Do you trust customer reviews on e-commerce websites?

Yes, if it is not flooded with fake reviews. It is helpful most of the time.

if it's just a couple of reviews (written at the same period, with similar ratings), I'm more cautious, but when there's plenty, and on a trustworthy site, I'm totally sold.

I trust only if there is an attached video and photo from that customer.

Yes, unless all reviews sound the same and there are no negative reviews at all. It's just hard to create a product that is loved by all. What you an however see is how the brand responds to negative reviews.

There are two aspects to your question which are quite contrary. Firstly when I step in the shoes as a consumer, then in this case my answer is definitely YES! Whenever I use any e-commerce platform the first thing that I do after liking a product is to check the reviews. There are have been multiple incidents, when even despite me liking a particular product I have refused to buy it, solely based on the bad customer reviews. Now even though most of the e-commerce websites offer an exchange policy or refund; as a customer, it is the inconvenience that comes to my mind. Now as someone that has seen the business side of things, I generally grow suspicious of customer reviews. Most businesses, unfortunately, buy fake reviews and I'm sure this part of the comment is going to get me, haters! But it is what it is! A few articles that I recently came across while browsing through the web revealed that certain brands have fake reviews ranging from as low as 4% to as high as 20%. Quoted from an article that I came across: “In 2019 alone, Amazon spent more than $500 million and employed more than 8,000 people to reduce fraud and abuse on its platform,” according to researchers. They found Amazon was deleting around 40% of the fake reviews. Now isn't that surprising! It is definitely a very unethical practice and not something that I would personally use in my own business. When you build something, you ideally must have user empathy and fake reviews are just misleading.

Well it depends, seeing 2 or 3 negative reviews is enough for me to just move on, but I have to see plenty of positive reviews to trust them and then yup I rely on it.

I've seen a lot of shopify apps for reviews, and there are always workarounds to showing 'verified' reviews, which makes me weary. After seeing enough reviews from enough companies, its fairly easy to tell which are organic, which were incentivized, and which were simply manufactured by the staff/owners Typically (from what I've seen) in paid ads, reviews that are included in the ad copy/creative are either falsified for the sake of advertising, or so cherry-picked that it is more of a sales pitch than an actual review As with anything, its best to take them with a grain of salt and use common sense when looking through them

Yes!...If I like the product i'll ignore the negative feedback though lol

Yes, I trust in reviews.

Nope. I've build some e-commerce sites and a lot of reviews are fake. Curated reviews are fake. Some reviews or many of them can be self generates with an algorithm - its not every website, but I don't trust the reviews, unless it's a reputable website. Even simple brochure sites with testimonials can be fake - testimonials have zero credibility for me, for like 98% of things. If someone does have a fake review, you might start seeing a pattern and figure out what they are up to, but then again, what if they hire 10different people to write 100different reviews - the language, writing style will be different. Some say its not easy to manipulate the reviews however, a few lines of code and you're done. It's that easy...

Most definitely, my answer is yes. I never buy a thing from an e-commerce store until I see a good amount of positive reviews along with parcel pictures.

Yes, I trust reviews if they are detailed enough. Also, if a product has 100 reviews and all of them are super-positive - then I will question its authenticity.

Reviews can be the bread and butter for both customers and companies. If you want to stay on top of them as a company, you need to be notified when there's a fire in the review section. If you don't, you'll be losing so many customers to a bad review. A good mediation from a company can actually win you a customer. The reviews section is where decisions are made and also where your product or service can improve. Programmatic VoC is the way to automate that whole process, but having any process is better than nothing.

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A single review with a few positive words makes up an opinion, but a few dozen say the same thing make a consensus. The more reviews, the better

I trust them with a grain of salt. Too many companies look like they recycle them from a generic source. A good example is Best Buy's website. But if a product has a large volume of written reviews, it is still trustworthy even if the e-commerce site itself doesn't own the review

I would if there are good number of them and they are all detailed. I will judge by the content.