I discovered in this paper ‘Her Amazon Purchases Are Real. The Reviews Are Fake‘ how there is an industry setup to generate fake reviews on Amazon. This must be an issue for all e-commerce websites and creates another challenge for those sites to regulate and banish.
The setup is actually quite clever: a consumer really purchases the items, comments positively on them one week or so later, so that the review seems legitimate. Only that she gets reimbursed on her purchases separately and whatever she writes it is a 5-star review. This in turn, pops the item up the search results on the site, resulting in more sales – and thanks to Amazon reach, an added profit that is probably many times the investment in the fake purchase of the item in the first place: “a high ranking in a search can be worth tens of thousands of dollars in monthly revenue“!
Having some family and friends write gleaming reviews on Amazon is an old trick to promote one’s stuff, or at least try to make it visible. But in that case it seems that the practice has taken industrial proportions. Up to the point where I wonder what truthfulness should be given to those reviews on e-commerce sites!
Amazon and other e-commerce sites will soon need to do something. This may not be as damaging as fake political ads, but on the long time this has the potential to severely erode people’s confidence in those sites.
