Buzzillions Blogs

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.

One of the many hats that I wear as Review Manager at Buzzillions.com is a fedora.  My team makes it our business to detect and sniff at any suspicious reviews that come into our system – and let me tell you, that’s more than a few reviews. Individuals and companies are trying to game the system all the time!

I’ve been kind of quiet on the buzz blog for a while, but I wanted to chime in this week since review sites have been getting so much heat in the news. From the allegations against Yelp, to the Belkin scandal, to the most recent Amazon debacle, the media is looking to find the next shady review site. But they won’t find fodder for their next exposé on buzzillions.com. Not only do we post the good, the bad, and the ugly in our reviews, but we also go to great lengths to ensure that we represent those reviews in a way that is fair and transparent.

One review per-person, per-product

Unlike Yelp which uses an algorithm to suss-out reviews, all of our review quality assurance is done by a team right here in the office. Each day we search for duplicate reviews to take a first pass at the obvious offenders. We then comb through reviews in many different directions looking for unusual reviewer activity. Did we get 50 reviews by the same username in an hour? Did a particular product get 200 1-star reviews in a single day? Unusual behavior like this isn’t a surefire way to spot fraudulent reviews but cases like these raise red flags that prompt us to dive deeper into situation.

The purpose of my detective team is not to stifle user generated content – we certainly don’t want to stop someone writing lots of reviews for products that they own. But we want to uphold the ideal of one review per-person, per-product.

Verified Buyers

Our most powerful tool against review fraud is our Verified Buyer system. Any review that you see on Buzzillions with a Verified Buyer badge was written by someone who has actually bought the product. As a site built on user generated content, it is remarkable that we can take the doubt out of the equation for such a large number of our reviews.  This is also a brilliant way of addressing the issue of the Anonymous Reviewer.  Should people have the right to state their opinions about products and services without having to disclose their identity?  Most reviewers think so. But this is under hot debate from the ones reading reviews to the ones being reviewed: Can you trust an anonymous reviewer? Our Verified Buyer badge grants credibility to our reviews without forcing identity disclosure.

I have to hand it to the big guys like Yelp and Amazon for forging a path through the swamps of user generated content and teaching us how (and how not) to deal with the battles of free speech vs. inflammatory content and anonymity vs. trustworthiness. It’s no easy task.

So in the spirit of Buzzillions, which truly embraces our community of reviewers and all of their opinions (be they funny, edgy, glowing, or coarse), we rely on you, our readers, to help us become a better site. Mark helpful reviews so that the most useful ones stand out from the less constructive ones. And flag any review that appears to be a duplicate so we can whip out our trench coats and magnifying glasses and get on the case.

It’s been reported by a number of websites (CrunchGear,  Slashdot) in the past few days that Belkin, maker of audio, video and computer cables, wireless networking devices and similar products has been paying people to write favorable reviews of their products on Amazon.  A Belkin employee used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to pay people .65 cents to write positive reviews and discount negative reviews.   Did writers of the reviews actually have to own the product?  No.  Have used the product?  Again, no.  In fact, looking at the instructions to those willing to lie for .65 cents, fiction was highly encouraged.  “Tell a story of why you bought it and how you are using it.”  A story indeed.  Not only did the instructions include giving products a 100% rating but also encouraged writers to mark other negative reviews as “not helpful”.   Yikes.

This scandal of course caught our eye because here at Buzzillions, we are in the business of product reviews.  Inauthentic product reviews would kill credibility, with our company’s death sure to follow.  It’s particualrly troubling that Belkin, instead of reading honest complaints about their products, and then using those reviews to make product improvements, they instead chose to try and kill the bad reviews.  Surely this is a bad long term strategy.

You may be asking at this point  how Buzzillions can be sure no manufacturers are gaming our system.  While nothing is foolproof, this scandal has been a reminder to us how valuable our “Verified Buyer” system is.  Verified Buyer reviews on Buzzillions, are reviews that have been tagged as being from customers who actually bought the product.  How do we know this?  Our retail partners generally send follow-up emails to purchasers of their products, asking them to write a review.  When customers follow this link in an email, our system knows they actually bought the product and used it.  Imagine that, reviews from people who actually own the product.

Further, we have actual moderators (real live people) looking at every review that passes through our system.  And we are always on the lookout for suspcious reviews (those that might have come from manufacturers or seem to be consistently knocking competitor products.)  While nothing is foolproof, we’re absolutely committed to reviews that are honest and authentic.  It’s unfortunate when a company like Belkin, and by extention, Amazon, tolerates such shady practices.

When we speak with consumers about product reviews, they are likely to say…

“How do I know who wrote this review?”

That’s a good question. Our moderators do see reviews that are obviously by someone with a connection to the product manufacturer or even worse, people who are paid to write reviews.

Our response from Day 1 has been to verify the writer of the review as being an owner of the product. Amazon might ask you to self-verify (check out their “I own this” checkbox) but we take it a step further and go behind the scenes with retailers to flag the users who they KNOW own the product. When product owners write reviews of products they own, we mark them as being Verified Buyers.

On Buzzillions, these reviews are flagged with this badge:

Verified Buyer is all about one thing, credibility. Want to know what REAL product owners think about the:

iPod Touch 16GB

Just read the 55 reviews almost all from Verified Buyers from two of our most trustworthy retailers, B&H Photo and Abt Electronics . We work with these retailers to ENSURE that the reviewer actually owns the product itself. No guessing. No fakes. Real reviewers with the product in their hands.

When researching a product, isn’t it great to know that the review you’re reading was written by a person who owns it? So as you research the next product on your list…be on the lookout for the Verified Buyer badge on Buzzillions.com. They’re everywhere!

P.S. If you’re not satisfied yet, check out the hundreds, yes hundreds of Verified Buyers who’ve reviewed the:

– Pee Pee Teepees