My go to place to purchase anything right now is Amazon.  I’ve pretty much always hated stores and shopping in general….so the idea that I can pretty much buy anything and have it show up in 1-2 days is AWESOME.  I’ve also used it to see if a product was good or worth the money – by checking product reviews.  But as of late – some of the product reviews seem sketchy.  I would venture to say a good percentage are fake reviews. Especially when you see “I received this product for free in exchange for a review” over and over again.  I know Amazon is pretty diligent about checking for products with fake reviews.  It has implemented a program called Vine wherein it manages its network of trusted reviewers:  https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/help.

But with the millions of products and reviewers it is difficult to police.  I’ve been using this third party website, which so far has done a pretty good job of rating the quality of the reviews, www.fakespot.com.   You post the URL (link) of the product you are considering and Fake Spot will give it a letter grade and provide analysis based on the quality of the reviews.  You can use this for different sites as such as Best Buy, Walmart or Yelp.

I tried it for the Google Wi-Fi http://www.myeverydayhacks.com/2019/04/26/home-mesh-network/product I was planning on buying and it gave Amazon’s review a solid C.  This is based on the fact that Amazon had altered reviews and based on analysis 71% of the reviews were valid.  Since Google is a well-known brand and I’ve gotten some positive feedback from friend’s that have used it…I’m going to try it anyway.

So while a site like Fake Spot can guide you, you should consider other criteria as well.