If you’re a regular customer of Amazon, you’re fully aware of the fake reviews. They are sometimes obviously fake. After removing its third recent major company from its online storefront, Amazon is laying the blame for the fake reviews at the feet of social media.
Amazon Blog Post
On Wednesday, Amazon published a blog post that laid all the blame for its numerous fake reviews on social media while spending paragraph after paragraph defending its practices.
The blog post described that “product reviews are an important part” of its “shopping experience, helping customers in their purchase decisions and providing a way for selling partners to differentiate their products from other similar items.”
“We have more than 300 million active customers and over 1.9 million selling partners worldwide – most of which are small and medium-sized businesses that represent the majority of physical products sold in our stores. On behalf of our customers and selling partners, Amazon relentlessly innovates to allow only genuine product reviews in our store,” claimed the company.
Further defending itself, Amazon wrote, “Some didn’t understand why we would highlight positive and negative feedback on products in our store.” It goes on to describe itself as “obsessed with delighting customers over the long term.”
Amazon believes its job is to provide “genuine product reviews” to help “customers make purchase decisions and receive products that meet their expectations.”
The blog post explains Amazon’s process of preventing fake reviews. It uses “sophisticated technology powered by machine learning” along with “expert human investigators.” Last year it stopped customers from seeing 200 million suspected fake reviews.
At this point, Amazon started to lay the blame for the fake reviews on social media. It explained that some “bad actors” use “social media services on their own” and others use third parties to “perpetrate the activity on their behalf.”
Amazon regularly reports this activity to social media companies who it says “took a median time of 45 days to shut down those groups.” It reported “more than 1,000 such groups.” The blog post also said the company has filed lawsuits against “those who have purchased reviews and the service providers who provided them.”
Amazon Admits Removing RavPower
It made the news over the past few days that Amazon had pulled RavPower from its storefront. RavPower had pushed a charger with a $35 gift card offer if a review was left. This violates Amazon’s policies and has been since 2016 when it banned reviews posted in return for an incentive.
All of RavPower’s products appear to have been removed. The company’s storefront on Amazon is empty, and searches for the brand return no results.
It’s not the only brand to be removed. It appeared that the Aukey and Mpow brands had been removed as well last month, but there was no confirmation of this.
Paid review comments are not something new in this industry. It’s big business. As a freelance writer, I have encountered many employment ads for this. I even had a gig at one point sniffing such things out for a company trying to track down its fake reviews. In this respect, Amazon may be spinning its wheels trying to stop this.
Amazon has also picked up some negativity recently for its new Sidewalk service that allows you to “share” your Wi-Fi with your neighbors. Read on to learn how to opt out of Amazon Sidewalk.
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