“Reviews needed.
100% refund ”.
This message appears constantly in some Facebook groups.
In them, all kinds of products are given away in exchange for positive ratings on Amazon: from headphones and watches to sofa covers, light bulbs and even insect repellants.
Among the millions of
reviews
that flood the e-commerce giant's platform, some are not authentic.
There are sellers who pay users in exchange for good opinions.
How common are fake reviews on Amazon?
Who are hurt by these ratings?
Does the company do enough to prevent users from posting these reviews on its platform?
Davide Proserpio, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Southern California, explains that the market for fake reviews on Amazon seems "very large and active."
But he acknowledges that it is difficult to estimate the true magnitude of the problem.
The rating and opinions of a certain product can have a significant influence on sales.
One of the most common ways to buy reviews is in private Facebook groups, according to the professor.
“Sellers ask buyers to buy the product and write a five-star review.
Then they reimburse them through PayPal, so the price of a review depends on the price of the evaluated product, "he says.
Some sellers, depending on the account, also offer additional money in addition to the free products.
Amazon ensures that the objective of the reviews is that users can make better informed purchasing decisions.
"We want Amazon customers to buy with confidence knowing that the reviews they read are authentic and relevant," the company explains by email.
The e-commerce giant prohibits posting "false, misleading or inauthentic" content on the platform.
“We use
machine learning
tools
and we have a team of researchers who analyze more than 10 million reviews weekly to stop those that do not meet our requirements before they are published,” he says.
In addition, it insists that you monitor all existing reviews for signs of inappropriate behavior and take action quickly if you find a problem.
However, according to Proserpio, on many occasions the measures do not arrive as quickly as they should.
The time it takes for the e-commerce giant to remove fake reviews is long enough that "product ratings and sales increase and ultimately hurt both consumers and Amazon."
The company has not provided this newspaper with concrete figures on the global scale of the fake reviews problem.
A 2018 analysis by
The Washington Post
indicated that in some popular categories, such as
bluetooth
headphones and speakers
, most reviews seemed paid.
Another study published in 2019 by the Organization of Consumers and Users (OCU) indicated that 8.4% of the products sold on Amazon had “a score significantly affected by interested opinions”.
Proserpio has studied the market for fake reviews on Amazon with other researchers.
In 2019, it collected data for four months about what happened in different Facebook groups in which fake reviews were bought and sold.
The researchers analyzed the information of more than 20 groups of this type every day.
“These groups are large and quite active.
Each one has around 16,000 members on average and about 568 requests for fake reviews are published every day, ”explains the researcher.
The study, conducted by Proserpio and other researchers at the University of Southern California, concludes that a wide range of products on Amazon have fake reviews bought on Facebook.
Among them, some with many ratings and a high average rating.
Brett Hollenbeck, an assistant professor of marketing at UCLA and a co-author of the study, says that many of the sellers who buy fake reviews are from China.
While some of the people who write these reviews later sell the products on eBay, others only want a free product occasionally, according to the expert.
Next to each rating, Amazon sometimes indicates that it is a "verified purchase."
This means that the person writing the review has purchased the product on the web and did not receive it "at a significant discount."
Hollenbeck indicates that, in most cases, since these users buy the product before writing the review - despite the seller refunds the money - they will appear as 'verified purchases' on the platform.
A significant but temporary effect
The authors indicate that fake reviews can lead to a significant increase in the average rating of a product.
And also a growth in the number of sales.
But the effect is temporary: it disappears after about a month.
When companies stop buying fake reviews, their ratings drop rapidly and the proportion of reviews of just one star - the lowest rating - increases significantly, according to the researchers.
Sherry He, a marketing Ph.D. student at UCLA and also a co-author of this study, says that fake reviews mostly abound on low-quality products.
There is no doubt that the main losers are consumers.
“They are tricked into buying the products thinking they are good.
But once they receive them, they realize that this is not the case, ”he clarifies.
Spotting fake reviews is not easy.
He maintains that it is increasingly difficult to differentiate which ones are not authentic: "They tend to have a lot of text and photos."
"Companies are getting quite sophisticated when it comes to buying and creating fake reviews," he adds.
Amazon encourages customers concerned about the authenticity of reviews to use the “report abuse” feature, which appears next to each review.
"If you find this content inappropriate and you think it should be removed from Amazon.com, click below to inform us," the platform says.
The company claims to take actions against those who violate its policies: "Such actions may involve the suspension or elimination of their accounts or the initiation of legal actions."
Nine months in jail for selling false opinions
This problem is not new and it does not affect only Amazon.
Multiple researchers have tried to create algorithms to detect these false ratings.
While large platforms such as the App Store or the Play Store are looking for a way to get reliable reviews of the applications, others such as TripAdvisor or Booking also try to detect and eliminate ratings that are not real.
The weapons of these companies to combat this problem are, on the one hand, technology and, on the other, a team of humans.
Buying and selling valuations can have significant consequences.
Last year, a company that sold supplements in pill form was fined $ 12.8 million after paying for valuations, according to technology news portal
The Verge.
And there are those who can even end up in prison for this practice.
A Tripadvisor user was sentenced in 2018 to nine months in prison for selling false reviews on the platform.
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