They know the AI techniques used by Amazon will flag more reviews as suspicious if they continue to follow the same pattern of employing people to write reviews who rely too heavily on formatted texts. Speech pattern analysis may look for unusual word usage, phrase repetition across different reviews, and other indications that the reviewer is working from a template or keeps reusing similar wording to describe different products.īut as the job posting sample above shows, and others that can be found in Facebook groups and elsewhere, marketers are actively looking for better quality fake reviews. Even that would be still an educated guess but at least would be based on the best available dataset.Īmazon and ReviewMeta and similar services generally rely on speech patterns to now identify potential fakes. Only Amazon could provide informed statistics based on their deletion patterns and deep data analysis. In other words, the average review rating for all products on Amazon is up and ReviewMeta’s analysis of reviews seems to indicate an increase in “unnatural reviews.”Įven ReviewMeta admits they have no idea on the cause of this phenomenon and it’s virtually impossible to even guess how many reviews may be fake. Fake ReviewsĪccording to ReviewMeta, a company that rates reviews on Amazon, there has been a sharp decline in the trustworthiness of reviews in the middle of 2017 that correlates with an increase in the average product review rating during the same period. It is as widespread as ever if one is willing to do a little searching.
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There are even proposals for cash on top of the free product!īut let’s not just blame Facebook, postings seeking paid product reviews on Amazon can be found on Reddit (/r/slavelabour/), Upwork (search: ‘Amazon Review’ under Jobs), other outsourcing platforms, invite-only chat groups, forums, slack-channels, etc. Type “Amazon Review” in the Facebook search box and the results will show a long list of groups with tens of thousands of members willing and ready to review products in exchange for receiving the product at little or no cost. If a buyer actually read the reviews for a product they could decide how much they would trust them.Īt least, if a buyer was savvy and willing to take the time, they could weigh the number of incentivized reviews into account before making a purchasing decision.īut that is no longer the case as the practice is officially forbidden and now it seems to spot incentivized reviews is even more difficult as the practice has gone underground.
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The reviewer only had to mention they received the product in exchange for their opinion for free or at a discount.
Here is an interesting thread where a seller claims another seller’s reviews for male products are mostly from women.īefore 2016, Amazon did try to use improvements in text recognition technology to try to search out obvious suspicious reviews, but it just wasn’t that easy, and apparently didn’t do much to solve the problem.įinally, a ban on incentivized reviews was the answer Amazon implemented in hopes to further stamp out the practice, but did it help? Paid Reviews Go Undergroundīefore the ban, it was easy to spot an incentivized review. But how many people actually bothered to do so?Ī search of the history in the Amazon Seller Central community forums finds discussions going back many years where sellers are concerned about this practice. In fairness, Amazon did offer a method for buyers and sellers to report obvious fake reviews. The company even sued sellers to try to combat fake reviews in 2016. This is corporate speak, we have a problem, and we must fix it because we are getting too many complaints. “These so-called ‘incentivized reviews’ make up only a tiny fraction of the tens of millions of reviews on Amazon, and when done carefully, they can be helpful to customers by providing a foundation of reviews for new or less well-known products.” In 2016, Amazon decided to ban the practice of “paid” reviews. How many shoppers actually read the reviews and only relied on the rating system to make a purchase decision.Īnd how many of these products were as good as the reviews seemed to indicate? Amazon Bans Incentivized Reviews Of course, that resulted in a sales boost that often made the investment into paid reviews the go-to strategy for sellers offering new products on the Amazon platform.īut there was a growing problem of trust in this review system. And those 5-star ratings catapulted the product high in search results, immediately increasing its visibility to Amazon shoppers.
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