I’ve spent a lot of time on Amazon over the past few weeks getting ramped up for the holiday season. As I have, I’ve noticed one thing about Amazon reviews…most reviewers don’t even own the product! Now, because some of these items are potential presents, I can’t name any of them, but what I will say is not to trust a review by its star rating.
One product which I planned to buy, has a pretty poor star rating, only 2 ½ stars, but as I thought it was supposed to be a good product, I pulled up the reviews, jumped straight to the 1 star reviews to see what was wrong with it and you know what I found… “I don’t think I’ll be buying this. It’s way more than I’d like to spend…” What!? You gave a product a 1 star review because you were too cheap to buy it!?
I’m a huge fan of Amazon, and the reviews provided there, but there are some…
OK, so one person, whatever, let me keep reading… “There is no way I would ever be able to pay for this.” Then why the hell are you leaving a 1 star review? OK, let’s skip further down the page, see if I can find an actual complaint about the product… “I may have actually considered buying this…until I saw the price. Holy Mary Mother of Christ, are you kidding me?” What the {insert string of expletives here} are you stupid {more expletives} doing!? Why are you leaving negative reviews for a product because you can’t afford it or you are too cheap to buy it!?
You’ve never even gotten your hands on the product, how can you possibly review it!?
I feel like I should start writing car reviews for Lamborghinis, Bugattis, and Bentleys, give them all negative reviews because I think they are overpriced and I can’t afford them. No, Mr. Hefner, you shouldn’t buy that Rolls Royce, it’s too expensive. Mr. Trump, you should hold off on buying a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, the $400,000 price tag is just too much.
I want to slap myself right now…
Anyway, I understand why Amazon has an open forum for their reviews, meaning you don’t have to have purchased an item from them in order to review it. But when I see items that have really poor ratings, where all of the under 3 star reviews are from people who never purchased the product, well, I think it’s a little shady. And this did happen, one product I looked at had literally hundreds of 1 and 2 star reviews, but after spending a couple hours looking through them, what did I find? I tallied less than 10 reviews from people who actually had a complaint about the product. The other 300+ reviews were people who didn’t even own the damn thing!
{If you want to know the product, feel free to contact me, I just don’t want to post specifics in case I end up giving this as a gift.}
My point is, don’t judge a product by its stars. Take the time to at least look at the reviews and see what people have to say. Are they reviewing the product, or are they giving feedback based on other things. What I like to do is jump straight to the negative reviews first, see what the complaints about the product are. Are they a lot of ID10T errors or does the product genuinely suck? Or, as I’ve found recently, does it have a lot of bad reviews because people think it is too expensive or they can’t afford it.
All I’m saying is don’t judge a product by its stars…So say we all.
Is My Geek Showing? 