A third of Amazon book reviews are fake, study uncovers

With countless products available on Amazon’s marketplace, online shopping can often leave customers overwhelmed, exhausted, and reliant on product reviews to determine the best purchase. However, shady sellers have been quick to take advantage of this, and crowd their reviews with fake five star ratings.

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But just how many product reviews are fraudulent? To find out, Scams.info analysed ratings for Amazon bestsellers to uncover which products have the biggest boost by fake reviews.

The most untrustworthy Amazon reviews

Rank	Category	Percentage of fake reviews
1 ADVERTISEMENT	Books	37.2%
2 ADVERTISEMENT	Baby	34.8%
3	Large Appliances	33.6%
4	Computers & Accessories	32.1%
5	Women’s Clothing	31.9%
6	Garden & Outdoors	29.9%
7	Men’s Clothing	26.0%
8	Musical Instruments	25.2%
9	Lighting	22.8%
10	DIY & Tools	22.7%

For the full data, see here.

Book reviews are the most untrustworthy on Amazon, Scams.info can reveal. Almost 2 in 5 (37.2%) book ratings are fraudulent, the most of any product category. After analysing Amazon’s bestsellers, the experts uncovered that for 59% of products, over 40% of ratings were fake. For 1 in 20 books, over 90% of ratings were illegitimate.

Shockingly, baby products also receive an extreme amount of fake reviews. Over a third (34.8%) of ratings on Amazon’s baby range are artificial, and 1 in 16 products had 90% of reviews determined to be fake. Reviews for high-value items like Large Appliances and Computers & Accessories are also untrustworthy, at 33.6% and 32.1% fake rating respectively.

The most trustworthy Amazon reviews

Only 7.9% of reviews for Pet Supplies are fake, the only products with less than 10% fake reviews, and 29.3% fewer than Books. Those purchasing Sports & Outdoors (10.5%) and Stationery & Office Supplies (12.1%) products can also take comfort in the knowledge that less than 15% of reviews are artificial.

Note to editors: If you use any of the data below, we kindly ask that you provide a link to https://www.scams.info/ who conducted the study as credit.

Methodology:

1. 20 popular categories on Amazon.co.uk were chosen for analysis to determine which had the most fake reviews.

2. The top 50 best selling items in each category were analysed.

3. Independent review analysis tool https://reviewmeta.com/ was utilised to scrape reviews for each product. Data gathered included the original rating, the quantity of fake reviews, and a new review score once fake ratings were removed.

4. Where the last analysis was done before August 2023, the product was run again for a more recent analysis.

5. Finally, results were aggregated and by category and ranked by % of fake reviews.

6. Original data analysis was conducted 5th September 2023 and is accurate as of then.