Fakespot

Has been pretty good at informing when Amazon’s reviews are somewhat real or completely fake. Usually, I avoid anything with an F rating and will accept a B or even C with a grain of salt. Try it on products you know are good to confirm.

I usually just ignore all positive reviews and any negative ones that don't include a specific complaint. If I'm interested enough in a product to check its reviews on Amazon, I already know what I'm going to like about it, so it doesn't really matter to me what other people like about it. What I want to know is what people don't like about it, so I can decide if those issues are going to apply to my use case, and if they do, whether they're going to be deal-breakers or not.

Even just reading the bad reviews requires skimming past a lot of "it sucks", "reading instructions is hard", and "I thought it would do something the manufacturer never claimed it would", but at least unhelpful bad reviews tend to be shorter than unhelpful good ones.

True, but when dealing with something like an iPhone charger or any other low cost device where several different companies will “do”, it works wonders on the ones that are going to break in three days.

For larger purchases, Amazon and fakespot are not where you are going to go for your initial reviews of the product, again, generally.

Oh yeah, that's a really good point! Things like chargers, AC adapters, and various USB/audio/video cables and adapters are often mildly stressful to shop for, because there's a hundred different brands selling exactly the same thing with a suspiciously high number of reviews (do 250 people really have strong enough opinions about their $7 DisplayPort to HDMI that they're willing to take the time to write reviews about them?)

The next time I need to buy something like that I'm definitely giving Fakespot a try.

I’m surprised amazon hasn’t just bought them, but I guess that would kill off several of their sellers.

Monoprice is my solution to this. You get what you pay for with their stuff, and they have several price levels for common items.

A single star from me, because I found the package in the bushes, and it got rained on.

https://www.fakespot.com/product/the-mountain-three-wolf-moon-short-sleeve-tee-0f05d177-6608-42ac-b05e-0d6649fd6176

It's not just the reviews that are fake, Amazon has a lot of counterfeit goods for sale and doesn't seem interested in eliminating them.

You can't measure loss of good will in terms of dollars, especially when you are a near monopoly. In Amazon culture, the numbers are everything.

True. I make a point not to buy stuff that says "fulfilled by Amazon", as that appears to be where a lot of the counterfeit comes from. But given their labor practices I really shouldn't be buying from them at all. They're the Walmart of the Internet.

I tend to gravitate towards two and three star reviews for being the most helpful and honest. One and five star are generally useless and four stars tend to be lacking in founded critisism.