Rankings and product tests help millions of consumers to spend their money wisely by verifying or disproving the claims of the manufacturers. There are many websites, magazines, and laboratories that release their opinions on everything from gardening hand tools to motor vehicles, but one of the most trusted and wide-ranging sources is Consumer Reports. This article is all about Consumer Reports - how it works, what they review, and how they could help you and your customers make better use of your budgets.

Consumer Reports is a magazine that has been around since 1936. It is published in the United States, but has so many Canadian subscribers that it usually includes inserts for Canadians that correspond to the differences between a Canadian product such as a Toronto loft condo and an American one. The magazine is released monthly and there's also an online version of the publication on their website. To access full content you have to pay a subscription fee, because neither the magazine nor the website accepts advertising, which helps them maintain distance from the manufacturers they're reviewing. It also means their subscription fees are higher than many other magazines.

The reason that Consumer Reports has become such a trusted source is that it is completely independent. Laboratories sponsored or supported by the companies themselves and reviewers who get their products handed to them from the companies for free are in danger of being biased. To get around this, Consumer Reports buys all their cable cutters at retail stores, does all their testing in house, and doesn't allow their reviews to be posted on company websites or used in company literature for the purposes of advertisement.

The benefits of such methodology are obvious from the consumer perspective. If there's no pressure to give a product a good review, the reviewer can be objective. All of the names on the publisher information sheaf are involved in each project, too, so no one person with an agenda can hijack the results. Therefore consumers can trust their reviews to represent the truth of the matter and allow themselves to be guided by the magazine's results, which saves them a lot of work comparison shopping.

Consumer Reports can also benefit you if you're a manufacturer or distributor, even though you're not allowed to advertise that they gave your Richmond real estate classes a top rating. How? Because the more than 7.3 million people who subscribe to the magazine will see their results and be guided by it. You can't ask them to review your product or send it to them for review, though. You can only make it widely available and hope that their shoppers will come across it and buy some for testing.