ReviewMeta Reveals Spurious Reviews on Online Shopping Sites

These days whenever I need to buy anything I visit Amazon online shopping site. I have been buying all kinds of items from Amazon for a long time – clothes, electronics, books, everything. Usually when you shortlist a product for purchase on Amazon, you first have a look at the product reviews left by other customers. Based on these reviews, it is very easy to see if the product is good or not.

But the sellers also know about this habit of the customers and they have found a way to manipulate it for their benefit. They add spurious and exaggerating reviews about their products in order to entice the unsuspecting customers into buying their products. Rival sellers also use the same technique to post bad reviews about the products of other sellers.

In the past the way I usually found out about the fake reviews is by checking if a user has actually bought the product or not. Many online shopping sites like Amazon indicate this by putting a label Verified Purchase next to a user’s name in the reviews. But going through a huge list of reviews is a daunting task in itself.

ReviewMeta

Now I have come across a new extension called ReviewMeta for Firefox and Chrome web browsers that can be used to automatically filter out these fake or misleading reviews. This extension uses a number of measures to find out if a review is fake or not. For example, it tags the reviews as fake if they are made by people with unverified purchase, brand loyalists, paid reviewers and more. It not only checks the review rating and the review text but also the background of the reviewers.

The way it works for you is that when you are on a product page on an online shopping site (Amazon for example), you will adjusted see the product rating in the small icon in the browser toolbar. This rating will be adjusted by removing all the spurious reviews. You can click on this icon to view all the details about how the adjustments were made and the fake reviews were culled.

ReviewMeta

Conclusion: With the help of ReviewMeta, you can avoid the spurious reviews posted on the online shopping sites. This way you can get the correct adjusted rating for any product. It works both in the Chrome and the Firefox web browser.

You can get the ReviewMeta browser extension from https://reviewmeta.com/blog/extensions/.