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Buying Something
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Do you believe in reviews for the items?
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It depends upon
(a) where those reviews are to be found ;
(b) how many there are ;
(c) what the likelihood of fake reviews is for that type of item ; and
(d) the ratio of good reviews to bad ones.
For examples, glowing for reviews for the products and services of Super Duper Trash Ltd on the website superdupertrash.com are clearly meaningless, whereas those on TrustPilot might be more reliable.
If there are only a handful of reviews (especially if they're all 5-star ones and they've all been posted almost simultaneously), I tend to be suspicious.
If, say, I was considering buying a novel by a famous author and then found that there were over 10,000 reviews spread across multiple websites (such as Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Goodreads.com, etc), I'd reckon that the chances of most of those reviews being fakes would be very low indeed. So I'd be prepared to trust them.
If I'm looking at an independent review website, such as TrustPilot, I try to keep in mind that although it's fairly easy to fake good reviews, it's much harder to hide poor ones. So I'd be suspicious of a product that, while it had 70% 5-star reviews, also had 30% 1-star ones.
Lastly, I keep a list in my mind of genuinely independent review websites that I fully trust, such as TechRadar.com, PCmag.com, TomsGuide.com, ExpertReviews.co.uk and the websites of several newspapers (such as Independent.co.uk).
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