4 ms·

> has bought ineffective products like eye cream based on five-star reviews, including some that appeared fake. Now she only looks at two-, three- and four-star

by mmt 8y ago

> has bought ineffective products like eye cream based on five-star reviews, including some that appeared fake. Now she only looks at two-, three- and four-star reviews when she shops on Amazon. My strategy has always been to read the 1-star and 2-star reviews, most recent first, unless there are so few total (e.g. under a dozen) that I may as well just read them all. Positive reviews, even 4-star and (enough of the) 3-star tend to be useless to me. What I want to know is why people hated the product. If it's exclusively for reasons that don't apply to me or for risks/problems inherent to the type of product, then I have what I need. Negative reviews are often also where the best referals to alternative products can be. Of course, those have a high enough likelihood of being posted by a shill that one can't assume it's actually better without reading those reviews, too, but it can beat grinding through all of Amazon's search results. All that said, the worsening counterfeit and delivery situation means I've bought hardly anything in the past year, after a progressive decline in buying the year before.

imh 8y ago
Often I wish I could just sort by least 1-start reviews or least 1-2-star reviews. Most products you don't need an amazing version, you just need one that isn't crap.
- ReconBob 8y ago
  Check out ReconBob- chrome extension that provides seller transparency. You can read about the company behind ReconBob in Google Cloud's case study: 3PM Solutions: Using data to detect, remove, and protect against online marketplace fraud. https://cloud.google.com/customers/3pm/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/3pm/
thecleaner 8y ago
I like this method of "selection by rejection". It makes sense. People like stuff for a variety of reasons, what one ought to be looking for is adversarial feedback. But how do you choose which bad reviews to ignore ?
- mmt 8y ago
  > But how do you choose which bad reviews to ignore ? Content-free ones like "hated it" or "didn't work" or even "DOA" (and nothing more) can generally be summarily ignored. Other ones I don't exactly ignore but, perhaps, dismiss, are of the form "it was too complicated for me to use" or "it didn't solve my specific problem". In general, I already know ahead of time what I'm up against in terms of ease of use, problem "fit", or similar issues. However, if not, these comments can, in aggregate, be helpful in setting expectations, just not in rejecting the product. Another dismissal-worthy category I alluded to are complaints that are generally universal to all products of that type. A trivial, historical example would be complaining about hard drive capacities being advertised in SI units not matching the power-of-2 units displayed by the OS. A more modern example would be external battery pack mAh capacity claims, where it's often the nominal (raw) capacity of the 3.6V internal cells, not the 5V USB output (which isn't 100% efficiently converted), further confounded by the fact that capacity varies widely by discharge rate. If there's a truly high volume of content, I end up trying to scan for people who have written both lengthier reviews and mention something that sounds like my personal use case. It's time-consuming, unfortunately, and, with today's chance of getting a counterfeit anyway, not even worth it for most of those items.
kashprime 8y ago
The only problem with this strategy is that competing vendors will start leaving 1 star reviews on reviews of rival products. That said, I haven't bought much either and switched to vendors that somewhat vouch for their products like Best Buy, Walmart, Monoprice, etc
- sykhic 8y ago
  I’ve started using Walmart.com for just this reason. I no longer trust Amazon. Trust is a hard thing to acquire once it’s lost. After an Amazon Basics usb cable stopped working after a few weeks I don’t even trust Amazon's own products.
- mmt 8y ago
  In what way is that a problem, though, in the context of what I desribed? I'm not merely counting 1-star reviews but actually reading them for content. IOW, what content would a competing vendor be leaving in a review that would confound my research?
  - ReconBob 8y ago
    Check out ReconBob- chrome extension that provides seller transparency. You can read about the company behind ReconBob in Google Cloud's case study: 3PM Solutions: Using data to detect, remove, and protect against online marketplace fraud. https://cloud.google.com/customers/3pm/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/3pm/

by mmt 8y ago

imh 8y ago

Often I wish I could just sort by least 1-start reviews or least 1-2-star reviews. Most products you don't need an amazing version, you just need one that isn't crap.

ReconBob 8y ago
Check out ReconBob- chrome extension that provides seller transparency. You can read about the company behind ReconBob in Google Cloud's case study: 3PM Solutions: Using data to detect, remove, and protect against online marketplace fraud. https://cloud.google.com/customers/3pm/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/3pm/

thecleaner 8y ago

I like this method of "selection by rejection". It makes sense. People like stuff for a variety of reasons, what one ought to be looking for is adversarial feedback. But how do you choose which bad reviews to ignore ?

mmt 8y ago
> But how do you choose which bad reviews to ignore ? Content-free ones like "hated it" or "didn't work" or even "DOA" (and nothing more) can generally be summarily ignored. Other ones I don't exactly ignore but, perhaps, dismiss, are of the form "it was too complicated for me to use" or "it didn't solve my specific problem". In general, I already know ahead of time what I'm up against in terms of ease of use, problem "fit", or similar issues. However, if not, these comments can, in aggregate, be helpful in setting expectations, just not in rejecting the product. Another dismissal-worthy category I alluded to are complaints that are generally universal to all products of that type. A trivial, historical example would be complaining about hard drive capacities being advertised in SI units not matching the power-of-2 units displayed by the OS. A more modern example would be external battery pack mAh capacity claims, where it's often the nominal (raw) capacity of the 3.6V internal cells, not the 5V USB output (which isn't 100% efficiently converted), further confounded by the fact that capacity varies widely by discharge rate. If there's a truly high volume of content, I end up trying to scan for people who have written both lengthier reviews and mention something that sounds like my personal use case. It's time-consuming, unfortunately, and, with today's chance of getting a counterfeit anyway, not even worth it for most of those items.

kashprime 8y ago

The only problem with this strategy is that competing vendors will start leaving 1 star reviews on reviews of rival products. That said, I haven't bought much either and switched to vendors that somewhat vouch for their products like Best Buy, Walmart, Monoprice, etc

sykhic 8y ago
I’ve started using Walmart.com for just this reason. I no longer trust Amazon. Trust is a hard thing to acquire once it’s lost. After an Amazon Basics usb cable stopped working after a few weeks I don’t even trust Amazon's own products.
mmt 8y ago
In what way is that a problem, though, in the context of what I desribed? I'm not merely counting 1-star reviews but actually reading them for content. IOW, what content would a competing vendor be leaving in a review that would confound my research?
- ReconBob 8y ago
  Check out ReconBob- chrome extension that provides seller transparency. You can read about the company behind ReconBob in Google Cloud's case study: 3PM Solutions: Using data to detect, remove, and protect against online marketplace fraud. https://cloud.google.com/customers/3pm/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/3pm/