ReviewMeta

There's a few key differences - the main one is with transparency. Fakespot shares practically nothing about their analysis. I discovered them while I was still in the process of building ReviewMeta and decided that I wanted ReviewMeta to show everything I possibly could about our analysis.

Both sites are estimates - and that's why I think it's important for visitors to sorta check over our work and make sure that we're on the right track.

We've got a bunch of extra tools and tricks on our site that the common visitor might be unaware of: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/reviewmetas-hidden-features-for-power-users/

Here's an article I wrote a few years back going into more detail about the differences between the two sites: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/fakespot-vs-reviewmeta-for-analyzing-reviews/

Ah, glad you asked. I always tell people to imagine you are an Amazon seller (with a lack of morals) and you have a budget to "buy" 100 fake reviews on Amazon. What is a better investment? To boost your own product with 100 5-star reviews? or to give each of your (dozen?) competitors a few 1-star reviews? Keep in mind that every one of those competitors is going to have a massive incentive to challenge those 1-star reviews and likely complain to Amazon until they get removed. They won't have the same incentive with your 100 fake 5-star reviews.

That's not to say that fake 1-star reviews don't exist. There's a lot of niche categories on Amazon that only have a few sellers, or when two top dogs in the field are duking it out. It definitely happens, but I think it's much less common than you'd imagine.

The more common cause for bogus 1-star reviews (in my opinion) are review brigades. You see it happen a lot to political books - a bunch of people who disagree with the person flood Amazon to bash the book without even reading it. Here's a bit more on brigades: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/review-brigades/

Ha! I feel like people literally say that about EVERYTHING. "This [city/country/game/company/brand/website] has gone downhill. It used to be cool 10 years ago!"

When I was building ReviewMeta, I was thinking about what would happen if sellers would try to "game" ReviewMeta (since we are so transparent about our algorithm). The answer is that yes, it would be possible to "game", but it would take a lot more coordination and planning of the fake reviews to make sure they fly under the radar of all the tests.

Also, consider that probably less than 1% of Amazon shoppers use ReviewMeta (which is still A LOT of traffic). Is it still worth it for sellers to "game" ReviewMeta?

PS - For those of you that don't know about SupplementReviews - that was a site I started and ran for about 12 years. I think it was going well until I stepped away last year, and then the new owner basically killed it. I also think that whole industry (fitness supplements) is just toxic.

Hmm, a few thoughts come to mind.

First, I would say that pretty much every "natural" mosquito repeller product I've seen is propped up entirely by fake reviews. Mainly because they simply don't work.

Second, I've noticed that a lot of self-published e-books are also completely full of fake reviews. That's a category that makes sense but I guess I didn't expect it at first.

Yes and yes. We have 15 tests that look for "unnatural" patterns in the review data. We look at things like the dates that the reviews were posted, whether they are from verified or unverified purchasers, if all the reviews are repeating the same language, if the reviewers have similar reviewing habits, etc.

We then look to see if the ratings are vastly different between the reviews we think are "unnatural" and those that are not. So, for example, if a product gets 50% of its reviews in one day, and those reviews give it 5 stars on average, but all other reviews give it 4.3 stars on average, we know something's up. This helps us throttle back our suspicion-meter in case there's a natural spike in reviews (eg. could be a holiday item).

We show our work in as much detail as possible on every report page. It's a lot of information at first, but if you're a data nerd like myself, it's fun to go through it. Here's an example report to look at: https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B07S9YBZMK