The Internet used as a "pre-buying research" tool

How to teach your prospective clients they are being deceived?

[menial]

It seems most of Internet users strongly believe whatever is published online is true. I happen to deal with many clients who are frequent online shoppers. Most of them are skillful enough to use a search engine and type-in a company's name when they do their "pre-buying research."

However, their smartness usually ends right there. If they find a slandering blog, forum post, or some other unfavorable message about the company, they seem to believe each and every word - even though it should be obvious the text was either fabricated, posted by a competitor, or does not hold any true research value.

This is a big problem and the worst is yet to come. When will the Internet shoppers realize the value of the Internet as a research tool is usually not that great and accurate? And that it takes a minute to anonymously post whatever information on a dozen of different websites?

Teaching your prospective clients about the problem is not likely to be effective. Because before you start they would buy from your competitor who has a "clean record."

[HRoth]

Perhaps tell them that if the reviews all mention the same design flaw, then they can take it as tending to be true, but otherwise, they should take both positive and negative reviews as opportunities for shills and cranks to shoot their mouths off. I have found this is becoming more and more true at places like online bookstores, where authors get their minions to post five-star reviews. Then you get the book and it's a piece of unmitigated trash that's not just bad info but plain old illiterate. This has happened to me a couple times now, so now when I see an item has a five-star review, I automatically suspect the operation of shills, and I disregard the reviews on bookstore sites unless they mention very specific information about the book. Same goes for product review sites.

I recently bought an electric lawnmower and read many, many reviews all over the net about it. Some were fiercely negative. Some were sunnily positive. The ones I paid attention to were those that mentioned flaws that others mentioned. I ended up with a good lawnmower.

[aspdaddy]

Shoppers are just more savvy in general, research shows only 1 in 3 go direct to the brand now, the other 2/3 use authority comparison sites, cashback sites, and search engines to meet the brands half way - blogs or forums are not that influencial as they only offer information.

When will the Internet shoppers realize the value of the Internet as a research tool is usually not that great and accurate?

It happened about 2 years ago.