Amazon UK's top reviewers may be profiting from reviews
We probably all know the temptation when browsing Amazon without an exact item in mind - you gravitate towards listings that have hundreds, or even thousands of glowing reviews to bolster their reputation.
Many people have also doubtless noticed that while most of these reviews seemingly come from random people who just decided to leave their thoughts after a purchase, there are some more frequent reviewers who appear to be churning out countless reviews.
The Financial Times has taken a detailed look into the practices of Amazon UK's top 10 most prolific reviewers, and in even that small sample size has uncovered what look a lot like shady goings-on.
The number one reviewer on Amazon UK, one Justin Fryer, seems to churn out multiple reviews a day for products from vacuums to laptops, all of which most tech journalists would struggle to adequatley test in the time between his uploads. Meanwhile, it would appear that he's selling on what he claimed to the FT were duplicate items of the same listings via eBay and other reselling sites. This pattern appears to recur throughout the ranks of top reviewers.
Being sent an item for free, in exchange for a review on Amazon, is a concept that's expressly not allowed in Amazon's terms of services, and when those reviews are almost guaranteed to be glowing and five star-rated, it starts to look a little more like bribery.
After being contacted by the FT, a bunch of the top reviewers in the UK now appear to have either taken their reviews down or changed their profiles to avoid scrutiny.
A couple of weeks ago an academic study from California drew similar conclusions about Amazon's problem with fake reviewers, adding fuel to the fire in this area from Amazon's point of view.
The retail giant, meanwhile, has responded by launching an investigation into a problem that it'll see as threatening the basic trust in its services that encourages people to shop with it.
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