In a recent blog, Ewoud described how fake reviews on web pages are misleading the customer.
In a comment, I asked Ewoud the question: How do you think this problem can be solved in the near future? Improve the algorithms to detect and delete these reviews? Make regulations about these incentivized reviews? Make reviews more personal by providing some personal details about the reviewer? Honestly, I didn’t know the answer to these questions either. However, it seems that Amazon found a way to fight and control these incentivized reviews.
Incentivized reviews are written by people that receive the product for free, in return for their “honest review”. These honest reviews however, are diluting the actual honest review score and are therefore misleading to the online shopper. There are, unfortunately, a lot of examples of incentivized reviews. Looking at the reviews of a product with 4+ Star ratings, only to see that these 4Star plus reviews are written by the people that received it for free, while the people that bought the product themselves rate it like sh*t. This is causing distrust amongst the customers. However, these incentivized 5 star reviews could also be based on truth. However, as explained in a video by Reviewmeta, these reviews are extremely biased and affect the average score of products. This video went viral, and apparently Amazon caught air of it.
Yesterday, Amazon announced that they are making changes to their Review system. With this update, ratings will no longer be influenced by incentivized reviews. How will they do this? Amazon will be able to identify trusted reviewers. Additionally, they will add some measures of control to eliminate biased reviews out of their review database. The only incentivized reviews left, will be done by customers selected for the Amazon Vine program. Amazon will select helpful and trusted reviewers based on previous reviews, and asks them to give their honest opinion about new products, which have not yet received a lot of reviews. The amount of these Vine reviews will be limited per product, in case they still influence the bias towards the product. The producer of the product won’t be in contact with the reviewer. This will not entirely delete the incentivized reviews, but allows Amazon to control the process.
Nevertheless, Amazon will not delete reviews that complied with its previous review policy, which means that there will still be product review scores that are heavily influenced by incentivized reviews.
Who will be next to follow Amazon?? Google Playstore, iTunes, I’m looking at you…
https://digitalstrategy.rsm.nl//2016/09/23/should-we-trust-online-reviews/
https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/abpto3jt7fhb5oc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdLI62JKpCk
