Review trends

[jimintexas 0]

I love reviewmeta... It's extremely helpful especially since you guys are so transparent about how you evaluate reviews.

I noticed this particular product went from a 3.8 in May when it was last evaluated to a current 4.2.  I bought the product (although I am a bit surprised I must not have used reviewmeta.com because I don't know if I would have been impressed with a 3.8) and am greatly disappointed with it.

While current metrics do not show any suspicious review activity with this product, to me, it would be interesting to see the rating over time. To move up to a 4.2, that would require not just 4 stars but 5 stars... It would be interesting to see if it spiked suddenly or just gradual over time.

Anyway, thanks much for providing such a useful tool to help use in evaluating reviews of products.

[ReviewMeta 35]

We include a rating trend graph on every report - can you post a link to the particular report?

[jimintexas 0]

Sorry, I meant to do that. https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B00C97JY2M

Note though I said to see how the rating changes over time. What I see looking at another review is that it gives the rating based on the reviews for that month... What would be useful is another line graph which gives the overall rating of the product as of that month. Thus, if I see a relatively constant rating over the first few months, but then later, it trends up, let's say, over a period of a year... I would wonder what happened that made reviews trend higher... Or if it starts out high, then starts to trend down, I would be suspicious about the initial reviews. Yes, I can guess a trend based on a rating per month, but per my example below, it would take a bit of speculation on my part to see the trend.

For example, looking at: https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B01MYQEEWV  I could guess that the rating is relatively stable, although there were some months with low reviews which also had low ratings, making my guess of a trend more speculative than just being able to see it on the chart.

And the information about how high review months compare with others is useful... But again, on this product which shows a rating trend, one of the high review months had an average rating of 4.6. For a product which does not have a lot of reviews, this is possible, but if this had been a product which receives 100s of reviews per month, this would be a bit suspicious to me.

[ReviewMeta 35]

Oh, my bad - you need to request the full report.  The one you sent is just the preliminary.  I requested it, so in a few minutes you should be able to see the graph.

[jimintexas 0]

Thanks...

I'd still like to see as part of Rating Trends the overall rating up to that point in time. I wish I could recall when the previous summary was created for this product, but I recall going into reviewmeta.com and seeing a 3.8.  If I were to guess, it was March 2018. If we look at the graph, especially considering that prior to 2019, the highest reviews per month was 16 and since April this year, every single month except 3 exceeded that count or within one of that count...

And if my memory is correct that around March 2018, the rating was 3.8, we see not only with the increased volume, we see 19 out of 21 months where ratings for the month exceed the previous average.

I know based on other metrics, there's minimal evidence of fake reviews... And perhaps it is only coincidental that all of a sudden, there's been a great increase in reviews since Spring this year and ever since the last reviewmeta analysis, everyone seems to think more positively about this product...  But based on my experience after buying the product, it wouldn't surprise me that sellers are getting more sophisticated in fraudulently raising their product ratings.