If you want to find out what others think about a product or service, what do you do?
A quick internet search throws up thousands of review sites and customer ratings on so many things; films, days out, Airbnb locations… the list goes on. Chances are, you’ll find some opinions.
There are probably 3 main reasons why we feel driven to leave a review.- Venting frustration.
- Complimenting a company we like.
- Wanting to express ourselves and feel our opinions matter.
as a company, we see all 3.
But as Karen mentions in the review above, we are oftentimes left wondering if what we are reading is real.
In 2020, Fakespot (a fake review detection service) analysed over 720 MILLION reviews on the Amazon website using AI. They found a staggering 42% of the comments were phoney.
And in April 2023 the UK Government Department for Business and Trade published a study into the occurrence and impact of fake online reviews. It found:
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11% to 15% of all e-commerce reviews for consumer electronics, home & kitchen items and sports & outdoors products - are likely fake.
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well-written fake reviews impact our decision making - we’re 3.1% more likely to buy something that has well-written fake reviews.
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fake reviews had the largest effect on the buying of electronics and more expensive items. Products.
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fake reviews cause an estimated £50 million to £312 million in total yearly harm to UK consumers.
the real deal.
So it seems filtering out the authentic opinions from actual customers might be tricky. This is one reason why smol partners with Feefo to collate our customer reviews from folk who are actually customers. Feefo is an independent review site but they verify with us that every review actually only comes from real life customers who have had first hand experience of shopping with smol.
We’re proud of our Platinum Customer Service Award via Feefo and also our 25,000 plus 5 star reviews on the platform.
Sites like Trustpilot also work hard to ensure reviews are fairly managed and only from genuine customers. Whilst we don’t work directly with Trustpilot, we always try to ensure all reviews are bonafide but some probably do slip through. Despite this we still maintain a high score of 4.4 out of 5 or above.
social media.
Another powerful source of opinion is found on social media pages where you can often gain an insight into what customers think of a service or a product.If a customer has gone to the effort of writing a positive comment on one of our adverts or social posts, it speaks volumes for our service and is better than any advert. Customers really do say it best.
