Testing products sits at the heart of what we do at Consumer NZ. We’ve been doing it since the 1960s!
We have test results for thousands of products on our website, from small purchases like laundry detergents and air fryers through to washing machines and e-bikes. Whatever we’re testing, though, there are some core principles we keep to.
Our testing is independent, evidence based and designed to reflect how New Zealanders actually use products in real life.
Companies cannot pay to influence our results or rankings. This independence lets us give honest advice – even when the results are uncomfortable for manufacturers. Often we will find an expensive, well-regarded brand doesn’t do well in our test.
How our testing works
Our market researcher looks at what products are available in New Zealand and are most likely to be considered by New Zealand shoppers.
We buy the products we test anonymously, from the same shops you do.
We conduct tests or send the products to specialist labs that are set up to do the testing. Our test methods are designed to make it easy for you to compare one product to another.
Our testing is extremely thorough. Take our luggage test – we drop suitcases from a 90cm height 300 times to see how they hold up! To test the durability of strollers, we put them on a bumpy “rolling road” machine for 64 hours.
For a lot of product tests, we don’t just report back on how they performed in the lab. We also survey thousands of New Zealanders and incorporate what they tell us about how reliable the brands are and how satisfied they are with them. We also look at how repairable some products are to give you long-term insights.
Why you can trust our product reviews
Online ratings and reviews are everywhere – but they’re often not reliable. In recent years, fake online reviews have flooded the internet. AI is making it even worse, and social media is full of influencers paid to say products are great.
We’re here to help you avoid a bad buy. Our robust expert testing and independent ad-free recommendations mean we only recommend top-performing products.
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How to use our results
We use clear labels to help consumers quickly understand what our results mean.
Consumer Recommends
Consumer Recommends is awarded to the products or services that perform best overall in our tests.
To earn this label, a product must:
excel in the most important parts of our testing
have no major safety, reliability or usability concerns.
People’s Choice
People’s Choice awards are based on the experiences of real consumers. They draw on large-scale consumer surveys to recognise brands that:
earn high satisfaction and reliability ratings from owners
have products that score well in our testing.
Don’t Buy
A Don’t Buy label highlights products or services we believe consumers should avoid.
We apply this label when testing uncovers serious issues.
Predicted scores
We test as many products as we can afford to for each category, but sometimes there are many more that consumers might be considering buying. This is when we use all the test data we have available to carry out predictive scoring.
You can read more about how predictive scoring works.
Discontinued products
When a product we’ve tested stops being sold in stores, we don’t take it straight down from our website. This is because we know many people will still be buying these products on the secondhand market. You can use our search filters to view test results for products that have since been discontinued.
