When it comes to driving a consumer’s buying decision on Amazon, product reviews are of paramount importance. There is a wide range of strategies e-commerce brands should be implementing to ensure they get eyes on their product listings, such as winning the buy box for example. Once landing on a product listing, however, it is often the positive or negative reviews that can ultimately lead to a user’s decision whether to add the item to their cart.
As covered extensively in previous GreyScout blogs, there is a wide range of nefarious actors active on the Amazon marketplace including grey market sellers selling branded products through unauthorised distribution channels, counterfeiters, triangulation fraudsters, and others.
With such power to influence a user’s buying decision, it’s not surprising that e-commerce fraudsters have found ways to manipulate Amazon reviews to their advantage.
According to Fakespot – an AI-driven platform designed to detect fake reviews on e-commerce marketplaces – 42% of Amazon’s 720 million reviews were fake in 2020.
Where do Fake Reviews Come From?
Providing online shoppers with first-hand accounts of customer experiences with products, and positive reviews are among the most effective ways for brands to increase conversion rates while also boosting their credibility.
Unfortunately, many Amazon sellers who are often involved in the grey market, counterfeiting, unauthorised 3P selling, and other nefarious activities do not generate their reviews organically.
Although Amazon banned incentivized reviews in 2016, sellers continue to offer rewards for users who post positive reviews. They often do this through their own channels, such as a business card shipped with a product that offers a discount on future purchases with proof of posting a five-star review.
While these reviews are not necessarily “fake”, they go against Amazon’s policies and incentivized reviews cannot be viewed as trustworthy. Moreover, the power of reviews on Amazon has led to the birth of a wide range of black and grey market services focused on manipulating Amazon’s review and search ranking systems through odious means.
Amazon is aware of this issue and in February 2023, launched a lawsuit against six defendants to protect both consumers and legitimate brands on their platform.
The Impact of Fake Amazon Reviews
Although it would be very difficult for sellers to post fake reviews on a competitor’s product listings, fake reviews on Amazon in general can have a damaging effect on brand perception. With Amazon emerging as the web’s most-visited e-commerce marketplace, vendors must ensure that customers are receiving accurate information about products.
Fake reviews can skew customer opinions and create an inaccurate representation of a product. While your brand may have generated a decent number of positive reviews organically, a competitor generating fake reviews could gain an edge in the marketplace, as unfair as that may be.
Not only do fake reviews pose a threat to businesses selling products on Amazon, but they also threaten the accuracy and authenticity of Amazon’s customer feedback mechanisms overall. Customers rely heavily on other shoppers’ experiences when making purchasing decisions, so reviews must remain honest and reliable.
If too many fake reviews are posted on listings of a particular product, it becomes increasingly difficult for customers to determine which feedback is accurate and which is not. This can lead them to make bad buying decisions or even avoid purchasing a particular item altogether.
How to Handle Genuine Negative Reviews
When dealing with negative reviews on Amazon, it is important to remain professional and courteous at all times while addressing customers’ concerns quickly.
Responding with compassion and understanding will help foster trust between customers and your brand while also serving as damage control in difficult situations. Additionally, brands should ensure that policies are in place that allow them to investigate complaints thoroughly so that they can determine how to resolve them quickly while also keeping customers informed throughout the entire process.
When it comes to managing reviews on Amazon, brands would be wise to take an approach that ensures real-time monitoring, responding to negative reviews, and taking steps to remove reviews that do not follow Amazon’s criteria. Using Amazon’s “report abuse” feature, brands can alert the marketplace of possibly fraudulent and inaccurate reviews. From there, Amazon will perform an investigation and remove the review if it is determined to be fake.
Tracking Negative Reviews to identify eCommerce Brand Protection Need
Whether it is positive or negative, reviews on Amazon are very powerful. For consumers, it is one of the most important factors that drive a buying decision. It is vital to a brand’s success in e-commerce to stay on top of its product reviews to detect potential issues before they escalate. By proactively monitoring customer feedback and interactions, sellers can quickly identify any potential problems before they lead to negative reviews on Amazon.
It is important to monitor and act upon the following types of reviews as they could be a reflection of bigger issues such as potential grey market products, parallel imports, used products being re-sold as new or even at times counterfeits products being sold as genuine under your product listings.
Examples of Potential Counterfeits
Examples of Potentially Materially Different Products
The Bottom Line
eCommerce and online brand protection and monitoring tools such as GreyScout can work in complementary with digital shelf solutions that help brands monitor and detect negative reviews and ratings to enforce and take down infringing products sold by unauthorized 3P sellers. Enforcing against unauthorized 3P sellers who are potentially infringing brand policies can help retail consumer confidence, ensure consumer safety and potentially lead to a reduction in negative reviews.
