Chinese Company bought good reviews from professional reviewers
Chinese sellers are notorious for buying good reviews to boost their product rankings. This cheating behaviour is against Amazon policies. However, they can disguise this pretty well. Just found a good example.
Seller is Puppyoo, a Chinese vacuum cleaner company. By copying Dyson’s designs, doing OEM and purely selling online at a cheap price, it soon became a large company and even went public. Now, it sells its products on Amazon UK, and not surprisingly, it is buying good reviews from marketing specialists.
See this example: This product only had 9 reviews (ASIN: B01MR1RVNV). Among these 9, there are 3 reviews with videos and many images. The reviewers of these thorough videos and images are professional reviewers, i.e. they are paid to “buy” the products, then giving thorough reviews from the Seller/Manufacturers’ perspective. Click on the reviewers’ profile and you’ll see.
I just have one question: you are buying a low end vacuum cleaner, not a diamond ring for your girlfriend, will you spend hours on making the video, taking images of different parts, uploading to Amazon and writing full comments? Some people are attentive to details, I know, but 3 reviewers of all 9 reviewers are such people? Impossible.
To further prove above, the same man, Mohsin Uddin, reviewed again as a “verified purchase” for another product of this seller. Mr Uddin, are you a wealthy landlord owning many houses so you need to buy so many vacuum cleaning machines for your properties?
Again, a lot of wording and many images. And again, we all know Mohsin Uddin was paid to do so. If you are interested, go to Mohsin Uddin’s profile, and you can find all the products paid by companies for him to “buy” then leaving good reviews. And, Mohsin Uddin is not hiding this fact that he is an online marketing specialist.
Some people may argue that these are “verified purchases”. Yes, indeed, they are purchased by the reviewers but they are paid to make the purchases. These people are not genuine customers.
8 replies
Seller_DU3QC7hNdqwQH
I have contacted various departments at Amazon about these blatant paid for reviews, and even provided links from the seller to the “secret” FB paid for review groups, so they can actually see without a doubt that the reviews are incentivised. And guess what…nothing happens.
I’ve also sent in name after name of reviewers who have left hundreds of fake reviews. And guess what…nothing happens.
So the buyer - the genuine buyer - purchases these goods on the basis of these 5 star reviews ( and videos) and gets a pile of (insert expletive), hassle , disappointment and time wasted in trying to return damned thing. But to Amazon its a win win, they get commission regardless.
Seller_szlg9mwshA8mO
Good heavens. A Chinese company is using nefarious tactics in order to make a larger profit? Who would have thought?!
Seller_ouF7KjN4zbUMU
Can’t see what your problem is … British companies do it all the time. It is easy to become a “product tester” as long as you give a review of the product tested.
Seller_wRGBSSwJnzaDE
Or removing the hose from a very personal part of your anatomy?
Seller_EJIX7rqDNQJi2
You don’t need to explain it, I think that it’s very obvious, which reviews are fake. The buyers are not stupid. They can also see, that the listing has suspicious product reviews. Just because a listing has a high amount of (fake) reviews, it does not necessary mean, that it has any real sales which bring profit to the seller. The sellers are mostly selling these products at deep discounts, refunding the buyers by PayPal after the sale.
Amazon is already working on deleting fake product reviews. Since the begining of April they have been closing buyer accounts who violated the review guidelines, deleting their reviews, closing Facebook review groups etc… It will take some time until they manage to clean the entire site.
