I recently purchased a lamp on Amazon. My confidence to trust that it was a well made, reliable product came primarily from the MANY 5-star reviews.
Then, when I received the lamp, the product-box (not the Amazon box) included the following bribe for a 5-star review.
My first thought was, hey, free money to spend on more stuff at Amazon...
My second thought was, hey, this pretty much means the reviews on this product were bought for about half of what the product costs.
My third thought was, hey, if they can cover that and still make money, the margin on this thing has to be around 75%. Hope it's not complete junk.
Bottom line is that I now have yet one more reason to suspect the genuineness of Amazon reviews. Negative reviews are probably still useful for finding out if a product's flaws are acceptable (because there's lots of whining going on in reviews too), but if a product has overwhelmingly positive reviews, that may not mean very much.
