When you buy products on Amazon, it’s a good idea to leave reviews about them. Reviews help other buyers decide whether to purchase a product as it lets them know about their credibility. However, sometimes it so happens that some buyers can’t read reviews written by others. This means that there’s no way to read the original post as Amazon hides them with the help of this feature.
The issue has persisted for several users, many of whom think that it may be due to the sensitivity filters reinstated to prevent harm from negative reviews.
It could have happened to anyone. As users browse through the product, a message stating ‘Review Hidden by Sensitivity Filter’ suddenly hits them.
What Does the ‘Review Hidden by Sensitivity Filter’ Mean on Amazon?
Amazon classifies certain product reviews as sensitive. It means that when you write a review for such products, they will be automatically hidden from your profile and won’t be visible to other buyers.
Such products include Personal care products, clothing, jewelry, erotic media, and self-help and personal protection products.
Amazon classifies these products as sensitive to protect its users from embarrassing themselves. Thus, with the help of the hidden sensitivity filter, the e-commerce giant screens out reviews for such products, making them unavailable for public viewing.
Why is My Amazon Reviews Hidden?
Amazon wants to protect its users’ privacy, adding several features that hide reviews, questions, wishes lists, and other sensitive content. When the eCommerce giant rolled out these changes, many users suddenly began noticing their reviews disappear. At the same time, most users thought that Amazon must have deleted them for not complying with their standards. Only after much research did they find that there were changes in their privacy settings.
The ‘Reviews Hidden by Sensitivity’ filter automatically hides your activities, privacy, and contributions, but you can still choose to expose them.
How to Hide Amazon Reviews?
If you are getting the ‘Reviews Hidden by Sensitivity Filter’ message, you needn’t worry, as you can undo it. However, if you need to protect your privacy and want to hide your reviews, you can follow these steps.
- Log in to your Amazon account and head to ‘Your Profile.’
- Select Edit your profile, and then, Edit privacy settings.
- Under Privacy Settings, select the Hide sensitive activity to uncheck it and choose Save.
The changes should reflect as soon as you click on Save, and the reviews that you post will be visible.
How to Get Rid of Fake Reviews on Amazon?
In a 2020 survey of 1000 US Amazon buyers who wanted tech items on Prime Day, only 16% said they could confidently spot fake reviews, while only 24% said that they could mostly do it, and 33% said that they were confident enough to filter out those fake write-ups. The same survey also suggested that 78% of participants said product reviews played a prominent role in their buying decisions.
However, while most reviews are genuine, it would still be a good idea to know how to spot fake reviews. So, when you read a product review on Amazon, you should look for these things. Also, there are several tools that you can use to spot fake reviews, including Fake Spot, Review Meta, and more.
Customer Reviews
When you read product reviews on Amazon, especially those written by other customers, there are several things for which you must keep your eyes open. Firstly, you should check if the ratings given by other buyers are genuine. To do this, you can look for things like the natural use of language. It would help if you also looked for any comparisons between the product you are looking at and competitor products.
Also, be wary of overly positive or negative reviews. Another thing that you should spot is if there are too many one-star or five-star ratings for the product. If you find all or any of these, you can rest assured that the reviews are fake or cooked up. They are not genuine, and someone has compensated the reviewers for posting them.
So, if you find that a product review is fake, you can request Amazon to launch an investigation and find the perpetrators. To do this, click on the Report Abuse button under the review.
Alternatively, you can also contact customers who have left the reviews and ask them to remove the comments. However, you must be careful when you contact other customers to terminate or make changes to the reviews to abide by Amazon’s policies that state you cannot pressure buyers into removing the feedback they have left.
Furthermore, the policies also state that you must be polite with your buyers, and you cannot harass them in any way. If you do so, it can lead to the suspension of your account. Also, as a seller, you shouldn’t offer compensation to your buyers for reviewing your products as it is against Amazon’s policies and will lead to the termination of your profile.
Fake Spot
‘Fake Spot’ is a tool through which you can find the reliability of reviews posted on e-commerce sites such as Amazon, eBay, and more. The algorithm works by looking at the reviews, reviewers, language used, previous reviews, and purchase histories of the products to determine if the review is fake.
To know whether an Amazon review is fake using Fake Spot, copy and paste the URL into the Fake Spot Analyzer, and investigate it. Once you paste the URL into the analyzer, it will show you the legitimacy of the review by assigning different grades.
The tool also screens fake reviews by assigning them genuine ratings. So, for example, if the reviewer has given five stars for a product, and if the tool brands it as fake, it will lower the ratings and make it more reliable. Fake Spot Analyzer will also give that review a C grade, meaning that the review is not genuine, and someone has been paid for to post it.
You can install the Google Chrome extension of Fake Spot Analyzer and analyze reviews on Amazon or other such e-commerce websites with the click of a button. Fake Spot is also available for the Android platform, and you can download the application from the Play Store and analyze Amazon reviews from your smartphones.
Review Meta
Like Fake Spot, Review Meta is another tool that you can use to filter product reviews on Amazon and other such e-commerce websites. It works in the same way as Fake Spot, where you paste the URL into the search bar, and it will eliminate or scale down the reviews so that they look genuine. The tool also gives you a report card to infer whether the product review Passes or Fails. If neither of the two cases holds good, the tool gives you a warning. Review Meta eliminates fake reviews using a host of evaluation criteria. However, you can tweak the default settings and make changes to the algorithm as per your requirements.
For instance, you can adjust categories according to your preferences.
Moreover, you also get the Review Meta extension for popular browsers such as Edge and Chrome. So, you can install them and check for fake reviews right from your browser.
The Review Index
The Review Index is another tool that analyzes tech product reviews and screens out the fake ones. Although it works only for ratings, you can still use it to check if a product gets a boost on the platform with the help of fake reviews. Like the other tools, ‘The Review Index’ also has extensions for Firefox and Chrome. So, you can use them and check for fake product reviews right from your browsers.
To spot fake product reviews on the e-commerce platform, all you need to do is paste the URL into the search bar on ‘The Review Index’ website. Once you do this, the tool automatically classifies the product into different categories depending on the words it parses. The tool then runs a scan for filtering out spammy reviews that have helped boost the ratings of the products.
After completion, the ‘The Review Index’ tool gives you the results in a pass or fail, depending on whether the reviews are genuine.
What Percentage of Amazon Reviews are Fake?
Amazon already has around 250 million reviews for all the products listed across categories. These reviews have helped the eCommerce giant increase conversion rates by 270%. Also, when products with lower price tags are reviewed, Amazon gets a 190% boost in conversion rates, while it gets 380% for products with higher price tags. So, it is safe to say that product reviews on the platform increase conversion rates.
More Than Three-Quarters of Users Search for Negative Reviews
82% of users search for negative reviews on Amazon, while about 16.2% base their buying decisions on such product reviews. Everyone wants to be a marketer and prove that their products or services are the best. So, when these people put their products up on places like Amazon, they ensure that they state their values and qualities in a boastful way, using swanky words to describe them. So, you can see why most people don’t trust product reviews on Amazon.
Less Than a Quarter of Users Trust Product Reviews
While these numbers are fascinating, only about 17% of buyers trust these reviews. Among these buyers, about 20.8% only trust reviews by verified buyers, while only about 58.1% consider them genuine. Similarly, about 4.1% of buyers don’t trust product reviews on Amazon.
When it comes to writing reviews for a product sold on Amazon, only about 3% to 10% participate, where 80% of buyers leave a one-star rating for the products they purchase, more than half leave five-stars, and only a few leave two- or three-star ratings.
However, the number of fake reviews is more staggering than you might think. Amazon suggests that 61% of reviews in the ‘Electronics’ category are unreal, while the illegitimacy of Beauty products reviews is 63%. Likewise, about 59% of sneakers reviews are fake, while you cannot trust the reviews of at least 64% of supplements.
Other Interesting Facts About Amazon Reviews
As of March 2019, Amazon had more than two million unverified reviews, of which 99.6% were five-star ratings. Likewise, in March 2018, the e-commerce platform detected only 1% of fake or unreliable reviews.
Also, when you check the 58-odd million Amazon reviews using Review Meta or other such tools, you will find that 9% are unnatural or fake.
Several companies practicing Blackhat techniques resort to paying buyers as much as $10,000 for leaving cooked-up feedbacks on various products. For example, when buyers verify fake reviews by giving them a thumbs-up, companies such as these pay them at least $1. Similarly, you can get up to $10,000 for reviving an account suspended due to fake reviews.
Likewise, you can get up to $300 for removing negative reviews.
Conclusion
As a seller on Amazon, or even as a buyer, it would be better to keep your profile private. It primarily holds good if you don’t want others to see the product reviews you have put up. Amazon introduced the ‘Reviews Hidden by Sensitivity Filter’ to protect the privacy of both buyers and sellers. The feature helps save people who buy or sell on the platform to stay away from those awkward or embarrassing moments that they may experience due to product reviews.
With this feature, buyers, or even sellers, can choose what reviews or other information they want to share with other such buyers and set them up for public view while also having the option to hide sensitive information.
Only a few people buy products without reading their reviews first. At the same time, only 17% trust such reviews. Even fewer people write them. So, you can say that most product reviews that you find on the platform come from companies practicing Blackhat techniques that lead to higher conversions.
