61% of electronic product reviews on Amazon are fake

One of the barriers that ecommerce has been overcoming over the years is knowing the reliability of a product that you cannot physically touch. A photo from various points of view and the characteristics of the product described is what the online store offers you a priori for you to buy, but there is an extra addition that ecommerce does not control directly and that is the definitive step in the purchase decision of most consumers: the reviews.

Before buying a product, an experience or a trip on the Internet, What most of us do is go first to the ratings and comments of other users who have already tried it. If they are positive, it is more likely that we will end up buying, on the other hand, if they are negative, we either think about it more or look for another alternative in the market.

But what if they told you that the reviews you read are fake? Would you still trust that brand?

A recent review study has shown that 33% of consumers detected some false review during 2018, and not only that. According to the analyzes carried out by the review analysis website Fakespot, most of them are fake or paid.

The ten Amazon categories and/or products with the most fake reviews

Fakespot has made a ranking where it shows which are the categories or products with the highest percentage of false reviews on Amazon, and these are:

• Electronic products
  • Wireless headphones
  • Phone cases and screen protectors
  • smartwatches
  • mobile chargers
  • AApple accessories and other well-known brands
• beauty and cosmetics
  • Make-up
  • wrinkle creams
  • hair loss products
• Clothing: like Adidas or Nike sneakers
• Vitamin supplements or complexes

61% of electronic product reviews on Amazon are fake

However, if we want to highlight something, it is that there are categories where it is not that there are many false reviews, but that Fake ones outnumber real ones. so it is difficult for you to trust that product. And this happens in electronics, where 61% of reviews are fake; in Beauty, where it happens with 63%, in sports shoes (59%) and in vitamin supplements (64%).

And it is that, although Amazon has already tried, on several occasions, stop fake reviews, these data show their failure, and above all, it seems that Chinese sellers are the ones who take the most advantage of fake or purchased reviews. The Washington Post itself contacted Amazon in April 2018 to talk about it, and from the Internet giant they assured it that they take false reviews very seriously and that they are working to end the problem, since they understand that millions of customers make their purchase decisions based on them. But since then, nothing has changed.

Who gets hurt by fake reviews?

• In the first place the honest sellers, since they can’t compete with the number of fake reviews and its products lag far behind on Amazon, the Internet’s leading product search engine.
• And secondly the consumers, since rely on fake reviews to buy somethingso, without knowing it, they are buying blindly, they do not have the reliability that we were talking about at the beginning.

Let’s hope that Amazon puts an end to this problem soon and we can trust all the reviews, because if your product is really good, what’s the need to lie?

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