Decide what to buy | the Reevoo.com blog, featuring news on TVs, cameras, laptops, mp3 players & other gadgets, shopping tips and deals, reviews and more

As you may have noticed, here at Reevoo we’re all about real customer reviews.  Other people aren’t as great fans of letting shoppers be guided by the opinions of people who actually own the product they’re thinking of buying.  These kind of people - usually the makers, or sellers, or promoters of products or services - are always looking for a way to game the reviews system.

Travel review websites have long had problems with hotel owners posing as guests, and AOL Travel has a great list of ways to spot a fake travel review.  We thought we’d come up with a similar list for people looking for electricals online.

You’ll find the full list at our fake reviews Facebook group (and we’d love you to add your own tips to it!), but here are a couple of tasters to get you started:

- Does the review sound like a sales person has written it?  Is the language used a bit like an advert or promo, with lots of positive adjectives and superlatives: best, most amazing, ground-breaking, etc.

- Does it stand out? Are the rest of the reviews negative and yet this one is overly positive or vice versa?  Another lesson here is to make sure you read the best and worst reviews of a product.

Find a full list here: SAFER: Shoppers Against Fake e-Reviews

Fake review stories have been all over the news in the past few months. Whether it’s manufacturers and service providers posting fake reviews about their products to try and increase sales or even the hilarious reviews of things like wolf t-shirts on Amazon. Funny or not, these reviews are not genuine and pose a threat to consumers who could be misled into wasting money on goods and services that don’t deliver.

To see how much of a problem this really is, Reevoo teamed up with YouGov to see how many people were even aware that companies write fake reivews of their products and services online and how many people have actually been misled by fake reveiws.

41% of UK shoppers do not realise that fake reviews even exist online. This moves up to 47% of older shoppers in the 45-54 year group. That’s nearly half of older shoppers who are at risk of falling for fake reviews and wasting their money. In the run-up to Christmas, this could mean bad news for millions of shoppers.

Almost one in 10 people have been misled by a fake positive review and wasted their money on something that didn’t live up to how it was reviewed online.

For more information on the research, check out our Reevoo press page.

Reevoo was born out of our founders’ quest for providing shoppers with real reviews but we think now is the time to really shout about it and try and help shoppers as best we can, all over the Internet.

Even though there are now laws against falsely representing oneself as a consumer (The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008), the Internet is impossible to completely police so we’ve drawn upon the powers of social networking to try to get shoppers to help others by reporting fake reviews.

Join our Shoppers Against Fake e-Reviews (SAFER) page on facebook and find out how to spot fake reviews, report your findings and make online shopping a better experience for everybody.

Say no to fake reviews – shop SAFER

How Reevoo makes sure all reviews are 100% real - from people who have definitely bought the product.