Buy or book something online, almost everyone does it. But how do consumers make their choices? Studies revealed that more than 80% of the Dutch consumers looks at the reviews before they make a decision and that 60% of them is more likely to buy a product with good reviews.
Companies and consumers that offer their products online know the impact of high reviews. If an online-good has a high average than there is more chance the product is top ranked and if a product has great reviews there is a higher chance the next ratings will be high as well. Furthermore studies revealed that there is almost no relation between the quality of the item and the reviews. High rated products do not have automatically the best quality, but they sell more. Online providers know these facts, so they want the best reviews.
The amount of reviews increases every day, so ratings getting more important over time. ‘Reevoo’ studied these reviews and they revealed that 30% of the reviews is fake. Many online providers use tricks to get high ratings and to be top ranked, but how?
Online providers have their own strategy for getting ‘fake’ reviews. Some online providers let their friends and family rate their product. It is a save way to give the item more reviews and a high average, so the item looks attractive to buy. Other online providers give discounts or free products for consumers that give great reviews. The company does not know the consumers but they still get the reviews they want.
For a consumer it is sometimes difficult to recognize trustworthy reviews. In many cases a company as ‘Amazon’ has his own program to identify fake reviews. Companies like ‘Amazon’ have programs that filter the products with fake reviews and delete them. Consumers can also identify fake reviews by themselves. Some examples are: high activity in the first minutes after launching, many reactions and ratings in a short time frame, ratings from consumers with the same name and only high rated reviews.
Many consumers are being influenced by reviews. Online providers know the facts and they will not stop making fake reviews. The consumer has to recognize the fake reviews if they want to buy the right product.
http://www.marketingfacts.nl/berichten/caution-fake-reviews-at-online-stores
http://www.realsimple.com/work-life/life-strategies/fake-online-reviews
http://time.com/money/4310796/dont-trust-online-reviews/
Hey Ewoud!
I fully agree with the fact that fake reviews are harmfull to the end consumer, although I do questions the percentage of 30% fake reviews.
Next to the fake reviews, maybe even more harmfull to the customer, are the incentivized reviews. In this case, as you already mentioned, the company provides a discount (up to 100%!) and asks for an ‘honest’ review in return. However, these incentivized reviews have a massive bias towards the product. About 20% of the reviews are incentivized, so your suspicousness is correct. Data shows, that these incentivized reviews rate the product with on average 4,73 stars out of 5, while the non-incentivized reviews rate products at 4,33 stars. Reviewers are encouraged to keep writing good reviews to keep the flow of free goods flowing. This does not provide the customer (to-be) with fair information and might therefore also influence his own opinion of the product.
In the current environment, it is very important for products, services and experiences to have a good rating. Webshops, booking sites, ect all allow you to rank products based on rating, therefore the products with the highest rating will always catch the consumers eyes first.
How do you think this problem can be solved in the near future? Improve the algoritms to detect and delete these reviews? Make regulations about these incentivized reviews? Make reviews more personal by providing some personal details about the reviewer? Personally, I wouldn’t know the best solution. However….
If you are suspicous of the fake and incentivized reviews when looking at a product, try using the website Reviewmeta.com. Their database and algoritms filter the fake and incentivized reviews and recalculate the actual score given by real, honest customers. In this video they discuss the problem of the incentivized reviews: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdLI62JKpCk)
(And no, I am not being incentivized to mention them in this comment ;), just helping a fellow student out!)
Interesting blog! I was always wondering how many of these reviews were fake and to me 30% seems like a lot. However, I am wondering about the distribution of this 30%. I can imagine that smaller organizations with barely any reviews, will mostly consist of fake reviews. On the other side, I can imagine that bigger organizations with a lot of reviews, won’t need any fake reviews, because they have enough consumers that are willing to review their organization. The threshold for consumers to write a review becomes lower as well, once an organization has more consumers, because a person won’t be the only one reviewing. Is it therefore safe to say that bigger organizations with lots of reviews have less fake reviews written in them?
I also suspect that it differs for branches. For hotels or hostels it is easy to ask friends and family to ask for good reviews, but for a product review it would be less applicable.
Next to that, I was wondering about the possibility of ‘buying’ fake reviews, in the sense that you buy people to write reviews for you? For example, smaller organizations that want to have a lot of Facebook or Instagram likes are able to buy ‘likes’ to look like a bigger organization. I don’t know if this is possible for reviews as well, but if this would be possible it would actually be really attractive, as reviews are usually are not written on social media pages, which makes it harder to track the real identity of the person that has written the review.
In the end, are fake reviews in essence even a bad thing? I once bought earplugs based on a review, saying how great they were and which kind of functionalities they had. If the same kind of information was just in the description I would probably have ignored it. On top of that, why would someone even bother to write a review about earplugs? For organizations this is just another marketing tool. And I think especially for products with a low review rate or smaller organizations fake reviews can be a good thing, to give them just the boost they need.