From counterfeit goods to fake N-95
masks, price gouging to disappearing orders, shoppers on Amazon have a
growing need to proceed with caution before clicking Buy Now. Since Amazon's early days, reviews are the
one big metric customers rely on to determine the quality and
authenticity of a product. Turns out many of those
reviews can't be trusted. The review system as
of today is broken. Before the pandemic, the usual benchmark
around our average fake reviews was 30%. The norm has now become
close to 35%, 40%. In recent years, thousands of fake
reviews have flooded Amazon and Walmart, eBay and others, just as
sales numbers have skyrocketed. And as shoppers stay home, online orders
are up 57% since the same time last year and the number
of reviews is up 76%. There's an element where you simply want
to trust those stars and you want to trust the numbers, because if you
can't trust that, how do you know what you're buying? From Facebook groups
where bad actors solicit paid positive reviews to bots and click
farms that upvote negative reviews to take out the competition, fake reviews
have boosted sales of unsafe products, caused huge brands to sever
ties with Amazon and hurt business for legitimate sellers. We can't compete. We can't surface our
products that are new and innovative and truly valuable to consumers because
other products that aren't so great are playing this
game of review manipulation. We decided to find out why
fake reviews have infiltrated Amazon, how customers can spot an unreliable review,
and what the trillion dollar company and others are
doing to stop them. One big draw over competitors like
Walmart, Target and eBay is that Amazon's listings often have hundreds or
even thousands of reviews instead of just a handful. It's so easy, no
matter what site you're on, to simply say the most reviews with the most
stars means the most level of happiness. It's just simply
not the case. If those Amazon customers aren't really
customers or if they're an organization of paid individuals who just sit
there and go five star, five star, five star, that doesn't really
tell me anything meaningful about the product. Review software company Bazaarvoice
did a study of 10,000 consumers at the end of last year. 42% of consumers are saying that fake
reviews from the brand itself would cause them to lose trust. 82% of those consumers are saying that
would cause them to never buy that brand again. The problem is fake and
real reviews are getting harder to tell apart. When you have no reason
to think it's a fake review, that's when the consumer's in
the most danger. And as shoppers increasingly turn online
for things they'd normally want to shop for in person, like the nursing
bras made by Simple Wishes, there's a higher chance of serious repercussions from
the purchase of a counterfeit or low quality product. And if the product's Amazon page
is filled with fake positive reviews, shoppers won't know to steer clear. We see reviews of people saying that
their breast tissue was torn and irritated and bleeding because
of irritating seams. And, you know, we see things like this
or like this product broke or it tore after I wore it three times. You see those real reviews surface and
then all of a sudden there'll just be massive positive reviews. A high rating can also trigger
the coveted Amazon's Choice badge, although Amazon did say it will delete the
badge if a product isn't adhering to policy. Amazon prohibits any attempt to
manipulate reviews and told CNBC it will suspend, ban and take legal
action against those who violate these policies. For any review, even the most
genuine, it always is worth asking why is someone writing that review? What is the incentive
to write that review? Free products and payment
are increasingly common incentives. Sellers solicit pay-for-play reviews through
popular Twitter accounts and Facebook groups with
thousands of members. So I joined some of these groups
just to kind of poke around. And the first groups I joined, there
were five different postings from our competitor asking for a review. I felt like I just struck gold
finding my competitor there, reported it to Amazon and nothing happened. UCLA and USC released a study in July
that found more than 20 fake review related Facebook groups with an
average of 16,000 members. In more than 560 postings each day,
sellers offered a refund or payment for a positive review,
usually around $6. Amazon told CNBC it works with social
media sites to report bad actors who are cultivating abusive reviews
outside our store. And we've sued thousands of bad actors
for attempting to abuse our reviews systems. The FTC requires reviewers to
disclose any payment or connection to the product being reviewed. On some sites like Fiverr and
Freelancer, users get around this by advertising marketing services, a thinly
veiled reference to pay-for-play reviews. There's also the more direct
approach where sellers include a note inside a package asking for a
review in exchange for a discount or other compensation. It's hard to keep on
top of five million sellers and 600 million products. There's always a few bad seeds in the
mix, and it's the bad seeds that get the attention. It's not that
Amazon's sitting back doing nothing. It's that the scope of what
we're dealing with is so vast. There are legitimate paid reviewer
programs like Amazon Vine, Early Reviewer and Amazon Associates, which
require reviewers to disclose that they've received a product for free in
exchange for what's supposed to be an honest review. But Amazon has little
way to detect a compensated review when deals are made
outside these programs. There's a Velcro panel in the back so
you can constantly reset the size and it's always the proper support. Sisters Joy Kosak and Debra Abbaszadeh
designed a new type of hands-free pumping bra and started selling it on
Amazon in 2009, where sales took off quickly. But for the past three years,
sales have been flat, dropping off after Amazon started to openly court
Chinese sellers to join its marketplace. Cheaper bras with an
exceptionally similar design to theirs started popping up, getting hundreds
of five star ratings seemingly overnight. When that happened, we saw
a pretty immediate race to the bottom in terms of pricing. The sisters have been tracking review
activity on listings from competitors like Momcozy and sharing
the data with Amazon. Our best seller, where we used to be
number 25 in baby, we over the past ten years of being on Amazon, we
have collected a little more than 10,000 reviews. It took them a couple of
months to to increase by 4,000. Big brands like Nike and Birkenstock
have been so burned by competitors selling knockoffs with thousands of five
star reviews that they stopped selling on Amazon altogether. Although Nike's landing page still appears
active on Amazon, the items there are being sold
by third-party sellers. They're fake, they're counterfeit. They're either bought from Alibaba or
eBay and then they're resold on Amazon. So a lot of these
sellers are actually ruining Nike's reputation and they're putting in all the reviews
into the official listing for Nike. At times, big brands themselves
are soliciting fake reviews. Last year, for example, skincare brand
Sunday Riley settled with the FTC after it was caught encouraging employees
to post fake reviews on Sephora.com. On Amazon if you're not doing
some sort of, you know, tricky technique, it's at least one hundred orders
for each review that you get. Bernie Thompson sells about 120
consumer electronics products on Amazon from his warehouse outside Seattle. Competitors have tried to undermine his
sales with fake review tactics. We've had people take our most
negative review, the one that's most embarrassing, and we've had competitors
vote up those negative reviews. Let's say your competitor has a one-star
review on the first page, you can buy 100 helpful votes. When they're considered most helpful, they show
up at the top of the results. And so you can really
harm your competitors by doing that. That helpful box can easily be clipped
by bots instead of humans or by click farms overseas. The ones that I've been contacted by
are all in Bangladesh, India, I think one of them, Vietnam. They have computers and they've got
fake accounts and they basically turned in this whole system where they go in
and just click on "helpful" once and then log into a different account and
then click on "helpful" again and so on to where you can just pay
for basically taking down your competitors. Bots are also getting better
at generating convincing written reviews. We actually see a lot of these
fake review farms leveraging open source projects from these behemoths, such
as Google, Open AI, multibillion dollar research firms and leveraging
it to produce fraud. And by this case, we're producing human
like text that looks like really realistic. Amazon's own algorithms do
usually detect these patterns and remove them within weeks. Amazon says we're going to wait 30
days and if we detect that there's enough fake reviews, we'll pull
back those fake reviews. The problem is, during that 30
day policing period, the product can generate a whole lot of sales
that it didn't otherwise deserve. In 2019, Amazon changed its review system
so customers can leave a simple star rating with one click instead
of a full written review. This tool that Amazon put out there to
make it easier for consumers to give real feedback has actually made it
easier for the scammers to elevate their star rating, just the volume, because now
all they have to do is say all you have to do is click a button. No one can tell who left the rating. You will not see those ratings as a
list of authors on the bottom of the page. And we see products with thousands
of ratings that have no body, text body attached to them. While a rating can only be left
by someone who bought the product, Amazon allows reviews from anyone even if
they haven't made a purchase. We see certain categories have over 90%
of the reviews on the product are unverified. And when you look at them, it
just looks like a flood of bot reviews. What Amazon does is they
give different weights to different kinds of reviews and so a verified
purchase review will have more of a weight than someone
who wasn't verified. But the intention is that you could have
bought it at Walmart and want to review it. You could have bought it
somewhere else and want to review it. And then there's a slew of new
tricks popping up from bogus seller accounts to mysterious free Amazon packages
appearing on people's doorsteps. In one tactic known as Review Highjacking,
a seller takes over a once popular listing. So you'd have these
crazy situations where, you know, our product was a USB hub but
we had to discontinue it. And somebody's selling like women's eyelashes
would take over that product, change the picture to women's
eyelashes, change all the text. The reviews would show
these 2,000 positive reviews. But if you'd read the
reviews, they're not about eyelashes. They're about a USB hub. Another recent tactic involves seed packets
from China showing up at hundreds of people's houses who don't
know where they came from. The Better Business Bureau warns that
the scam, often called Brushing, means the seller is using the seeds
to generate fake Amazon orders tied to U.S. addresses. Then they can write
fake verified reviews about themselves falsely inflating their
seller rating. Then there's sock puppet reviews, which
are bogus accounts created by a seller to write positive reviews
on their own products. Sellers can also hack into a customer's
Amazon account and post a positive review from there without
the customer ever knowing. And they're all new products that are
getting reviews at an amazing rate. It's just not, it's not believable. With so many ways to create
realistic fake reviews, some start-ups have developed ways to detect them. Fakespot is one of these. Fakespot launched a new Chrome plugin in
May that has a quarter million downloads so far. It analyzes the
credibility of a listing's reviews and gives it a grade from A to F. The Fakespot Guard will actually catch
these sellers dynamically as you're browsing Amazon. And we will offer you an alternative
seller that is authentic and genuine that we've seen before that
has high customer satisfaction. Other online tools that customers can
use to check the credibility of Amazon reviews include ReconBob, ReviewMeta,
the Review Index and Review Skeptic. Shoppers willing to spend time
to vet their purchases can manually spot fake reviews, too. The number one way consumers tell us
they identify a fake review are multiple reviews with the
same language in them. So they're basically looking for
patterns in the reviews. The second most important way is reviews
that are not actually about the product. The third is
poor grammar and misspellings. And the fourth, and I actually think this
is one of the more important ones is overwhelming number of
five-star positive reviews. If a product only has two or three
reviews that it's gathered over a long period of time and those two or
three reviews look pretty good, consumers actually need to give kind of more
trust to a product like that. Clearly, that brand and that
manufacturer, they're not gaming anything. If you do spot a fake review,
Amazon encourages customers to use the report button next to each review. But whether Amazon will take any action
after fake reviews are reported is a different question. We go down these rabbit
hole that take a lot of time to look for this information and then
we share it with Amazon and nothing happens. And it's just exhausting. After CNBC brought Simple Wishes' complaints
to Amazon, months after it was first informed of the illegitimate
reviews, Amazon said, "We've taken appropriate action on these accounts." Amazon
told CNBC it uses powerful machine learning tools and skilled
investigators to analyze over ten million review submissions weekly, aiming
to stop abusive reviews before they're ever published. Getting Amazon
to actually do investigations, quite frankly, they don't have enough
investigators to do all the possible investigations needed. When I was at Amazon, there was
a time when Amazon had about 20 investigators for the
whole United States. There was over a million sellers on Amazon
at the time and there were 20 investigators. In an unprecedented move,
Amazon hosted a virtual conference earlier this month to give tips
and listen to concerns from its third party sellers, who make up
58% of Amazon's e-commerce business. When it comes to outside regulation,
fake reviews are prohibited by the FTC, but it's a complex issue. Where you can leave a review and
you receive some kind of compensation, you need to put in a disclaimer. And that's consumer law. That's been around for a while. But there are different ways that
this is now being gamed. There is no law attached to ratings
where you can leave them without text. Targets and Walmart, they are they
are held to a higher standard. They have to vet products that they
put on their shelves or through their e-commerce platform because
they are liable. And that's the huge difference here. Unless Amazon is purchasing the product
from the seller as a wholesale purchaser and they are representing as
the seller, they have zero liability. And that's frightening. Last year for the first time, the
FTC prosecuted a company for fake reviews on Amazon. The inflated reviews were
for a weight loss supplement that's made with a plant that
can cause acute liver failure. You can already see the FTC
becoming more interested in reviews. They treat reviews as a form of
advertising because of the influence that it has on us as shoppers. Now, Amazon supports a California Assembly
bill that would subject online marketplaces to the same
product liability requirements as brick-and-mortar retailers, despite years
of Amazon successfully fighting lawsuits against such rulings. If passed, it could incentivize Amazon
and others to better police fake reviews. Amazon owns the keys to that
data, and they they can do it. I know they can. As Amazon continues
to help people stay safely at home, the need for shoppers to trust the
reviews and order with confidence has never been higher. It's really almost a
societal level issue of, you know, can Amazon kind of keep control of
its systems and live up to the dependency that we have on them? And I think the you know, honestly,
they've been growing so fast that they've been struggling with it. On one hand, Amazon is
getting better about policing. On the other hand, it's
a cat and mouse game. You know, that probably
will never end.
Regardless of fake reviews, I did a project in uni about Amazon and I highly recommend people to not buy from Amazon at all.
Amazon’s current system is killing all of their distributors, and the delivering companies, and rendering a lot of people jobless. All through pretty much an abuse of power.
Basically what they do is if a supplier wants to sell, say a pillow on Amazon, Amazon will let them. They will then use the website cookies and so forth to see if the product is taking off. If the product takes off, Amazon basically shadow bans the original supplier and instead sells its own version of the product at a lower price and higher up the search bar. It’s an unfair competitive advantage that’s killing a lot of businesses.
It’s also killing the delivery companies who have been forced in giving an incredibly low price of delivering the Amazon goods, which is so unsustainable that, these companies raise their prices for all the other small businesses that can’t properly negotiate on equal ground with them. Of course that’s putting a lot of people out of business.
I’m not even gonna talk about privacy and data at Amazon, cuz that seems to be an absolute joke. I’ve actually got here a documentary I highly recommend watching if you have time, about Amazon and everything I’ve basically just mentioned and more, it’s a real eye opener: https://youtu.be/O90PShJVu58
So anyway I’ve decided to never buy from Amazon again.
eBay is also a massive scam for sellers and has no protection at all
Not an Amazon fan (although I will use them when I have to). However, fake reviews are easy to subvert.
...and this does not apply only to Amazon:
Instead of going by how many good reviews a product has, go by the bad reviews.
If a product has a couple bad reviews I will read them and determine if it's a systemic issue or fluke manufacturing defect. For instance...
If I am buying an item and there are lots of reviews in the good and bad categories, I'll read the bad reviews. A lot of them will be, "Showed up late", "I wanted a different one and customer service was rude", "This things feels/looks/seems kind of cheap" etc.
I don't care about that sort of thing. Then there are reviews like, "tolerances are too loose, you're better off paying a little more and getting a better one", or multiple "broke on first use".
I buy a lot of cheap stuff on line. For some of my hobbies, things can get expensive so sometimes I buy el-cheap-o knock offs to test to see if I want to spend a lot of money on a particular item.
Ignore the positive reviews. Start paying attention to the negative reviews. Once you've been doing it for a while, you sort of 'get the feel' for how to recognize good and bad products about 80% of the time.
I use ebay a lot. A lot of high rated sellers are family businesses and that feels good. Also Ebay pays more to them when it sells. I watched a YouTube video and this guy scanned a product and Amazon will take 83% with selling FBA.