Reviews You Can Trust

Sending a $300 speaker to a stranger takes trust, so check before you ship, whoever you pick. Most of these take a minute, and none need any special tools.

1. Look somewhere the shop doesn't control. Reviews on a shop's own website go through the shop first, and the shop decides what shows. Trustpilot, Google, and Reddit are harder to curate.
2. A wall of nothing but 5 stars is a question, not an answer. Every real shop gets the occasional bad review. Look for them, and look at how the shop responded.
3. Compare the profile pictures. Many store websites (WordPress and WooCommerce) make each reviewer's picture from their email address. Right-click a picture, open it in a new tab, and look at the long code in the address. If "different" customers have the exact same code as the owner's replies, they were posted with the same email.
4. Peek at the page source. On WordPress sites, a review posted while logged in gets a tag like comment-author-username. If reviews under customer names carry the shop owner's username, the owner posted them.
5. Watch the numbers and the dates. In the same page source, each review has an ID number that counts up as reviews come in. If the IDs count up one by one while the dates jump around by months, someone set those dates by hand.
6. Search a sentence. Copy a distinctive line from a review and search for it in quotes. The same review under two different names is a red flag.
7. Check how old the outside profiles are. A Trustpilot page claimed last week with one glowing review doesn't tell you much yet.
8. Be wary of reviews that trash another shop. A customer telling their story is normal. A review that goes out of its way to knock a competitor, featured front and center, is worth a second look.

Fake and misleading reviews aren't just bad manners. The FTC banned them, including undisclosed reviews from a company's own people, in its 2024 rule on consumer reviews. If you spot them anywhere, you can report them at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.