all look like, too-- if there are a handful of good reviews, a bunch of four stars, and a zillion one-stars, I check the one stars....half the time it seems to be bot-trash. If it is, I go look at the five stars. If there are a lot of bot-reviews there, too, I look elsewhere; if there are a bunch of decent reviews that are obviously people, I look at the four stars.
And if you Google reviews for the product you can find much more inc from magazines whose job it is to test things.
I just take the average review number and rarely read the reviews.
I think of what I do, which is rarely put in a review. Unless I get some really bad service.
I can't agree with the poor service is just more time to chat. I've been to a restaurant, with young kid, exited about a deep dish pizza. The waitress warns it will take 45 minutes for the pizza. Oh, yes, we know, it's worth it. At 40 minutes, she comes out and says it will be just a little longer. Never saw her again, and left, without any food at nearly 90 minutes.
As you know, I don't have young kids anymore. I've been forced back to that restaurant maybe 3 times in the last 20 years. It was ok, but I'm still tainted. And yes, I know, there is a 0% chance that anyone is still there from back then.
Basically, like most everything on the internet. I don't trust it.
I ignore the 5-star reviews and look at the lower ones for specific concerns. Yeah, you get the clueless or malicious one-stars, but you can get a sense of where the product weaknesses are and whether you can live with them.
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