Last Updated on February 6, 2020
3. Product reviews
Product reviews are the holy grain of multi-level e-commerce markets. And for a good reason. They are honest feedback provided by consumers who have no connection whatsoever with the product they are reviewing, and have properly assessed its quality after using it a couple of times.
Or at least they should be. There are many different forms of tampering and manipulating reviews in order to favor your own product or depreciate your competitor’s. Therefore, it is extremely important to know how to identify fake reviews during your Amazon review analysis. Here are a few tips that can help you out:
– Check the dates: when sellers buy fake positive reviews (4 and 5 stars) they are usually all posted within a couple of days of each other. To check if this is the case for the product you intend to buy, simply sort reviews by date and ascertain the dates on which they were posted.
– Check if the review matches the product: some sellers keep using the same product page to sell different products.
This means that they will benefit from the reviews, ratings, and reach of their previous products to rapidly sell new ones. This is a pretty shady strategy that becomes obvious to buyers when the vast majority of reviews refer to a product completely different from the one currently being sold.
– Fake Reviewers: you should be suspicious of 5-star reviews with only a few generic words such as “Amazing product!” or “Great value!”. When a product has a handful of reviews like this, you should always click on the reviewers’ profile to check if they are legit. If not, buy the product from someone else.
4. Fake sellers
You know what they say: if the price of an item seems too good to be true… it probably is. So, when you find a product listed at half its market price by a third-party Amazon seller… it probably is a fraud.
Fake sellers have been using this approach to attract consumers for a long time. After you place the order and pay for it, the seller will send you a fake product that costs much less than the original one. Be careful!
