Customer reviews on the internet

According to Scamadviser, 39% of all counterfeit products ordered online are purchased from website shops and 29% from online marketplaces such as Amazon, Ebay or Alibaba. Embellished star ratings on both web presences deliberately mislead customers. Last year, e-commerce software specialist Capterra conducted a representative end-customer survey, the results of which suggest that more than half of online shoppers assume customer ratings are fake. As a result, online shoppers look at an average of five to 20 reviews before placing an order. The majority (39%) find online reviews more important than recommendations from friends and acquaintances (23%). Similarly, many shoppers prefer a not-so-good average rating to a better average rating if the less good one is derived from a much larger number of ratings.

Hardly anyone books a holiday trip today without first looking at the reviews of their destination on the internet. You can find a rating for almost anything, be it a doctor (docfinder), a beach (beach-inspector) or a film (imdb) that was in the cinemas 40 years ago, for example.

The omnipresent rating trend was originally triggered by e-commerce providers themselves. In the past, they only asked for a simple product rating in their own webshop after the purchase. This method is called an integrated rating system. Smaller companies usually did not have their own rating system, but did not want to do without the advertising effect of customer opinions in the competition with the increasingly dominant marketplaces such as Ebay or Amazon. Specialised companies soon established themselves that rent out trustmarks to webshops and thus provide corporate customers with a graphic badge with a current average rating for their homepage. This is intended to prove the reliability of the company to potential customers. These trustmarks are usually based on customer feedback from verified purchases, i.e. only if the customers have actually bought from the evaluating provider.

In German-speaking countries, the monthly costs for a company entry on such a seal of approval platform range from 10 to about 250 euros. With the largest providers, the monthly rent for the seal has settled at around 100 euros; entrepreneurs can pay for additional functionalities. With this type of seal of approval, or even if the system is integrated directly into the ordering process and is based on internal customer feedback (e.g. at Amazon), one speaks of so-called closed platforms. Here, only customers invited by email can submit a rating. However, this carries the risk that a distorted picture of the reputation of the company or product can emerge and the question of how the result came about is often not particularly transparent. Especially not if there are only a few ratings or if a rating system is new.

According to § 6 para. 1 of the E-Commerce Act, review platforms are obliged to label sponsored products or profiles. Thus, paid reviews - which in principle are nothing more than advertising - must also be clearly marked as such on the rating platforms. The Media Act also stipulates in §26 that websites must make purchased reviews clearly recognisable as advertising. For this purpose, words such as "Paid advert", "Advertisement", "Sponsored by" or similar are usually placed near or on the paid ad or the sponsored profile.

Fan pages of companies on social networks such as Facebook offer the possibility for customer comments or even quantitative ratings (points or star ratings, red - green coloured bars). In general, social networks and open platforms catalyse the impact of customer reviews on business, both good and bad. However, the easier it is to create new fake profiles on the social network in question and the smaller the number of users, the more questionable these ratings are. As a counterpoint, however, there are also social media groups, bloggers or passionate fake site hunters who specialise in collecting misleading praise and fake shops.

If one is not careful, it is often difficult to tell whether it is a conventional webshop, dropshipping (goods arrive from the Far East at some point without support in case of problems) or even advance fee fraud (paid order will not come). In the collected examples, there may also be hybrids of all three "business models". In large networks such as Facebook, the comment function can trigger a feedback response to negative reports, which encourages more and more users to express similar opinions.

A clumsy attempt can be seen as a freely invented seal of approval by some traders who, for image reasons, want to give the impression of an external inspection. However, this has never taken place; the supposed seal is nothing more than a mere advertising graphic with no content, a decoration intended to convey the appearance of proof.

Agencies specialising in fake customer testimonials offer such positive reviews for sales or open review platforms at a unit price. So-called clickworkers are hired by such agencies for a few hundred euros and write 5-star fake reviews serially and on commission. The backers evade justice in tax havens and opaque corporate networks. The article in the magazine Extrablatt (from page 106) explains the argumentation of the sinister rating merchants; companies should not have a bad conscience when buying fake ratings. A rating seller sets out his logic on his website with the text "Why is it morally correct to buy ratings?" as follows: The person who does not cheat has only himself to blame, because he puts his company at an economic disadvantage against the competition, since the latter certainly uses the practice as well. In this way, the abuse of the review circus, which is susceptible to falsification and is thus becoming more and more absurd, is presented by such review traders as essential for the survival of companies.

If competitors blacken a competitor through fake entries, this is unfair competition and can be reported if it is possible to find out who is behind it, despite all the difficulties. In the case of unjustified customer reviews, companies have the option of having these deleted from their company profile on a review platform if they can objectively refute the alleged accusations with facts. Frequently, however, a counter-statement is added by the company in the case of conciliation. The deletion of a critical customer review is possible, but it harms the review platform and is normally avoided.

Meanwhile, many rating portals are networked. This is called rating aggregation and means that ratings from different platforms are shared and flow into a common overall result. Google also displays aggregated rating results from licensed rating partners directly in the hit list of the search engine itself, if a company rated by the partner has placed an ad on Google in order to be ranked at the top of the search hits. If a Google page with additional information such as address, Google Maps entry and opening hours is available for the search result, only Google-internal so-called "Google reviews" are displayed there.

The analysis portal Fakespot now considers 42% of all Amazon reviews to be fakes. This means that the figure for 2021 has risen sharply compared to the 36% of the previous year. The algorithm of Fakespot evaluates customer reviews on online marketplaces such as Amazon, Shopify, Ebay, Walmart, BestBuy etc. after installation as a browser plugin or as an app in the smartphone and an artificial intelligence filters out the fake reviews and blocks their display as well as the display of fake goods (counterfeit) on the device of users of this popular app.