Stars for Sale on Amazon
When browsing products on Amazon and you see a product has a five star rating that means it is a great product, right? Unfortunately, you cannot trust that rating as much as you might have thought. At least one Amazon retailer has been paying people to post rave reviews for its products on the site.
Though this highly misleading practice violates Amazon’s stated policies, VIP Deals paid its customers to give the product good reviews. The company is now suffering the consequences – Amazon took down the product page on which people posted the offending reviews and then removed all other VIP Deals products from the website.
When shopping online, many customers place a high importance on peer reviews because they cannot physically see or handle the item they are purchasing. Good reviews are essential for retailers to sell their product amid the multitude of similar products available online. Therefore, some retailers like VIP Deals are resorting to posting anonymous reviews or selling reviews in order to obtain customers.
When customers bought an item from VIP Deals, they did not know that the company was going to offer to pay them for a review. The product, an Amazon Kindle Fire case, cost customers only $10 plus shipping and handling on Amazon. When customers received their item, a note accompanying it asked them to review the product for a refund of the $10. Many people posted their reviews, which were strongly encouraged to be 5-stars, and actually got their money back.
This marketing strategy, which has been growing for some time, is not completely legal. According to the Federal Trade Commission, when a retailer pays (or exchanges items) for reviews, it must be fully disclosed. VIP Deals was not fully disclosing this review exchange policy, so it was both breaking Amazon policy and the FTC rules.
Despite the questionable legality of the act, many of the people who bought the product did not seem to think it was wrong to post a fake review in exchange for the product. Over 350 reviews, most of them five stars, were posted for the VIP Deals Kindle Fire case. When one person gave the product a bad review and called it a scam, others defended the practice and called it commonplace.
Be wary of too many good reviews on a product if you are buying online. It might be a good idea to read what professional reviewers have to say or find the product in a store nearby to verify what you read online. Fake reviews tend to have too many adjectives, use the product name and model number too specifically, and contain excessive exclamation points. Online shopping can be deceptive, but not all rave reviews are fake. It may take effort to verify reviewers’ claims, but it is well worth the time to make sure you are purchasing a good product.
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Filed under: Amazon.com, business, david milman, Fraud, Internet, rescuecom, scams