the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, not everything is as it seems on Amazon’s marketplace, where products are rated in a five-star system and a heavy number of positive reviews can help one brand stand out from a pack of competitors. Amazon has acknowledged it has a fake reviews problem, as it struggles to rein in coordinated efforts on other websites to flood product listings with good reviews in quid pro quo schemes that violate the company’s terms of service.
In it’s latest attempt to stem the tide of fake product reviews Amazon on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against two companies that allegedly acted as fake-review brokers.
The lawsuits filed in King County Superior Court in Seattle accuse the companies, AppSally and Rebatest, of fostering fake reviews on Amazon’s online marketplace. The companies allegedly connected third-party sellers with consumers who would leave a positive review of their product, in exchange for free products or payments.
The case represents Amazon’s latest effort to root out fake reviews on its sprawling third-party marketplace. The marketplace now accounts for more than half of e-commerce sales and has helped the company bring in record revenue. But fake reviews have proven to be a particularly thorny issue for Amazon as the marketplace has grown to include millions of third-party merchants.
Amazon said in a statement the lawsuit seeks “to shut down two major fake-review brokers” that it claims “helped mislead shoppers by having their members try to post fake reviews in stores” like Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Etsy. The statement added that AppSally and Rebatest say they have more than 900,000 users “willing to write fake reviews.”