I was just talking to a Chinese friend who works for a company that sells various goods on amazon.
He told me they budget to buy between 50 and 100 fake reviews for every single product they launch.
He said that without the fake reviews, the products will never start to sell on their own.
Whether to blame Amazon or blame the sellers, I’m not sure. But Amazon writes the rules of the game.
He said that without the fake reviews, the products will never start to sell on their own.
Then, once it really starts to sell, he should be afraid of Amazon taking over the product and including it as their own product line.
The product lifecycle at Amazon
Indeed you’re right. Amazon watches out for Amazon.
I mean he’s right, i won’t buy a product that has 0 ratings, seems sus
How else are they going to get off the ground? That’s the reality when you’re competing in a digital marketplace. You have to have some reviews or nobody’s buying.
5 star reviews (even real ones) are useless. They generally just say: “awesome product, love it”
No feedback or product info and anything. 4 stars and 2 stars are the most interesting to me. People who don’t care and like it rate 5, people who don’t care but didn’t like it rate 1.
2 and 4 star ones thought about the product and found at least one fault normally, and that lets you read about it a bit more. And then you can decide if the issues mentioned by the comments directly are worth it for the price for you.
Plus it’s generally easier to tell if the 4 star text review is real.
I google mapped the best pizza spots in my city rated above a 4. It showed me everything from little Caesar’s to dominos. What even is the point anymore? I also find there are paid results, like I can search “sushi near me” and in the results there will be McDonald’s and other corporate chains that have nothing to do with what I typed
Pretty sure you can buy 3000 reviews the same way you can buy 19 tho
With family hostages!
big brain
?
3.6 ⭐ chinese restaurant with people complaining about the service and the general tso is only alright. See one review from a Chinese-American whose visiting a friend raving about how good the food was. Then show up and see most tables with Chinese families.
This is the only restaurant you’re allowed to go to now.
This is actually the 3.5-star rule for American Chinese restaurants. Any restaurant below 3 stars or above 4 stars will be garbage. The goal is to find some place that lands right in the middle with the ~3.5 star average.
3.5 stars is the perfect combination of good reviews from Chinese people, and bad reviews from locals who expect American style service. If it has +4 stars, it’s too American. The service may be great, but you won’t find a single Chinese person inside because the food is too Americanized. If it’s under 3 stars, the place will just be gross or the food will be bad enough that even Chinese people don’t like it. 3.5 stars is the right mix of authentic Chinese food (meaning it gets good reviews from Chinese people) and Americans not being able to read the menu and getting upset that it takes +5 minutes for the server to come over and take your drink order.
I’d like to go to those places but I probably can’t read the menu. How does one navigate that? Are those the ones with the pictures of everything in the windows?
I’ve had good success with finding lots of other authentic food around me but I’d like to try another style of Chinese. I know it’s a trope but I feel good about my choice of restaurants when the patrons and staff are speaking to each other in their native tongue
I equally enjoy the 1 and 2 star reviews where they will openly state “product is great, no issues” but then immediately throw all that away because the version they bought doesn’t fit their grandpappy’s 1963 Barracuda, or “that table of six let their kids run around the restaurant, 1/10”.
The bipolar reaction of the average consumer is maddening, no nuance.
People don’t tend to write reviews for middle-of-the-road experiences. They only bother doing it when things were great or awful. The issue is that people have wildly differing opinions on what makes for good or bad experiences.
I tried to get into a habit of reviewing every campsite i stay at. i gave a reasonably good review to one i went to with my partner and the owner dug out my email and wrote me to complain because it wasn’t a perfect 5*
Suspiciously there were just enough new reviews at 5* in the month following to push mine onto the second page. none since then
I would say read the middlin’ reviews to find the real opinions, but I imagine at this point the review selling places have figured out that strategy, too. Really now it’s best to find a third-party source you trust for anything you want to buy off Amazon.
Or, just don’t buy off Amazon.
I scan for people stating the same negatives, then disregard the ones that were obviously unlucky or just bitchy.
I think about this a lot. Let’s assume for a second all reviews are legitimate (I know they’re not, but not detection isn’t what I’m talking about). I hate when you sort by ratings you get 5.0 (1 review) at the top. Why isn’t there some semi objective agreed upon way to do this? It doesn’t need to be perfect. Search engines aren’t perfect but we use them all the time. Something like 4.9 (10 reviews) should be above 5.0 (1 review).
In NPS (net promoter score) tracking - you know the survey “would you recommend this to your friends and colleagues”
it’s worded and scored 0-10 so that you can assume everyone that scores 7+ is happy and anyone below isn’t.
It’s a psychological thing that wouldn’t work if it was thumb up or thumb down.
In 5 star systems 4 and 5 should be considered promoters and 3 and below should be considered detractors, but again you should bifurcate and dichotomize the output so you see how many scored 4>= and how many <=3
Thanks for the information, I’ll look further into it. But even in those scenarios, say you get a score of like 90% recommending it with 100 people, but another with 89% recommending it but 1,000,000 people. I’d say the million people with 89% score should be higher. That’s more what I’m talking about. It’s like the more people that rank highly the more confident the result is. (Which is why for this discussion I said assume bots don’t exist lol.)
