Good brands are having trouble with bad reviews. While this isn’t a new phenomenon, it seems to be an increasingly prevalent one.
Reviews are the lifeblood of products that sell through online retailers, like Amazon, Walmart, and Target. According to INC magazine, 91% of buyers read reviews before buying on these sites, and find them highly credible. Another study shows that 94% of all purchases were for products with 4-5 star reviews, and amazingly, a product with 4 stars will have 11.6x more sales than the same product with a 3 star review. As well as that incredible impact on buyer conversion, bad reviews will significantly reduce your chance for showing up in search at all.
Amazon alone makes up about 40% of all US ecommerce sales, and what many buyers don’t realize is that about two thirds of all purchase on Amazon ($175B last year) aren’t with Amazon directly, but with Amazon’s marketplace of over 6 Million sellers. While Amazon has taken steps ahead of most competitors to improve review trust and quality, there exists a tremendous incentive for bad-faith actors to try to get an unfair edge on their competitors by manipulating reviews. More frequently, this is less likely to be done by increasing their own review score than by manipulating a competitor.
The most common tactic is known as ‘brigading’, driving fraudulent negative reviews of a competitor’s products on a site like Amazon. ReviewMeta provides an in-depth explanation of review brigades here, and also provides an excellent free tool for checking the review accuracy of any product on Amazon. Other tactics are even more extreme, like staging a photo to falsely claim a product represents a safety hazard, or buying obviously fake positive reviews for a competitor to expose them to punishment from Amazon. The Verge published an in-depth piece of a small business owner who was hit with this tactic, and despite immediately notifying Amazon of these fake positive reviews himself, still found himself banned, dealing with an incredible bureaucracy to overturn, and ultimately out $125,000 in sales, some of which undoubtedly went to the perpetrating competitor.
Very few categories are as high trust as Baby products. New parenthood involves buying a ton of unfamiliar gear that we need to be safe, durable, and effective, and we trust reviews to give us that guidance, but several top category leaders seem to be hit with brigading, onslaughts of fake negative reviews.
Lansinoh, a leading maker of breast pumps and bottles is classified by MetaReview as a victim of brigading. A product with over 5,000 reviews that tops many search results on Amazon is hovering right around that crucial 4.0 star mark, and MetaReview shows that it’s being pulled downward by recent, coordinated waves of fake one-star reviews, with 39% of all reviews for that product being flagged as ‘potentially unnatural’. Graco is seeing similar results for a best selling stroller, flagged by MetaReview as a victim of brigading, with 39% of reviews as ‘potentially unnatural’.
What’s evident is that reviews matter more than ever, as do product and brand recommendations from our own inner circle of friends and family, and as with each, authenticity is essential. Amazon and other retailers are taking real steps to try to clean up reviews, and while these steps have made fake positive reviews easier to curb, they haven’t addressed the less direct dirty tactics inherent in such systems that some unscrupulous competitors are using to tear down rivals. As always, caveat emptor, look beyond the star ratings to the content of the reviews, use tools like MetaReview to analyze before buying, and ask the people you know and trust in real life what brands they’d recommend when starting your search.