You are here: Home / Amazon / Can you actually trust those 5-star reviews on Amazon.com?

Can you actually trust those 5-star reviews on Amazon.com?

January 27, 2012 at 6:58 am by 10 Comments

Reviews for the Kindle Fire on Amazon.com run positive, but can you trust what others have to say?

Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet — especially when it comes to reviews.

The New York Times reports this week that Amazon.com recently removed an online merchant from the site by the name of VIP Deals. The problem?  The merchant was offering customers a full rebate on its $10 leather Kindle Fire cases for those customers who wrote reviews on Amazon. Call it “Review-Gate.”

It worked like this: Customers who bought the leather case received a letter from VIP Deals upon delivery which indicated that they would received a rebate of $10 — the full cost of the case — for those who penned a review on Amazon.

Before the VIP Deals page was removed from Amazon, The New York Times reported that the company (with no Web site) had received 4,945 reviews with a rating of 4.9 out of five.

Reporter David Streitfeld writes:

By the time VIP Deals ended its rebateon Amazon.com late last month, its leather case for the Kindle Fire was receiving the sort of acclaim once reserved for the likes of Kim Jong-il. Hundreds of reviewers proclaimed the case a marvel, a delight, exactly what they needed to achieve bliss. And definitely worth five stars.

As the collective wisdom of the crowd displaces traditional advertising, the roaring engines of e-commerce are being stoked by favorable reviews. The VIP deal reflects the importance merchants place on these evaluations — and the lengths to which they go to game the system.

Fake or spammy reviews aren’t a new phenomenon on the Internet. In fact, Streitfeld reported last August in the Times about the problem, writing that “an industry of fibbers and promoters has sprung up to buy and sell raves for a pittance.”

In many cases, individuals are simply paid to post favorable reviews — so-called “opinion spam” — for products or services found on sites such as Amazon.com, Yelp and TripAdvisor.

Filed Under: Amazon Tagged With: ,
  • Guest

    When I read a review, I look at the other product that the reviewer has reviewed.

    If the reviewer has only written one review, that reviewer is not to be trusted.

    If the reviewer only gives 4- or 5-star reviews, that reviewer is not to be trusted.

    If the reviewer writes intelligently and critically about a range of products, I believe what the reviewer says.

    • johnhcook

      That’s a good rule of thumb. Just as you analyze where you get your news online, you should do the same with reviews. I tend to look collectively at reviews, but if there’s a huge astroturfing effort going on (as appears to have been the case in the situation described above) then that wouldn’t solve the issue. 

  • Goddard Designer

    I lost faith in Amazon.com reviews after reading the reviews for the Goddard Replica, which of course doesn’t even exist.

    http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Origin-Goddard-Replica/dp/B000NL8210/ref=nosim/rictex-20

    • Guest

      If it doesn’t exist, why are you spamming your referral tag onto your link to it?

      • Goddard Designer

        Spamming my referral tag onto my link to it?  Huh?  This isn’t even a real product.  Someone (probably an Amazon employee) put it there as a joke and it actually got reviews as if it were something that people could actually buy.  The actual Goddard was a prototype rocket built and flown a few times by Blue Origin, another Bezos company.  My point was these are obviously not real reviews.

        • Guest

          Whose Amazon Associates referral tag is rictex-20? It’s in your URL.

  • http://twitter.com/Vroo Vroo (Bruce Leban)

    Likewise, I suspect many of the reviews of 
    http://www.amazon.com/Million-Random-Digits-Normal-Deviates/dp/0833030477/ are from people who never read the book.

    For some reason there are a lot of spammy reviews on this book, but if you skip those there are some truly insightful ones.

  • Pdsail

    Has Amazon also removed the ratings associated with this scam? If not, they should do so.

    • Guest

      This is a quote from the article. For your benefit, I’ve deleted all words longer than eight letters.

      “Amazon, sent a copy of the VIP letter by The New York Times, said its * * * for customer reviews. A few days later, it deleted all the reviews for the case, which itself was listed as *. Then it took down the product page itself.”

  • Adam

    Giving people incentive to write a review will lead to more reviews. But how did you determine that they are favorable ones? Seems like you jumped to a conclusion without any statistical analysis.