Mega e-commerce and cloud computing giant Amazon has a fake review problem.
That’s according to a new report from Buzzfeed News on the company, where the vast majority of reviews for items such as Bluetooth headphones and speakers appear to violate Amazon’s prohibition on paid reviews. Such reviews have certain characteristics, such as repetitive wording that people probably cut and paste in.
Various groups exist that help connect “reviewers” to those that might pay for them. While recently shuttered, two of the largest groups – “Amazon Review Club” and “US Amazon Review Club” – each had 69,000 and 60,000 members, respectively. Many more groups still exist, with tens of thousands of members apiece.
One of the most common tactics, according to the report, is to ask customers to buy a certain product on Amazon and say that they will subsequently be reimbursed via PayPal. In order for it to be marked as an “Amazon Verified Purchase,” the reviewer must have bought the product themselves, without receiving a discount from the vendor.
The most obvious characteristic of a fake review is when a product gets dozens of five-star reviews within hours of it being posted. Some of them appear to be worded similarly, too.
Depending on the amount of reviews, an average “reviewer” can make anywhere from $10 USD a month to several hundred, plus the actual product reviewed, whether her or she used it or not.
Amazon has made efforts to deal with the problem, aggressively policing for incentivized reviews and filing five lawsuits since 2015 against people who wrote paid reviews and the companies that solicited them.
An Amazon spokesperson told BuzzFeed News the percentage of inauthentic reviews on the platform is nominal, but wouldn’t get into more specific details. In a statement, she wrote, “Amazon is investing heavily to detect and prevent inauthentic reviews. In addition to advance detection, we use a machine-learned algorithm that gives more weight to newer, more helpful reviews, apply strict criteria to qualify for the Amazon verified purchase badge and enforce a significant dollar amount requirement to participate.”
Check out Buzzfeed News‘ entire report here.
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As both a vendor and user on Amazon myself, I see this issue being a real issue, particularly in a highly competitive space. It’s hard to compete with products similar products that appear to have tens of hundreds of reviews very shortly after selling, while some of us go through the ‘fair’ channels to stimulate growth. On another note, not to be super critical Christopher, but as an avid reader on the site, my feedback to this piece would be to tie back the piece to the iPhone in Canada. Seems the core vision of the site is being diluted a tad. Nothing wrong at all with the article, in fact very informative and well written. Just some old fashion specific feedback as an avid reader. Keep up the great work!
TLTR
This article is great. 5 stars
Best article. 5 stars
This is old news. Some of the reviews are actually jokes with some real sarcasm. Makes me laugh every time.
Buzzfeed reporting news… because people trust buzzfeed for legit news and what Starbucks drinks match your zodiac sign. Smh.
ALL review sites are victims of fake bogus reviews whether it’s positive or negative.
It’s commonplace for professional writers writing reviews nowwho have never had any experience with the business. The next advancement is bots writing reviews. It’s a huge money making business.
What makes it worse is sites like TripAdvisor shape the reviews by not approving or approving only a few negative reviews for a business advertises that with them. Yelp is similar as well.
I typically ignore reviews where the reviewer had done 500 reviews etc. I also read a few negative and positive and do look for some of the things pointed out in this article. That usually protects me against making a bad purchase, but admittedly might cause me to miss a good purchase if there is a proliferation of negative fake reviews. It may also cause me to avoid even looking at something with a low rating etc.