For Internet users, the ratings and comments posted on merchant sites could have become a valuable decision-making tool. But, over the years, the massive emergence of fake reviews has damaged their credit. How to curb the phenomenon? Amazon has been working on this since 2016, when the number one e-commerce company in France began to sue sellers using false reviews.
Since then, the American company has introduced rules complicating the work of counterfeiters – who use several fake Amazon accounts. A user must now have purchased for 50 dollars (about 44 euros) of products before being able to post comments. More spectacularly, Amazon chased from its shelves, in 2021, several hundred Chinese sellers who resorted to fake reviews, including some well-known brands.
Amazon’s ambiguities
But the American company lacks firmness on other points. According to the work of three Californian academics, the company takes an average of fifty-three days to detect a false notice. However, it is precisely the freshest opinions that weigh the most on the rating of a product. Also, starting in 2019, Amazon allowed customers to leave a review without text, reduced to a simple note: minimal effort for counterfeiters.
Daria Plotkina, teacher and researcher in marketing at EM Strasbourg, explains this ambivalence by “Amazon’s need to collect numerous and fresh reviews, which help it sell”. Amazon, moreover, must remain cautious: the company indicates on its blog make a lot of effort not to “mistakenly impacting honest sellers”.
Also on its blog, Amazon does not claim to have won the battle for fake reviews: “We have seen an increasing number of bad actors solicit fake reviews outside of Amazon, especially on social media. (…) to interfere with our ability to detect their activity. [Il est] clear that this battle is now being played out across the entire industry, and that we need to work together to move forward. » But it would be utopian to hope to prevent a dishonest seller from discreetly soliciting counterfeiters.
Facebook used as a gateway
According to the consumer association Which?, the British Que Choisir, Facebook is particularly appreciated by Asian brands wishing to contact Western consumers to offer them gifts in exchange for fake reviews. If most (not all) are generally written in English, this does not prevent them from being, since 2020 in any case, then transferred to certain French product sheets.
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