Source: Amazon.
Once seen, they can’t be unseen.
Key points
- Check for specificity, nouns, and first-person pronouns.
- Spotting reviews is an art, not a science.
American consumers trust reviews to help them make purchases. Scammers take advantage of this to post fake reviews, juicing the popularity of low-quality items.
Fake reviews have exploded in popularity. Out of 8 billion Amazon reviews checked by Fakespot from 208 through 2020, over 30% were flagged as false. As the world adjusts to an economy that shops increasingly online, the parasitic business of fake reviews will only grow. From 2019 to 2021, global ecommerce rocketed from 3.3 trillion to 4.9 trillion in sales. That’s a more than 30% increase in new products sold on shopping sites like Amazon.
Buyers, it seems, have their work cut out for them.
According to bestselling behavioral scientist Dr. Robert Cialdini in his book Influence, New and Revised, there are three proven ways consumers can separate true reviews from false.
How to spot fake reviews
If fake reviews were easy to spot, nobody would pay scammers to post them. Fortunately, we can limit ourselves to spotting three signals that indicate a review is genuine. These signals are…
