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Amazon Makes Good On Its Promise To Delete 'Incentivized' Reviews (techcrunch.com)
Amazon is making good on its promise to ban "incentivized" reviews from its website, according to a new analysis of over 32,000 products and around 65 million reviews. From a TechCrunch article: The ban was meant to address the growing problem of less trustworthy reviews that had been plaguing the retailer's site, leading to products with higher ratings than they would otherwise deserve. Incentivized reviews are those where the vendor offers free or discounted products to reviewers, in exchange for recipients writing their "honest opinion" of the item in an Amazon review. However, data has shown that these reviewers tend to write more positive reviews overall, with products earning an average of 4.74 stars out of five, compared with an average rating of 4.36 for non-incentivized reviews. Over time, these reviews proliferated on Amazon, and damaged consumers' trust in the review system as a whole. And that can impact consumers' purchase decisions.
They're easily spotted.
The easily spotted ones are easily spotted. Many others are not. My daughter makes money on Fiverr writing fake reviews. She is an A-student, and writes impeccable English. Many of her reviews are flagged as "most useful" by Amazon customers, and she uses that fact to promote her services. There is no indication that her reviews are fake or incentivized, so I don't see how Amazon is going to remove them.
"The obvious way for Amazon to fix this problem would be to stop spamming people that have requested to be removed from their marketing email list."
There are many other areas in which Amazon needs improvement:
When visiting an Amazon web page to try to understand a product better, Amazon tries to distract readers by displaying other products. To me, that is amazingly abusive and socially ignorant.
There are other scams besides some of the reviews. Some used books say the price is $0.01, one cent, but the shipping cost is $3.99. The total price should be listed.
There appears to be no protection by Amazon from dishonest sellers. I have, for example, seen complaints from buyers that say they ordered new hard drives but received used ones.
From what I've heard, fake reviewers often ARE verified purchasers.
Correct.
They work out deals to buy the products, then return them to the seller for a refund.
It is even easier than that. When my daughter writes fake reviews, she pre-sells the product on eBay or Craigslist, then buys it from Amazon and has Amazon drop ship it directly to the secondary customer. Then the seller reimburses her for the price difference. So the review is from a "verified" customer, when if fact she has never actually seen the product. Since she is a Prime member, the shipping is free, and that cost advantage means she sometimes directly makes money on the eBay transaction.