{"id":25744,"date":"2016-10-03T15:38:22","date_gmt":"2016-10-03T22:38:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/?p=25744"},"modified":"2016-10-03T16:00:44","modified_gmt":"2016-10-03T23:00:44","slug":"amazon-finally-bans-incentizied-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/bens-bytes\/amazon-finally-bans-incentizied-reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon finally bans shady incentivized reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"amazon-banned\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After months and months of Amazon sellers gaming the review system<\/a>, the online retailer has finally decided to crack down on reviewers that use this disclaimer phrase (or a variation of)\u00a0\u201cI received this item at a discounted price for my honest and unbiased review.<\/em>\u201c These overly positive reviews were recently proven to be biased<\/a> by ReviewMeta, often increasing the overall score as much as half a star.<\/p>\n

That study found that\u00a0incentivized reviewers were twelve times less likely to\u00a0assign\u00a0a 1-star\u00a0rating<\/span> than someone that purchased the product on their own. In addition, reviewers were loading up on products for free in exchange for their reviews; a makeshift payment system for anyone that wanted to write reviews for a living.<\/p>\n

As detailed by Amazon in a release today<\/a>, the only incentivized\u00a0reviews that will remain on the site will be anyone enrolled in the Amazon Vine program. In all likelihood, this will decimate the review scores on the flood of cheap Chinese knockoff products that\u00a0have taken Amazon by storm over the last couple years. There\u00a0were\u00a0even companies that sold\u00a0Amazon reviews, before Amazon started suing them.<\/p>\n

\"amazon-reviews-buy\"<\/a><\/p>\n

While Vine is a form of\u00a0incentivized reviews, Amazon limits the number of Vine reviews that can appear on a product listing. Hypothetically, a product may have 10% Vine reviews, 90% non-incentivized reviews.\u00a0Many third party sellers flipped that percentage in their favor, often listing 90% super-positive paid reviews and only 10%\u00a0non-incentivized reviews from real customers at a product launch.<\/p>\n

Amazon hasn’t weighed in on\u00a0what they will be doing with the existing\u00a0incentivized reviews that are currently listed on the site. While they won’t be allowing those reviews to be published moving forward, it’s unclear if they will remove reviews or require third party sellers to remove those reviews by a certain date.<\/p>\n

As a consumer on Amazon, you should be wary of any product that lists those types of\u00a0shady incentivized reviews. You can use products like ReviewMeta<\/a> or Fakespot<\/a> to scan for fake reviews or use the tips below to avoid incentivized reviews:<\/p>\n

Three tips to identifying shady\u00a0incentivized\u00a0reviews:<\/h3>\n
    \n
  • Search Amazon reviews for specific keywords like \u201cdiscount,\u201d \u201chonest,\u201d \u201cunbiased,\u201d or \u201creview.\u201d If you see a rash of reviews with that common disclaimer phrase pop up, you have discovered fake reviews.<\/li>\n
  • Use the sorting function to look at the timing of the reviews. When most of the 5-star reviews are around the same time period (perhaps within seven to ten days), those are\u00a0likely fake reviews.<\/li>\n
  • Fake reviews are typically short, include\u00a0extremely general details and have an overbearing level of positive superlatives. It\u2019s also likely you will see grammatical errors in phrasing.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    After months and months of Amazon sellers gaming the review system, the online retailer has finally decided to crack down on reviewers that use this disclaimer phrase (or a variation of)\u00a0\u201cI received this item at a discounted price for my honest and unbiased review.\u201c These overly positive reviews were recently proven to be biased by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25751,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[537,1605,168,1604],"class_list":["post-25744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bens-bytes","tag-amazon","tag-incentivized","tag-reviews-2","tag-shady"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25744"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25763,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25744\/revisions\/25763"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}