How to spot trustworthy online reviews before you buy

(InvestigateTV) — About 77 percent of Americans say online reviews are important when they are thinking about buying a product, according to a recent Consumer Affairs survey.

One in three people say they don’t buy anything without reading the online reviews first.

Dayna Edens with ConsumerAffairs said the survey found reviews are influential and even get people to change their behaviors. She said even when a product only has five stars, people can be wary.

“And we found something that we kind of call the ‘four-star cliff.’ If your review, your product has less than four stars, the hesitation is even further. Four point five stars is kind of like that...happy, okay, we trust it. Five-star, it’s kind of like, why is this only getting perfect stars? Are these reviews incentivized? That kind of thing. So, we really found that four stars is like a cliff that makes or breaks your product,” Edens said.

Edens said people are looking at who is posting the reviews. Shoppers try to find people of the same gender or age range to see what they have to say about a product.

Artificial intelligence is also infiltrating the reviews.

“We’re finding that nearly half of shoppers are trusting them way less than human reviews. And I mean, it makes sense. Basically, there’s a model that’s out there that is scrolling through a program, that scrolling through and taking that and you know, spitting back out the short snippet of it, which is great for that quick read, but you truly have to if you’re looking to make a big purchase, you really need to look into the actual product itself,” Edens said.

Edens said don’t just take one review and run with it. Read several of them. Make sure there is some sort of name and location tied to the account and also see if a review is a verified purchase or an incentivized review.

That’s where the company reached out to someone and offered a deal if they said nice things.