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Fake reviews are a big problem on Amazon, from Facebook groups where bad actors solicit paid positive reviews to bots and click farms that upvote negative reviews to take out the competition. Illegitimate reviews can boost sales of unsafe products and hurt business for legitimate sellers, causing brands like Nike and Birkenstock to sever ties with Amazon. Here are some ways to spot fake reviews and what Amazon and others are doing to try and stop them.
From counter feit goods to fake N-95masks, price gouging to disappearing orders, shoppers on Amazon have agrowing need to proceed with caution before clicking Buy Now. Since Amazon's early days, reviews are theone big metric customers rely on to determine the quality and authenticity of a product.
Turns out many of those reviews can't be trusted. The review system as of today is broken. Before the pandemic, the usual benchmark around our average fake reviews was 30%. The norm has now becomeclose to 35%, 40%. In recent years, thousands of fakere views have flooded Amazon and Walmart, eBay and others, just as sales numbers have skyrocketed.
And as shoppers stay home, online ordersare up 57% since the same time last year and the numberof reviews is up 76%. There's an element where you simply want to trust those stars and you want to trust the numbers, because if you can't trust that, how do you know what you're buying? From Facebook groups where bad actors solicit paid positive reviews to bots and click farms that upvote negative reviews to take out the competition, fake reviewshave boosted sales of unsafe products, caused huge brands to severties with Amazon and hurt business for legitimate sellers. We can't compete.
We can't surface our products that are new and innovative and truly valuable to consumers becauseother products that aren't so great are playing thisgame of review manipulation. We decided to find out whyfake reviews have infiltrated Amazon, how customers can spot an unreliable review,and what the trillion dollar company and others aredoing to stop them. One big draw over competitors likeWalmart, Target and eBay is that Amazon's listings often have hundreds oreven thousands of reviews instead of just a handful.
It's so easy, nomatter what site you're on, to simply say the most reviews with the moststars means the most level of happiness. It's just simplynot the case. If those Amazon customers aren't reallycustomers or if they're an organization of paid individuals who just sitthere and go five star, five star, five star, that doesn't reallytell me anything meaningful about the product.
Review software company Bazaarvoicedid a study of 10,000 consumers at the end of last year. 42% of consumers are saying that fakereviews from the brand itself would cause them to lose trust. 82% of those consumers are saying thatwould cause them to never buy that brand again.
The problem is fake andreal reviews are getting harder to tell apart. When you have no reasonto think it's a fake review, that's when the consumer's inthe most danger. And as shoppers increasingly turn onlinefor things they'd normally want to shop for in person, like the nursingbras made by Simple Wishes, there's a higher chance of serious repercussions fromthe purchase of a counterfeit or low quality product. And if the product's Amazon pageis filled with fake positive reviews, shoppers won't know to steer clear. We see reviews of people saying thattheir breast tissue was torn and irritated and bleeding becauseof irritating seams.
And, you know, we see things like thisor like this product broke or it tore after I wore it three times. You see those real reviews surface andthen all of a sudden there'll just be massive positive reviews. A high rating can also triggerthe coveted Amazon's Choice badge, although Amazon did say it will delete thebadge if a product isn't adhering to policy. Amazon prohibits any attempt tomanipulate reviews and told CNBC it will suspend, ban and take legalaction against those who violate these policies. For any review, even the mostgenuine, it always is worth asking why is someone writing that review? What is the incentiveto write that review? Free products and paymentare increasingly common incentives. Sellers solicit pay-for-play reviews throughpopular Twitter accounts and Facebook groups withthousands of members. So I joined some of these groupsjust to kind of poke around. And the first groups I joined, therewere five different postings from our competitor asking for a review. I felt like I just struck goldfinding my competitor there, reported it to Amazon and nothing happened. UCLA and USC released a study in Julythat found more than 20 fake review related Facebook groups with anaverage of 16,000 members.
