Your 2nd point doesn’t make any sense. Sure, you can spend the time returning things. If they’re bad and you know they’re bad. But what if they’re just bad enough?
Take guitar pedals, for example. I know nothing about guitar pedals. I don’t know the brands, I don’t know the features I should look for, what they should cost, nothing. A company can purchase thousands, tens of thousands, or more fake reviews from a bot farm run by wage slaves. I might buy their subpar pedal based on the good review score. It’s fine, it works well enough from my initial testing and doesn’t die…
But what I wanted was to purchase one of the better ones, which the false reviews told me it was! I could have spent the same or less for a better product, that rewarded the company that made the superior product. And I might not even know it, at least until it’s too late to return. That’s (one of) the problems with how bad fake reviews have gotten.
lemmyingly@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
I’ve never heard of anyone use a shop’s reviews to decide what product to purchase, so you’re literally the first to me.
If I want a product that I have no idea about then I’ll go to forums, YouTube channels, etc about that type of thing and see what they say about it all. They’ll be people who’ve done product reviews and comparisons. And so they’re the people with the knowledge and their the people that care.
So in your example of wanting a guitar pedal I’d be visiting music and electric guitar places on the internet to gather knowledge on the product range.
Once I hit the online store, I’ve already decided what I want to purchase. And so the store reviews are more about the seller themselves and whether the product is genuine/fake, or a good/bad version of the white label item.