A user recently wrote to Buzzillions to complain that the reviews for a product were too many positive (5 star ratings) and seemed too well written to be from regular people. So how can they be sure that manufacturers aren’t “stuffing the system with their self serving 5.0 reviews of themselves”?
First of all, Buzzillions never pays people to write reviews.
Secondly, all reviews submitted to Buzzillions (most of our retail partners too) are moderated by an expert team. There is no automatic approval system. Everything is looked over by a group of real people. They make sure that the reviews follow our guidelines but they also make sure that the reviews are authentic. Our moderators would never screen out negative reviews.
One thing you can look for is the “Verified Buyer” badge that appears next to a review.
This means that the review was actually written by a person that bought the product. What happens is that when a person buys a product online, the retailer will send them an email a couple of weeks after delivery to ask them to review the product. Note the retailer only asks them to write a review and does not pressure the person to write a good review. Buyers who click through on the email link to write a review are those we can verify as actually having purchased a product.
Thirdly, you may have already noticed, but people are generally happy with products they have bought. Makes sense given all the research that they usually do before buying them. Chances are more than likely that they’ll really like the product they ended up buying. In the rare case that they don’t, they tend be very angry. This is a well documented phenomenon called “response bias”. People are more likely to write a review if they feel strongly about a product, which is why you see so many 5 star reviews, few 1 star reviews and very little inbetween. When you look at a rating system of 1 – 5 stars you might expect the 3 stars to represent average. However, in reality the average is skewed positive and is closer to 4 stars. This has been documented by a study of products on Amazon and you can see it at Buzzillions as well. You can read more about this in a great article from 2007 by Farhad Manjoo.
Buzzillions provides you several ways to combat response bias in order to figure out the real value of a review. If you click on the arrow at the top of the page next to “xx reviews” you can see the Ratings Distribution for that product and the Category Average.
The Ratings Distribution will show you if the reviews tend to be towards the two extremes or if they are more likely to be balanced. Looking at the example above you can see most of the reviews are extremely positive and maybe should be read with a grain of salt.
The Category Average will tell you the average star rating for all products within the same category. You can use this information to help judge the star rating of that product (or a specific review). In this example, you can see that reviews for all point & shoot cameras skew positive because the category average is 4.2. Therefore when you read a 5 star review, you should keep in mind that although it is above average, it’s not that much higher than the 4.2 star rating for all digital point & shoot cameras.
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