Amazon sellers get five star status with bogus reviews of toys, investigation finds
Amazon sellers have been manipulating its review system to boost their review status to five stars, a deep-dive by a consumer choice group has claimed.
Businesses are making the most of a loophole with the online retail giant, using items such as cuddly toys and umbrellas to help inflate rating sand sell products.
An investigation by Which? found that 90 per cent of top rated headphones had top reviews for unrelated products, which it says have been used as a misleading marketing ploy. It says third parties are manipulating the system, with nine out of 10 brands of bluetooth headphones having artificially boosted reviews, and only one major brand, Bose, had no signs of manipulation.
With £23bn of spending linked to reviews, Which? warned about the damage to consumer confidence on Amazon.
A spokesperson for Amazon told City PM it “groups customer reviews for product variations like colour and size, and we have clear guardrails in place to prevent products from being incorrectly grouped, either due to human error or abuse.
“Our proactive measures detect and block the vast majority of abuse in our store automatically; however, we are disappointed when bad actors evade our systems, and we will continue to innovate and invest in our tools and processes.
“If we discover detail pages with incorrectly grouped reviews, we use these learnings to improve our prevention mechanisms. We have now taken appropriate enforcement action against the product listings and sellers in question.”
Which?’s director of policy and advocacy, Rocio Concha, said “unscrupulous businesses are exploiting weaknesses with Amazon’s review system, meaning shoppers are “at risk of buying products boosted by thousands of bogus five-star reviews.”