I thought so, too. Then I spoke to Brett Hollenbeck, a University of California, Los Angeles professor who has studied how we really respond to fake reviews and those ubiquitous little numbers: 4.5 stars, 4.8 stars, 4.2 stars.
Anyone about to hit the digital malls ahead of the holidays would benefit from Hollenbeck’s findings on how pernicious, and ubiquitous, review fakery can be.
How does one discover fakers? As Hollenbeck found, they’re hiding in plain sight. More precisely, sellers or their intermediaries publicly solicit fake Amazon reviews on Facebook.
They post descriptions of products, which they say consumers can have free of charge in exchange for a glowing review from a verified purchaser with photos.
The reviewer then buys the product so that the review is labeled as coming from a verified purchaser. Once he or she leaves a review, the seller refunds the purchase price and any transaction costs, and sometimes offers a bonus of as much as $15 a review, according to Hollenbeck; Sherry He, a professor at Michigan State University; and Davide Proserpio, a professor at the University of Southern California when the research was written. (He is currently on leave working at Amazon.) Their findings appeared last year in the journal Marketing Science.
Although the sellers don’t include the links, they often included enough information, such as the product type and pictures, for researchers to find the exact product and URL for which reviews were solicited. The team documented about 1,500 such items, including beauty products, humidifiers, teeth whiteners, cellphone accessories, home-improvement tools, bug zappers and electric foot massagers.
It’s in the stars to hold a product’s destiny
The products’ average rating jumped from 4.3 stars before solicitation to 4.5 stars after. After the Facebook recruiting ends, the rating gradually falls back to 4.1 stars.
That might not sound like a huge amount, but even a 0.2-percentage-point increase can dramatically improve how high a product ranks in an Amazon search. While the boost might be short-lived, the increase in the total reviews, sales rank and search position persists.
Though the researchers studied solicitation on Facebook and reviews on Amazon, the behavior isn’t limited to those websites. In fact, sites where users can leave reviews without being verified purchasers are thought by some researchers to have an even worse fake-review problem.
The fake reviews appear to work. The Behaviouralist, a London-based consulting firm that studies behavioral economics, in partnership with Which?, a British consumer advocacy and information group similar to Consumer Reports in the U.S., tasked 10,000 consumers with picking out dash cams, headphones or cordless vacuum cleaners.
Some consumers were shown fake reviews and some real reviews. Those who got the fake reviews were 5.8 percentage points more likely to pick products that Which? had recommended against buying. Overall, one additional star increased demand by 38%. In some cases, customers were responding to the review, in others, to the star rating—and sometimes both.
Perhaps surprisingly, more frequent online shoppers were likelier to be influenced by fake reviews because they’re accustomed to quickly assessing products via things such as rating and number of reviews, said Jesper Akesson, managing director of the Behaviouralist. “People develop these habits or heuristics that work most of the time but sometimes it really deceives them," he said.
Hollenbeck conducted his research in 2020, but there’s little reason to think the practices have ceased. The U.K.’s Department for Business and Trade estimated earlier this year that 11% to 15% of reviews for major product categories are fake.
Regulators respond
Regulators are trying to clamp down. The Federal Trade Commission in June proposed rules banning fake reviews and testimonials. The proposed rules would also prohibit related practices, such as company insiders reviewing their own products without disclosing their affiliation, reviews from fake people or of never-purchased products, or “review hijacking" where a company makes reviews for one product appear to apply to another by changing the listing.
Last year, Amazon filed a lawsuit against 10,000 Facebook group administrators who it said were soliciting fake reviews. But as old groups get closed down, new ones are created. Many of the sellers are overseas, and continually use new aliases and sock-puppet accounts. Hollenbeck’s research finds that Amazon eventually deleted many of the fake reviews, but often with a lag of 100 days.
An Amazon spokesperson said in a written statement that the company has “zero tolerance for fake reviews" and acknowledged that “fake review brokers operate outside of our stores, making it more challenging to detect, prevent, and enforce these bad actors alone." The company said it had taken legal action against 152 bad actors, and blocked over 200 million suspected fake reviews in 2022 alone.
“Facebook periodically deletes the groups and they pop back up again a week later," said Hollenbeck. Indeed, as of this Tuesday, I easily found a number of Facebook groups advertising free products such as furniture, ear phones, Christmas decorations, clothing, cordless vacuums and many other items in exchange for reviews. (Facebook’s policies prohibit buying, selling or trading for fraudulent reviews. The company has filed lawsuits against individuals perpetrating e-commerce abuse on its platform, including a fake review scheme.)
Hollenbeck and Akesson say their research has made them far more skeptical shoppers. They offer a few practical tips.
Both make a point to read mediocre reviews that are unlikely to be faked.
Hollenbeck says one surprising red flag is photos. Fake reviews are far more likely to have pictures than genuine ones. After all, who shares a banal photo of some minor consumer good?
Hollenbeck says he’s always cautious about those products that are one of four or five nearly identical search results. They’re just the sort of product that would benefit from a tiny ratings bump that a fake review can deliver.
Write to Josh Zumbrun at josh.zumbrun@wsj.com
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