I really despise those "I received this product at a discount for my honest review" reviews. "Honest review" my ass. Anyone who gets any kind of compensation for their review (even if only in the form of products or discounts) can not be trusted.
To compound the problem, the seller can see the past reviews of prospective reviewers, and pick those who've tended to give positive "honest reviews". This skews the reviewing even further off.
I've never ever seen an "honest review" that the reviewer made of a product they got at a discount that wasn't a positive review. Never.
Amazon's discount review program should be terminated. Only people who've paid full price for their products and have received no compensation of any kind should be allowed to do reviews.
> Anyone who gets any kind of compensation for their review (even if only in the form of products or discounts) can not be trusted.
A weaker statement that is still useful is that they can't be trusted similarly to people who bought the product themselves. So it's fine to have sponsored reviews but they should be segmented.
Seems to me that Consumer Reports should implement a new program whereby customers that prove themselves to be trustworthy can submit a receipt and a review for a product, and if it is voted helpful enough (by other shoppers), that reviewer gets one free month of Consumer Reports subscription.
The result: verified, honest, reliable, helpful reviews. It would boost CR's value and give the world something it badly needs.
I suppose Amazon could do this with gift certificates or a month of free Prime or something.
I don't think that's why people buy consumer reports. At least for me it's about getting a professional review in the context of the product as well as against others in the same category from a source whose only interest is keeping the customer (me) informed. I'll admit that limits the selection of the products reviewed, but I'm OK with that trade off.
I think what you're describing could work well for Angie's List though (also a customer of theirs).
That is an obvious solution for extremely expensive items that do not sell much. It doesn't work if the seller can just pay people to buy the thing and then write a review, no?
I think they should be able to tell apart from people's purchasing history if they are "organic" buyers [normal people's consumption patterns of goods] or something organized to curry favorable reviews.
Sure someone could get paid to review an item and also be an avid consumer of a product, but in that case it would seem they believe in the item.
Imagine someone buys eneloop over and over, never offer a review, then purchases a no-name brand, gives rave reviews and goes back to buying eneloop again.
Absolutely and recurring customers with a certain gained "reputation" should have more weight than new customers without much buying history. Maybe require a reviewer amass x-amount in previous purchases before allowing them to review as well as t-time before they can review to avoid fraudulent reviews.
I constantly get asked to review my purchases and have yet to do so. Some people are just not into doing reviews like that, specially if it feels like you're getting badgered.
Amazon is a completely dishonest company. Go look at the Xfinity internet reviews on their site. fully eightfive percent of them are a single star. And YET... Xfinity has 4 stars overall. The problem isn't users creating fake reviews it's Amazon itself.
That's a weird situation - it's a partnership between Amazon and Comcast, and many of the 5-star reviews say "Amazon customer service is awesome". It says more about Amazon than Comcast.
Some of the reviews even say "We all know Comcast sucks, this is a review about buying it through Amazon".
