I have always been a shopaholic, an online shopaholic, to be precise. So I end up spending an enormous amount of time on Amazon. My intrigue and boredom end up with me looking at unique products from random sellers. But I want to win, as in, I want to feel like a winner when I get the product and not like a dumbass who got scammed into buying a not-so-useful product. This sometimes becomes challenging as sellers may be new and the reviews aren’t enough to regress to the mean. One trick which I have started using is looking at the reviews and checking how many of them use their names versus the default ‘Amazon Customer’. Most of the reviews using their name seem fake to me as they give 5 stars and are championing the product. I may be wrong but this hack seems to have saved me some return nightmares.

A quick way to verify would be to go to https://www.amazon.in/gp/new-releases/ which lists Amazon’s new releases. Look at some of those 4+ star products and their reviews, don’t they seem odd?

It is easy to try this on new releases as it doesn’t have the real orders yet and most of them are fake.

My guess why they use their names would be to help with tracking.