When it comes to buying slippers, of all things, 71% of online products reviews are fake. The percentages for other popular gift items go up the closer we get to the holidays.
As the task of holiday shopping becomes increasingly urgent, maybe you’re scrolling through Amazon trying to pick out some slippers for your father-in-law. You see a pair that has a ton of great reviews, even though you’ve never heard of the brand. Eager to check the task off your list, you add the slippers to your cart and order, but when they arrive they look like they’re ready to fall apart.
There’s a decent chance you’ve been duped by fake reviews, written by people who received free products, gift cards or money in exchange for putting a finger on the scale in favor of certain unscrupulous brands. These reviews proliferate during the holiday shopping season on popular gifts like slippers, watches and sweaters, according to Saoud Khalifah, CEO of Fakespot, which uses artificial intelligence to identify fraudulent and untrustworthy reviews on sites like Amazon, Walmart and Best Buy.
“Right before the shopping season starts, we see a huge influx of fake reviews,” Khalifah said. Activity starts to pick up in late summer, he said. “By September and October, the dams are open.”
The product category with the highest percentage of fake reviews on Amazon after Black Friday is slippers, according to Fakespot, which says a whopping 71% of those reviews can’t be trusted. Other popular holiday items that are flooded with fake reviews include sweaters, smartwatch bands, Christmas trees, watches, back massagers and earbud headphones, where more than one-third of reviews are unreliable, according to Fakespot.
The number of fake reviews posted ahead of the holiday season dwarfs the little spikes in activity on other gift-giving occasions like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, according to Khalifah.
There’s a strong incentive for brands to pay for reviews, particularly among Chinese-based sellers who are trying to join the competition with an undifferentiated product and zero name recognition. Fake reviews help boost a product’s sales by an average of 16%, according to research done by Brett Hollenbeck, a professor of marketing at University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues.
“You end up buying a product you wouldn’t otherwise, because a low-quality product is masquerading as a high-quality product,” Hollenbeck said.
Buyer’s remorse often follows. The biggest surge in bad reviews comes after the holidays, for products that were purchased in November and December, Hollenbeck said.
Amazon is working to curb fake reviews, which are banned on its site. It uses a combination of technology and human investigators to analyze reviews before they go live on the site, and an Amazon spokesperson says the company has kept millions of suspected fake reviews from being published. Sellers who are found to have violated its policies are kicked off the platform. It has also filed lawsuits against brokers who coordinate fake reviews on Facebook.
Last year alone, Amazon said it invested more than $900 million and had 12,000 employees working to counter fraud and other forms of abuse, like fake reviews.
To figure out if a product has artificially high ratings, look for signs that other people have been fooled in the past by filtering for one-star reviews and reading them, Hollenbeck said. Be wary of products that only have five-star ratings or a burst of ratings from the same narrow time period. Fake reviews are also less common among well-known brands, said Hollenbeck, but make sure you’re buying directly from the manufacturer.
Certain categories remain more resistant to manipulation. Take board games, like Monopoly, Scrabble and Jenga, which have the lowest percentage of fake reviews on Amazon this holiday season at under 10%, according to Fakespot.
“It’s really, really hard to compete with those kinds of games,” Khalifah said. “A fly-by-night company that creates a game that’s trash and tries to push it with fake reviews? Impossible.”
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/2022/12/12/scammers-are-flooding-amazon-with-fake-reviews-for-popular-holiday-gifts/