Fake Reviews on Amazon can cost you your Amazon Sellers Account!
Amazon is cracking down on sellers who create fake reviews for their products or collude with other sellers to post fraudulent reviews in exchange for compensation. In fact, Amazon isn’t just suspending these sellers — they’re suing them.
Amazon claims that these fake reviews give sellers an unfair advantage by potentially influencing buying decisions.
As Amazon sellers know, customer reviews are one of the most important metrics that helps to determine your product’s Best Seller Rank (along with total sales). By artificially improving your ranking with fake reviews, you have the potential to give yourself inflated metrics that don’t match the customer experience — which is one of Amazon’s highest standards.
“The result of these intentional efforts is the deception of Amazon’s customers and unfair competition with sellers on Amazon’s marketplace.” — Amazon.com
Fake Reviews vs. Incentivized Reviews
Creating fake reviews isn’t the same thing as incentivized reviews — which Amazon also recently banned — and these crackdowns aren’t going away anytime soon. Organic reviews are the most valuable currency that an Amazon seller can have and having a lot of good reviews is a fantastic way to help avoid an Amazon suspension.
“As long as this type of abuse exists, we will continue to take enforcement and legal action against sellers participating in fraudulent reviews.” — Amazon.com
“More recently, Amazon has been removing reviews in an attempt to compromise with sellers in lieu of shutting down a seller’s business entirely.” — Sean, Paralegal at Rosenbaum Famularo, PC.
Since early 2015, Amazon has filed lawsuits against over 1,000 people, both in the U.S. and abroad. Many of the defendants are accused of engaging in fake reviews for long periods of time for many, many products. In fact, according to one report, Amazon claims that over half of certain sellers’ products were boosted by fraudulent reviews.
This has weakened many customers’ faith in the legitimacy of Amazon product reviews. That’s why fake reviews on Amazon are so sought after and harshly punished (even if you only do this for a few products).
If you have or plan on writing fake reviews on Amazon for your products, you can face an Amazon suspension or worse. If you’re already facing an Amazon suspension and need help with an Amazon suspension appeal, contact our team of Amazon legal experts today 1-877-9-SELLER.
