Amazons Choice: How It Can Be Exploited to Mislead Shoppers
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Dodgy retailers are gaming the system by paying for positive reviews and merging random products to get this apparent badge of quality.
Shopping online can be a difficult experience. Let’s say you’re shopping for a new kettle. If you’re doing it in person, you can touch it, get a feel for how well made it is and whether it’s really the one you want.
That’s not really possible online, which is why doing some homework on an item before paying is so important.
Lots of Amazon reviews are clearly dodgy or done commercially. Often the negative reviews are the true reviews but you have to be careful there with many seeming to enjoy giving a bad review without reason but others give detailed reasons why the product is poor and for me these are far more important than those positive reviews clearly written by people who don't have a clue about the product and don't include any specific details about the product. The other manipulation is where the product is sold for a short time at a very low price and gets lot of great reviews and then its sold at a much higher price off the back of those positive reviews.
We find it hard to trust any reviews - good or bad - because you don't know the calibre of the people leaving the review and what their expectations were in the first place, let alone whether it is a paid for review or not. We only take notice when there are several hundred reviews and they are mostly positive. 
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Chief Bargain Hunter
