Do you trust the amazon customer reviews?

When im looking on amazon i like to read a handful of reviews if im interested in something on there.

Just been looking at books, and i imagine that most books on there get at least a couple of reviews posted by friends of the authors/publishers to rack up the ratings but in general do you trust the reviews on there?

Im not saying theres any reason not to, just curious how you feel about the reviews.

As webmasters, we all know the fluff that gets added to stuff on sites to encourage buyers, plenty of us have done it ourselves, testimonials etc, i even wrote a testimonial a couple of years back for a product that i hadn't even used yet to get a $90 freebie of it, biggin it up saying it was a fantastic thing.

If im looking at the customer reviews for books and it's up to the 4th edition of that book, then im mostly interested in reading the more recent reviews anyway, like 2009 back to 2008, if the book sucked at first im not so bothered if by the 4th edition its now a great book.

Yeah, just wondering how you feel about the customer reviews, i do feel they kinda help a bit on decisions on choosing a book, even with a few fake reviews that must be in there.

 

I hope you listen to those reviews and comments, I've written a few on Amazon myself!

If I was touched by a product or service, I will comment and leave feedback (oh ebay...) just because I feel that's what I would want and helps add to the community experience.

Of course a lot of reviews are sales copy and plenty of dishonest marketing (like there's a difference...), but if you take the time to read through a few you'll get a good aggregate view of what the general consensus is. As always, be very wary of what the general consensus is; be a trend setter and trailblazer.

 

not really bcoz some of the good review maybe is part of their marketing strategic.

 

That's why they have the "x amount of x people found this review helpful" field.

 

if they can fake the reviews, they can fake the x amount of x people found helpful thing.

but i read the reviews and keep a skeptical mind.

 

If they can hide the book from the general public long enough.

 

I was just reading some reviews before finding this thread.

I'm pretty confident that Amazon themselves don't fake anything. What might happen is that the seller of an average product will post one great review under a fake name. So if a product only has one review, handle with care. But if there are several good (or bad) reviews, I trust them.

 

Well, few days ago I saw a topic where someone was paying to leave a review for him.

So, I don't really trust all of them.

- Digital -

 

To argue for both sides, I have been asked by a friend to post some good reviews of his site that I have never visited or used on some ranking network.

Marketing is a shady area of morality.

Buyer Beware seems to hold true. I didn't write it in Latin to save you from rolling your eyes at me.

 

I always just check to see if the product has more negatives than positives.. Or the other way around. If tons of people are complaining about something, then something must be wrong with it.

 

Interesting opinions from you all on this, one thing that i have found handy is that some of the books can have a rather large number of reviews, rather than just a handful where it could be more difficult to know if like 7 positives out of 10 were mostly written by friends of the author/company.

 

I do read the reviews just to get a general consensus of the product, however, I do believe some of the reviews are scripted and written for the sole purpose of marketing the product.

 

I usually ignore the ones for games and consoles, a lot of thoose are bias. For other electronic goods then i find them helpful, most of the time they're spot on.

 

I always go through the reviews but i dont believe it 100%.
The reviews is just a references for me, it helps us to make decision but not the only factor

 

by the way, the reliability of the reviews is somewhat a function of the popularity of the product. for popular products, if a review is fake, usually it will be attacked by another review