There’s no way to avoid it.  “Shopping season” is here. Consumers are told they will save heaps of money by buying a bunch of junk.  Let’s go back a year and see what junk we bought last time.

In 2017, we saw a spike in ReviewMeta.com traffic on Black Friday (November 24) and a much larger one on Cyber Monday (November 27).  However, the Sunday before Cyber Monday was an even larger spike than what we saw on Black Friday.

So let’s look back at the top 10 most popular products on ReviewMeta from Thanksgiving all the way to Cyber Tuesday (yes, that’s a thing now).

#1: Pure Biology Anti Aging Night Cream

https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B072MYZV4R

Yikes!  The number one most popular product (on ReviewMeta) last Black Friday now has ZERO reviews.  All 2,671 reviews that we’ve seen on this product are gone. I wonder if there’s a reason so many people were looking it up on ReviewMeta…

#2: Back to School Bluedio F2 (Faith) Active Noise Cancelling

https://reviewmeta.com/amazon-ca/B071SFQR9T

The number 2 product is actually from Amazon Canada – but still looks like there are some problems with the reviews.  Furthermore, we’re showing that 21 reviews have been deleted from this listing.

#3: Baebody Eye Gel

https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B01K2UMMI0

Another fail!  This one with over 10,000 reviews.  Worth mentioning that we’ve seen 1,212 reviews removed from this listing.  Almost 10%.

#4: Glorious Extended Gaming Mouse Mat

https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B00J2EF4K6

Alright! Our first WARN.  This glorious mouse pad has had at least 86 glorious reviews deleted.  Starting to wonder if there’s a trend here.

#5: Allezola Professional Chef’s Knife

https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B01MSOT2HX

Another product where all the reviews go missing.  Over 700 this time. So far 5/5 products have a substantial amount of deleted reviews…

#6: Platinum 20 sec professionelle Kratzerentfernung Lackschäden

https://reviewmeta.com/amazon-de/B07324CWLV

For product #6, we’ve got to go all the way to Germany.  This is a sort of auto paint scratch remover. A sub-2-star rating to begin with, ReviewMeta Fail, and even a handful of deleted reviews.

#7: XINDA Fatigue Driving Warning Device

https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B071F7CFS3

OUR FIRST PASS!  But it still has 5 reviews deleted…

#8: Fitness Tracker, Wesoo K1 Fitness Watch

https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B074P5VPRG

Product #8 is something that can’t even be found on Amazon anymore…

#9: Pure Biology “Total Eye” Anti Aging Eye Cream

https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B01N37TWSS

Another product with some serious problems in the reviews.  Not only is there a FAIL, but we’ve seen 1,957 deleted reviews!

#10: Deik Kabelloser Staubsauger

https://reviewmeta.com/amazon-de/B06XWPQ656

For our final product, we go back to Germany.  This vacuum only gets a WARN, but we’re still seeing that 177 reviews were deleted.

Why does every one of the top 10 products from last year have so many deleted reviews?

To be perfectly honest, I had originally set out to write a quick article about the top 10 products from last year just for fun – I wasn’t expecting to find anything interesting at all in the data.  But as usual, the data always seems to tell a story.

My first thought was that Amazon is obviously promoting shady products on their biggest day of sales, but after thinking about it a bit more, we can’t confidently conclude that theory.  Here’s why:

• ReviewMeta.com is a tool to look up products that might have questionable reviews.  These products are likely getting looked up because shoppers had some doubts about the reviews in the first place.  
• One of the most popular pages on ReviewMeta.com is the “Best/Worst” page.  It’s possible some of these products were featured there.
• There’s other reasons people visit ReviewMeta.com.  For example, the #1 product on this list seems to have received the vast majority of it’s traffic directly from Google.  Shoppers were likely just googling the product name and landing on ReviewMeta.

So it seems we can cast doubt on this conspiracy theory just as quickly as it started.  That said, it’s still good to stay critical of what of the reviews you’re reading.  Just because something is promoted as a hot Black Friday deal doesn’t mean that the product and reviews are fully vetted.

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