I have been caught out so many times by companies who appear to have great reviews, only to eventually be let down by the product, the service or the whole transaction. I have managed therefore to hone this to a fine craft and in the main I am rarely wrong about whether or not a review is legitimate. I firs tested this out when buying some survival supplies from a company called Rising S. I had never heard of the company before yet upon reading the Rising S company reviews, I decided that they were worth giving a try, and everything went perfectly.
If you aren’t sure which reviews to trust, here is a quick guide to gauging whether or not you can.
Distance of Time
This one applies to companies who have been in business for a number of years rather than those who are brand new. The key is to take a number of reviews from different times over the course of the last few years. If people have been leaving their own reviews or getting friends to write reviews for them, it will have been done in bursts, if however you see a steady line of reviews coming in then you can have much more confident that they were left by people who have had experience with that particular business.
Responses
One of the most encouraging things to look out for is a company who will actively respond to all reviews which have been left. In fact if they are doing this then even a negative review may not look as bad as it first could. When businesses respond to good and bad reviews it means that they care and it also means that they are happy to accept any blame which may be attributed to them. In the case of negative reviews you may see them offer compensation for someone’s bad experience but you may also see them defending themselves against something that they don’t agree with. The point is that should the business decide to respond to each review it means that they care, and that is a trustworthy trait.
The Reviewers
The last thing to check out, especially for those people who have left glowing reviews, is how many review they have previously left for other businesses. You often find that if someone wishes the review to appear different, that the people who sendup leaving reviews will have created a new account which they will have used to leave that review. There is something up if you find that there are many positive reviews, left by people who aren’t normally the type to leave other reviews.
Always pay attention to the full list of reviews, weigh up the positive and the negative and then make your decision. The final rule of thumb which I like to follow is that if it looks too good to be true, then it most probably is.
