by Bertis Brenford
When shopping for products online, many turn to retail giant
Amazon.com for recommendations, but the website's reputation as a
trustworthy source has been tarnished recently. Readers of Forbes, The
New York Times, Huffington Post or the Consumerist have read multiple
reports on the dirty secrets Amazon harbors. With fake book reviews,
paid product reviews and other nasty tricks used by unscrupulous vendors
on the website, how can a consumer trust the online retailer?
According to Bing Liu, a computer science professor at the University
of Illinois at Chicago, Amazon sellers are buying reviews because it is
the cheapest way of marketing and it is very effective, since customers
believe that they are reading authentic reviews.
Under the FTC's rules, when a reviewer benefits from posting a review
in any way, they must clearly say so. This includes getting paid, being
an owner or employee of the business and profiting from the sales
generated by the review, getting free or discounted products for the
review and more. That has gotten several companies in trouble so far,
but for every company they catch in the act, there are many others who
fly under the FTC's radar.
We ran an experiment to see what type of companies indulged the most
in fake review writing on Amazon.com. Within the Health and Personal
Care category only, we found dozens of vendors using deceitful
practices, selling fake male enhancement pills, weightloss products,
study aid supplements and more to unsuspecting consumers.
We bought several of these supposed health improvement products, each
of which had hundreds if not thousands of positive reviews. Upon
contacting Amazon to report over two dozen obvious fake reviews,
complaints were ignored, and the fake reviews stayed on the website.
What could be the reason?
It is not in Amazon's best interest to take down reviews that sell
products, even if dubious in nature, because every sale brings much
needed commissions. Wall Street made it all too clear recently that
profit expectations for the retail giant remain sky high and the company
knows that delivering on them will be increasingly hard. If keeping the
share price high means deceiving the customer, be it.
The original king of Amazon fake reviews was VIP Deals, a now defunct
company that found a surefire way of ranking products on top of the
bestseller list. According to an article published in The New York Times
titled "For $2 a Star, an Online Retailer Gets 5-Star Product Reviews,"
companies using VIP Deals' promotional services stooped as low as
offering a refund to every single one of their customers in exchange for
a 5* review. What is review tampering, if not that? They had amassed
over 5,000 reviews for various products before the scheme came to an end
after The New York Times article was published.
Recently a new disciple of VIP Deals appeared on Amazon. Ubervita, a
company trying to break into the supplement industry using the same
methods that VIP Deals used, has been offering customers full refunds in
exchange for 5-star reviews. Ubervita has also posted hundreds of their
own reviews from accounts that wrote exclusively abut Ubervita
products. In a matter of months they have amassed over 1,700 reviews for
their first product, W700 Thermogenic Hypermetabolizer, and they
recently started getting hundreds of reviews for 4 of their other
products too.
Ubervita has perfected the fake review scheme though, we found. Upon
ordering their W700 fat burner, we received a bottle of mystery pills.
There were no ingredients or instructions on the bottle other than to
take the "proprietary blend" once a day. As expected, we saw no
improvement after taking the product, except for the initial caffeine
kick that wore off in four days. Three weeks after ordering the product,
we received a postcard in the mail, asking for a review and promising a
free bottle of UberSurge, in exchange. We were instructed to send an
email to surge@ubervita.com to "collect our free bottle."
We emailed the company and their automatic response made it all too
clear that a 5-star review was expected. They stated in bold, red
letters that "If your experience was anything less than 5-star, PLEASE
let us know how we can make it better. Merchants such as Amazon see 4
and 3 star reviews as the equivalent of a negative for us online." This
is obviously not true, and a trick Ubervita used to get a portion of
their 5-star reviews. As some commenters on the product's page stated,
they would not have given W700 a 5-star rating if it weren't for the
incentive, but most omitted that fact from their reviews.
Amazon's rules state that incentivized fake reviews are not allowed,
and that if a reviewer receives compensation in exchange for reviews
they must say so. Ubervita has several hundred reviews that do not state
that they were offered free product explicitly in exchange for fake
5-star ratings. There are threads about Ubervita's suspiciously huge
number of similar sounding 5-star reviews on Amazon and other websites.
Yet, Amazon has done nothing to stop the inflow of 30 or more fake
reviews a day for W700.
This begs the question: how can UberVita, a fly-by-night company with no
history in the weightloss industry successfully fool consumers into
buying a useless product under Amazon's nose, when online shoppers are
reporting daily what is happening? Is Amazon purposely ignoring the
issue to avoid hurting its own bottomline?
Perhaps one day the growing backlash over fake reviews will force
Amazon to put customer satisfaction above profits obtained through
questionable standards just to live up to analyst expectations on Wall
Street. It may happen once the FTC fines a few more of Amazon's
deceitful vendors for their marketing practices. No one knows when the
next crackdown on the supplement industry will happen. Until then,
Amazon customers beware; the online store does not seem to care about
your well-being, only their own profits.
http://goarticles.com/article/The-Road-to-Amazon-s-Bestseller-List-Is-Paved-With-Fake-Reviews/9075733/
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