Fake Reviews From A Competitor

Hi guys,

I’m at a bit of a loss as to do what to do , so I thought I would post here.

I have been selling through Amazon FBA since September of last year, and have done pretty well in terms of sales. My number one priority is the customer, and I think this is reflected in the level of positive reviews that I’ve managed to get - over 200, which I don’t think is too bad.

Most of my competitors are Chinese companies, and a lot of their listings are poorly written, so as soon as I launched I was able to quickly rank and obtain a good market share. However, this has clearly not gone un-noticed. Around 10 days ago, I got two 1-star reviews in a row. Iniitally, I didn’t think anything of it, as I do occasionally get 1 stars. However, the following day, I got another, then the day after that, another, and another, until I had around 8-10 1 star reviews all left on consecutive days.

At this point I was extremely upset as the bad reviews killed my sales pretty much. Two weeks ago I was selling 50-60 units per day, now I am struggling to get past 10. My review rating fell from 4.5 to 4.2 in under a week. I spoke with my supplier, and questioned why the quality had reduced, and they said it hadn’t. So then I started to do some investigating on the reviews…and to my shock, I came to the conclusion that they were fake / paid for by a competitor:

• All of the reviewers (around 8-10) who left the 1-star reviews have made their accounts private, so you can’t see what other products they have reviewed (all less than 5 products). Whilst this isn’t conclusive, this is very strange. I usually always check what other products my customers have reviewed (to see what’s in trend etc) and it is VERY rare to see a private acccount

• My product is for women, yet three of the reviewers who said they’d used my product, were from men. Suspicious.

• A competitor of mine, who has also been doing well recently, has had the EXACT same thing happen. They were on 4.8, now 4.5, and they have had a series of 1-star reviews left from private accounts. They are still getting attacked, whereas my bad reviews seemed to have stopped (For now). I have contacted them, and they said they know who it is, but they don’t have proof, and Amazon won’t listen.

• Finally, I received an anonymous email to my company email account saying ‘hopefully you have got the message by now. Stop selling this product’. I am unable to trace the origins of this email, but I am convinced it is the competitor, who else would it be?

I have emailed and called Amazon, and despite me literally handing them the evidence on a plate (I’ve given them links to the accounts & reviews, my competitor’s page, and a screenshot of the email) they have done NOTHING. The review abuse team just said they will investigate, but for ‘privacy reasons, they can’t disclose the results’. I’ve emailed Jeff, Managing Director, Seller Performance, and the Review team, and i’ve had NOTHING back.

Has anybody got any advice / has anyone succeeded in having fraudulent reviews removed? I’m absolutely gutted. I put so much into this business, and this competitor / person, has destroyed it. My conversion has gone from 30% to 6%. I’ve been messaging other customers asking for them to leave reviews, but as you are aware, most don’t bother. Because I have so many reviews now, getting back to 4.5 stars from 4.3 is pretty difficult, I think I will need at least 20 5 star reviews in a row. Anyway, I shouldn’t have to do this, because I have been unfairly attacked.