To address the aching problem of unreliable reviews, Amazon has fulfilled it’s promise to ban incentive driven reviews from it’s website.
According to ReviewMeta, which analyzes reviews to find useful ones, says it has noticed Amazon quickly deleting incentivized reviews.
This was based on an analysis of 65 million reviews, the company noted Amazon removed 500,000. (71%) that were incentivized.
Incentivized reviews are those where the vendor offers free or discounted products to reviewers, in exchange for recipients writing their “honest opinion” of the item in an Amazon review. However, data has shown that these reviewers tend to write more positive reviews overall, with products earning an average of 4.74 stars out of five, compared with an average rating of 4.36 for non-incentivized reviews.
Over time, these reviews proliferated on Amazon, and damaged consumers’ trust in the review system as a whole. And that can impact consumers’ purchase decisions.
