Slashdot Mirror
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.
IMO, this is a bad policy, plain and simple.
The reality of the matter is that incentivized reviews aren't really a problem, and actually prevent much worse problems. Incentivized reviews (where people get, for example, a free product in exchange for a review) serve a crucial purpose in the industry—allowing products from new publishers, new manufacturers, etc. to get reviewed by someone competent early on so that people will actually consider that product. (Most people won't seriously look at a product that has no reviews.) By banning them, Amazon is basically saying that new publishers, new authors, new manufacturers, etc. need not bother to sell there.
Worse, a ban on incentivized reviews significantly increases the pressure on small businesses to use truly unethical means of getting reviews, such as hiring companies that pay people to buy the product and write fake reviews. Lots of seriously bad products invariably have dozens of obviously fake five-star reviews, and that abuse of the system makes it even harder for legitimate businesses to get their foot in the door.
The only way this decision doesn't represent an absolute abandonment of Amazon's duty to protect consumers from outright fraud is if they also make participation in the Vine program free and available to anyone who asks, whether they are Amazon vendors or not. Otherwise, this ban just encourages outright fraud by eliminating the one legitimate means that most small businesses have for getting reviews.
And the policy isn't just anti-small-business. It's also anti-consumer. The notion that the difference between 4.74 stars and 4.36 is meaningful is laughable. Star ratings are completely meaningless in aggregate (at least without a standard deviation), because a product could have three five-star ratings that says "This product is great" and a one-star rating that says "This product burned down my house", and in aggregate, that product would have a 4.5-star rating. Everybody who actually buys products understands the fallacy of comparing star ratings, and instead reads the highest-rated high, low, and average reviews to see what they actually say about the product.
Moreover, anybody serious about buying the right product also does keyword searches looking for aspects of the product that interest or concern them. For this reason, consumers are served best by having as many reviews as possible, paid or otherwise, because (with the exception of very bad products) each review is likely to provide information about some aspect of the product that no other review provides. So deleting incentivized reviews is not just anti-small-business. It's also anti-consumer, because it reduces the amount of information available to consumers about products that they are considering buying.
I'm absolutely blown away at the absolute cluelessness of this decision. It is as though their management never actually bought a product on their own website, never sold any product anywhere, and couldn't be bothered to ask consumers or sellers what they thought. The resulting decision is utterly naïve.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
They should also do something about "angry reviews" from people that have requested to be removed from marketing email, but are receiving it anyway through "marketplace.amazon.com", mostly badgering for reviews. Amazon refuses to stop those emails, so every time I receive one, I leave a one-star review for the product. I used to say that it was because they spammed me, and it didn't really reflect on the quality of the review, but then Amazon started deleting any review that mentioned spamming, so now I make up something about the quality of the product instead. This pollutes the review process and diminishes its usefulness, but at least I get my revenge. 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.
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.
Amazon could solve this issue by only allowing reviews from people who have actually purchased the product on Amazon.
Nope. My daughter writes fake reviews, and she typically charges $20+"price of product" if they want a "verified" review. For more expensive items, she will sometimes charge the difference between what the product costs on Amazon, and what she can resell the NIB product for on eBay or Craigslist, and then she has Amazon drop-ship directly to the secondary customer.
Requiring all reviewers to be verified buyers may help somewhat, but it would be only a partial fix by raising the cost of the fake reviews.
Does anything about her doing this bother you, from a moral or ethical standpoint?
Yes, but she is a 19 year old adult, so she makes her own decisions. I can think of about a zillion other things she could be doing that would bother me more.