Warning! 95% of product reviews are useless. Yes, I realize that’s a bold statement, but it’s true. The next time you decide to buy something, you really should read this first.
This also applies to other types of reviews but in particular, it applies to product reviews. When a new product is released, the majority of reviewers are not going to wait for the product to get old and stale before writing their reviews. They will try to stay updated, as much as they can, to the new products that are released so that people will keep coming back to them. And before the flood of other reviews come out for the product.
So what is wrong with releasing a product review quickly? It sure is great for gathering the limited information on the product in one central place. But the one major problem for reviews like that, is they will often not list the severe problems that pop up over time.
Time is the true tester, and it applies especially to products. Look at how long the pharmaceutical industry have to test their products before releasing it.Though even that standard is on a steady decline as money becomes more important than human wellbeing. But I’ll leave that topic for another time.
When you are looking to buy a new cell phone for example, you may search for keywords like “Sony Ericsson K850i specs” or “Sony Ericsson G900 reviews” and get all sorts of pretty product pictures and praises for its great new functions. All of which you absolutely need of course. Though probably for only 3 months till you get tired of them, and just use it to impress friends who has never seen those functions before.
Here’s the million dollar tip: Next time you are looking to buy something, use a search string like this, “Sony Ericsson K850i problems” or “Sony Ericsson G900 fixes”. That will link you with all the obscure forum posts and Help-Me websites where people are begging for help after purchasing the product.
It’s a simple but effective solution to get past all the PR and glitter for the product and dig up the potential pitfalls of your purchase.Hope this helps you to avoid a potentially disastrous purchase!
If this has helped you in any way, or if you have more shopping tips, please share it here!
not only product reviews, but also restaurant and hotel reviews! I found most of them unreliable! i remember how i once went to a pizzeria by relying on the review of a so called gourmet website, at which the restaurant was ranked first. However the pizzas turned out to be supermarket frozen pizza standard… eww!
In fact my friend opened a restaurant in HK around half a year ago, he was contacted by the biggest gourmet website in HK- asking him to pay $ 200,000 HKD to secure ‘positive’ reviews.
This is so right! I see this with digital cameras a lot. It’s not till you’ve used it a few months, even a year or so, before you realize what pieces fall off first and what the camera can stand up to. All the reviews are rushed because they’re commercialized, unfortunately. I’m glad Amazon.com still has some good, unbiased customer reviews.
Richard X. Thripp’s last blog post: Subject vs. Persona in Blogging