Shopping this Festive Season?! Make sure you check these two websites before buying anything!
- AnkitSlashKarn
- Dec 26, 2017
- 3 min read
The festive season is here, which means it's time for e-commerce giants and retailers to bombard you with lucrative emails, special offers, posts on your newsfeed and other attempts to sell you things.
For many people, the festive shopping rush will lead to Amazon.
And it makes sense: The e-commerce giant sells a whole lot of products and makes it very easy to buy them. Many times, those products are less expensive than they are elsewhere.
But not always. Though most people seem to be satisfied with the Amazon shopping experience, certain aspects of it can still be misleading.
Thankfully, there are tools you can and should use to counteract them. Let's talk about two of such tools: Camelcamelcamel and Fakespot.
Find if the deal is really a 'Good deal' ...
Camelcamelcamel is one of many product price trackers floating around the web, but it has been popular and reliable for the better part of a decade.
How it works
Simply visit the site and copy and paste the URL of whatever item you're considering, and CCC brings up a chart of how that item's price has fluctuated over time.
Though Amazon is home to many legitimate bargains, its status as the best place to shop is often overblown. There are more egregious examples. Like with any other retailer, the vast majority of its "deals" aren't really deals — in fact, some independent studies have found it promotes its own stuff over cheaper options, and that Google is often just as, if not more, competitive.
This is all to remind you that retailers aren't charities. While it's not perfect — Amazon has prevented certain products from being price-tracked in the past — a tool like CCC or the browser extension Keepa provides the context that Amazon often withholds.
Not just that these tools let you create a price watch list of the products you want to track price for and would notify you once the price of that product drops. You can also see the top Amazon products whose prices have dropped.
Identify fake product reviews
Fakespot isn't as plainly beneficial as CCC, but it's still a good thing to keep tabs on.
Amazon user reviews aren't always forthright — there's this inherent and shaky Amazon Vine program for one, where users are offered free products for offering good/helpful reviews but it's also not uncommon for a company to outright fake batches of glowing reviews to boost a product's appeal. Amazon has fought this for a long time and is getting better about it.
The idea with Fakespot is to quickly get a sense of just how genuine those reviews are.
How it works
Again, all you have to do is paste a link — Fakespot will then analyse the product's user reviews and grade them on their trustworthiness.
Naturally, it's harder for something like this to be foolproof.
Fakespot says it primarily judges a review's authenticity on "the language utilized by the reviewer, the profile of the reviewer, correlation with other reviewers' data, and machine learning algorithm that focuses on improving itself by detecting fraudulent review," but sometimes people with poor English are just excited about a thing. And again, this isn't the only site to use this idea.
Nevertheless, if you're on the fence about a certain product, especially if it comes from a brand you don't know, it's always good to be safe. This helps with that.
So, next time you find a deal that seems too good to be true, just know that it actually might be.
Happy Shopping!
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