> In my experience the reviews are most useless for small items, where fake reviews can easily manipulate the reviews or are even the only reviews available.

Yeah, 'big ticket' wasn't the right word; probably I meant 'commodity'. I meant to exclude things like reviews of obscure books, which sellers apparently usually don't bother trying to game, since they seem to be reasonably reliable (at least, last time I checked, which was a while ago …).