A number of reports and insight studies into the world of online retail and digital shopping have predicted that North Americans will spend over $300 billion shopping online in 2016. That represents a significant growth over last year’s figures. That number is not only astronomical, but also means that consumers are becoming more online-aware when it comes to making purchases, which invariably includes consulting review sites and reading product reviews left on product pages on sites like Amazon. Of course, you can’t always trust that those reviews are accurate and legitimate. Step forward Fakespot to assist with that.
If you’ve ever purchased anything off Amazon that comes attached with a significant price-tag, then the chances are that you went through a period of due diligence prior to that purchase. That could involve researching the product itself and the manufacturer, or even sifting through the scores of reviews that have been uploaded against the product on Amazon.
Unfortunately, not all reviews are legitimate and created with morality, meaning that some products have tons of fake review that have been created to bolster the review score of that particular product and give it a higher weighting in search results. Of course, we all want to be able to make our purchases with the most accurate and reliable information at hand, which is where Fakespot comes into the equation.
The web service simply allows consumers to copy and paste an Amazon product link into the analyzer to be able to get an intelligent review of that product. After running its analysis, the service provides a grading evaluation and determines whether or not the reviews on the page can be trusted or not by listing reviews that it determines to be fake. It’s really essentially designed to prevent consumers from investing financial resources into a product that simply doesn’t match the hype of the reviews. Which of course could actually be fake.
To make things a lot easier and seamless, the team behind Fakespot is also offering a Google Chrome web browser extension that will allow consumers to grade a particular product site without having to launch an additional web page. If you’ve ever purchased a product based on reviews, only to find they are likely fake, then Fakespot could be a life saver for you, but be advised that the system isn’t exactly perfect and may identify legit reviews as fake at times.
To get started, simply point your browser to fakespot.com and start throwing all those amazon URLs at it.
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