She was reading through the reviews for one she was considering buying, when suddenly she started noticing mentions of what a great taco holder the product was. “The taco holder got great reviews, but there wasn’t much for my phone adapter,” said Jones by email. “You do sometimes see reviews for slightly different items appear on a listing, but this was definitely a new one for me.” Jones had likely stumbled across something called “review hijacking”—a way that sellers can effectively steal reviews from older products in order to catapult their listing to the top of search results. Unscrupulous sellers have found a number of ways to take existing reviews and attach them to a new, unrelated product, betting that most shoppers will just give the page a glance and not notice that the five stars and glowing text are actually for a taco holder instead of a phone adapter. For Jones, the out-of-place reviews gave her pause and ended up steering her away from the purchase. “It made me laugh but it also made me suspicious of the seller and obviously I couldn’t trust that the product was any good,” she said. The Markup reached out to the seller, “Wilma Marmon,” which lists its business address in Chengdu, China, for comment but did not get a response. “In 2019, we invested over $500 million and have more than 8,000 employees protecting our store from fraud and abuse. We have robust proactive and reactive systems in place to protect our store and our customers.” Graham also noted that the company uses a combination of machine learning tools and human investigators to analyze millions of reviews per week, with a goal of stopping fake reviews before they are published.
How fake reviews happen
Because reviews are so important, there’s a cottage industry to quickly get those first reviews written for a new product listing. Once the positive review is posted, the cost of the product is reimbursed to the buyer through a payment platform, often with a small bonus for the reviewer. When the review appears, it gets a reassuring “Verified Purchase” label. Then there are various versions of review hijacking, like the one Jones experienced with the taco holder. This is common in cases of counterfeit goods, where an unscrupulous seller wants to sell a knock-off version of an established, and well-reviewed, product and take advantage of the existing reviews. Sellers also can also create illegitimate “variations” on a product: In the seller tools, a variation would normally be used to create an alternate size or color of the product for sale, but they can be misused to insert an unrelated product, which would still benefit from the original item’s review and ratings history.
Ratings ≠ reviews
The change lets a customer give a one-tap rating to an item. While this change makes it easier for customers to quickly rate a product once purchased, it also makes it hard to know where the ratings are coming from, since there is no way to connect a star rating to a purchaser. This is a move away from transparency according to Tommy Noonan, founder of ReviewMeta, a review analysis site. “They are making it more obfuscated and hidden and harder for the average Joe.”
Some tips on how to spot fakes
Pay more attention to reviews, less to the star rating Remember, reviews can be linked to a profile, but star counts are not transparent. Read a sample of both positive and negative reviews. Don’t read too much into photos or videos In an attempt to make improperly incentivized reviews appear more legitimate, Noonan says, some sellers tell paid reviewers to include photos or videos. If a product has a lot of reviews with videos and photos, that’s unusual, he says. This article was originally published on The Markup by Jon Keegan and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
