Why isn’t the Adjusted Rating lower?
This is becoming a common question, so I figured I’d address it: If a product has unnatural reviews, why isn’t the ReviewMeta adjusted rating much lower than the rating displayed on Amazon?
1. Fake Reviews does NOT mean it’s a bad product.
First off, just because a product has fake reviews (keep in mind that we’re looking for unnatural reviews, not necessarily “fake”) does NOT automatically mean the product is low-quality. Sellers know that in the long-run, there’s no amount of fake reviews that will compensate for selling a terrible product. Eventually the honest negative reviews and high return rate will catch up to them.
2. We base our adjusted rating STRICTLY on existing reviews.
We never punish a product by removing stars. Our adjusted rating is always based off existing reviews for the product. So, for example, if a product has only 20 5-star reviews, and we determine that half are not trustworthy, we’re still left with 10 5-star reviews. This will leave the product with an average rating of 5-stars.
We have absolutely no experience with the product, so it wouldn’t be fair to arbitrarily deduct stars just because some of the reviews look suspicious.
3. Amazon is already using an adjusted rating.
Amazon’s already doing what we are – to some degree. Their “product rating” is often different than the raw data average of all the reviews. We’ll never know what their secret sauce is, but sometimes (and often) it ends up having the same result as ours.
Remember: it’s just an estimate, and you can edit the adjustment yourself.
It’s always important to remember that it’s impossible to determine which reviews are fake and which are real with 100% accuracy. ReviewMeta is just an estimate and not always going to be 100% on the money. You have the ability to turn the knobs and edit our adjustments as you see fit. See how to edit the adjusted rating and other secret power user features of ReviewMeta.
