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Thank you for being a Fakespot user. I thought I'd bring in some perspective to your question. Your observation of the preponderance of unreliable reviews on A

Thank you for being a Fakespot user. I thought I'd bring in some perspective to your question. Your observation of the preponderance of unreliable reviews on Amazon matches what we see across the board. Unfortunately, ever since Amazon opened up to 3rd party sellers, the reviews have become a marketing tool by a lot of these sellers to move ahead of other products. These sellers use everything from pure fake reviews to gamed verified purchase reviews. This is major reason why so many reviews nowadays are unreliable, it is truly a wild west out there in the eCommerce world and fake reviews can mean $$$. With that said, we just launched Fakespot Guardian as part of our new Chrome extension which solves the 3rd party seller problem by telling you if a seller is reliable or not. By knowing if seller and reviews are reliable, you will be able to purchase anything with confidence.

vz8 6y ago
Once upon a time I was responsible for a high traffic site with ads as a primary revenue source. The constant problem was that competitors would automate clickbomb attacks -- fake traffic with click throughs that would ultimately get the site banned from ad networks (or severely devalue CPM rates) for fraudulent traffic. The irony was that we never used the same tactics ourselves, assuming that the risks outweighed the rewards. The malicious bot traffic ultimately spelled the end of the site. I would imagine that an Amazon product/seller would suffer from high quantities of any fake reviews, whether positive or negative: Too positive? Amazon or Fakespot & similar services penalize them. Too negative? Consumers penalize them. Seems like with a modest budget and a Fiverr-like service, smaller retailers could be harmed with relative ease. Then, faced with these attacks, I'd imagine many companies with means might try countermeasures, triggering a sort of review arms race. How do you separate the signal from the noise from deliberate fake reviews (of any kind) from third parties with malicious intent?

vz8 6y ago

Once upon a time I was responsible for a high traffic site with ads as a primary revenue source. The constant problem was that competitors would automate clickbomb attacks -- fake traffic with click throughs that would ultimately get the site banned from ad networks (or severely devalue CPM rates) for fraudulent traffic. The irony was that we never used the same tactics ourselves, assuming that the risks outweighed the rewards. The malicious bot traffic ultimately spelled the end of the site. I would imagine that an Amazon product/seller would suffer from high quantities of any fake reviews, whether positive or negative: Too positive? Amazon or Fakespot & similar services penalize them. Too negative? Consumers penalize them. Seems like with a modest budget and a Fiverr-like service, smaller retailers could be harmed with relative ease. Then, faced with these attacks, I'd imagine many companies with means might try countermeasures, triggering a sort of review arms race. How do you separate the signal from the noise from deliberate fake reviews (of any kind) from third parties with malicious intent?