‘My negative online review was blocked’

The UK has proposed new rules making fake product reviews illegal. But experts say it’s not the only way companies are distorting buyers’ perceptions.

Nathaniel Fuentes wanted to warn others about the printer he bought for his son’s schoolwork last year after finding almost every paper output was blurry.

But after the 36-year-old Californian made his comment on the manufacturer’s website, he promptly received the answer: “Your review has been moderated”.

His feedback never appeared. And suddenly the rave reviews he’d read before buying the printer looked a lot more suspicious.

“I would never have bought it,” he says. “I will no longer do business with them.”

Surveys show that approximately 90% of shoppers use product reviews to inform their purchases. But the information they collect can be unreliable.

The UK recently proposed rules that would make it illegal to write and commission fake reviews.

But while much of the attention has focused on the problem of fake reviews, experts say sellers also distort customer perceptions in other ways, using practices like showing reviews to their advantage, selectively soliciting comments — and in extreme cases Suppress bad feedback altogether.

Potential issues and conflicts of interest related to reviews have increased as more brands integrate them into their own websites and take a more active role in collecting reviews to support sales on other platforms.

“Many businesses start out with an honest agenda of removing fake negative reviews… but when they do, it becomes a slippery slope,” says Prof. Bin Gu of Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. “It’s very difficult to know when to stop.”

In January, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a $4.2 million settlement with fast-fashion apparel company Fashion Nova over allegations that blocked hundreds of thousands of bad customer reviews between 2015 and 2019.

The agency said the company, known for its partnerships with social media influencers and celebrities like Cardi B, uses software services that allow four- and five-star comments to be automatically posted while the rest are withheld for review .

The deal was the first case in which a company was taken down for hiding bad reviews. Another new FTC case involved a contact lens vendor paying $3.5 million to settle charges, including failing to disclose that it was paying people for reviews.

“This is a priority area for us,” said FTC attorney Amber Lee, who worked on the Fashion Nova case. “It’s hard to say how widespread the problem is, but one of the reasons we bring cases like this is to send a message to the market.”

Fashion Nova declined an interview. In a statement about the FTC agreement, the company said it had relied on another company to process reviews and “inadvertently did not complete this process due to certain resource constraints at a time of rapid growth.”

The company said it voluntarily released the relevant reviews after being made aware of the issue in 2019 and that it “only agreed to settle the case to avoid the distraction and attorney fees it would incur in litigation.” would”.

Complaints that Fashion Nova has systematically hidden reviews under four stars point to a “rather egregious case,” says Prof. Dina Mayzlin of the USC Marshall School of Business, who advocates large-scale review suppression given the risks of customer outcry for unlikely.

But, she warns, “there are usually more subtle ways to discourage negative reviews and encourage positive ones.”

New guidelines also warn businesses against practices like “misleadingly” presenting reviews or only soliciting comments from people who are likely to offer praise. They also say companies need to treat positive and negative reviews equally.

Agency officials are also working with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority on its investigation into online reviews on platforms such as Amazon and Google.

Government attention has begun to urge companies to address the worst behavior, experts say. Amazon, for example, last year finally suspended some big sellers accused of soliciting fake reviews, allegedly after being spurred on by the FTC.

“Regulators are trying to crack down on the manipulation, but it’s actually quite difficult,” says Prof. Brett Hollenbeck of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, who found that sellers solicited fake reviews for around 4.5 million Amazon products in 2020 to have.

“Given the importance that reviews have in people’s purchasing decisions, there is a very strong incentive for a company to manipulate the reviews and ratings they receive.”

Keith Nealon is CEO of BazaarVoice, a Texas-based company that works with more than 13,000 brands and processes more than 100 million reviews annually.

He says his team, which consists of 1,200 full-time employees and hundreds of part-time moderators, typically rejects about 8% of reviews after automated counterfeit checking due to issues such as obscenity and irrelevance – when the comments relate to shipping, e.g. and not the product.

But he says simply squelching bad reviews is a “limited” practice across the industry. His company, which didn’t work with Fashion Nova, requires customers to allow comments regardless of star ratings.

He hopes regulatory scrutiny will help convince brands of what his company has long advocated: that posting bad reviews can build trust in brands and confidence in online shopping.

“This moves the industry in the right direction, which we welcome,” he says.

For some buyers, however, the damage has already been done.

Former Fashion Nova customer Lauren Curry tried to alert the clothing maker to a missing order in 2017 – only to have her complaints taken down by the company’s social media pages. The 29-year-old from South Carolina says the experience dulled her perception of Fashion Nova – and made her wary of unknown companies promoting it on social media.

“You don’t know who’s legitimate,” she says.

As for Nathaniel, after doing more research online, he bought a different printer. But this time, he says, he didn’t buy it until he saw it in person.

“We live in a time of real lack of trust,” he says. “It used to be something that was really easy to say, ‘Hey – it’s a high rating. I can go buy it.’ It’s kind of muddy now.”