3 Things To Look For When Checking Reviews For A Product
If you’ve ever bought anything online, you know the excitement and anticipation of waiting for that item to arrive at your home. However, if what you’ve bought finally makes it to your door and falls far short of what you expected to be getting, you may find yourself upset and disappointed. To keep this from happening, it’s wise to check out any available reviews about the product before you make your final purchase. But sadly, you can’t necessarily trust every review you read about a product. So to help you know whether the information you’re reading should be trusted or not, here are three things you should look for when checking reviews of a product online and determining whether it’s fake or believable.
Use Tools To Spot Fake Reviews
Because fake reviews have become such a problem in recent years, there are now different types of tools that you can use to help you spot the false ones. According to Rick Broida, a contributor to CNet.com, you can put a review into tools such as Fakespot or ReviewMeta to see if the software gets any of its red flags raised that the review might be a fake. While using these types of tools won’t give you black or white answer as to whether or not the review you’re reading was made by a bot or given by someone with malicious intent, they will give you more information about the review so you can make a more informed decision on your own.
Read Into The Language Used
If you want to trust your own instinct and use your own intellect to determine whether or not a review you’re reading online is trustworthy, one of the first things you should look at is the language used in the review. According to Jake Swearingen, a contributor to NYMag.com, any reviews that have odd or syntactically unusual language should automatically be deemed as fake. This is based off the assumption that it’s not a real person who’s used to product giving the review. It might be written by someone from another country who’s been hired to give positive reviews or a robot that’s malfunctioning when it comes to language.
The Reviewers Themselves
One of the best ways to know if an online review is legitimate is by looking into the person who’s giving the review. Depending on what website or service you’re using to buy your product, Real Simple shares that they might give information about the person leaving the review and what their experience is what the product they’re reviewing. If the reviewer is verified and doesn’t seem to give out too many or too few reviews, it’s a safer bet to trust that their review is real.
To help you make better online purchases, consider using the tips mentioned above when reading product reviews before buying something online.