We have seen the trend of fake reviews that have been a problem and has been growing from quite some time in the industry. There has also been a lot of talk about how platforms should tackle the fake review issue and how there should be a censor as to how fake reviews are displayed or not on their platform. Now, we have seen that platforms such as Amazon has started to remove fake reviews from their platform as soon as they detect them in order to only show the real reviews. Because as per a report, 97% customers tend to rely on reviews in order to make a purchase decision.
Now, if the number is so significant and other report that reveals 15-30% of reviews on any given platform are fake then there is a problem for user trust. For this reason, platforms have started to tackle the problem by hiding fake reviews, removing them altogether or some platforms have chosen to show the fake reviews but under the disclaimer that they are believed to be fake.
We now have a new surprise report for you regarding platforms that show fake reviews to customers while clearly marking them as fake. According to this report, it is believed that 80% of the customers are likely to prefer a platform that shows them reviews that are fake and ones that are not. Now, it is also seen that those fake reviews really don’t help customers make a decision for the product but they do help them in knowing what is fake about that review.
The research concludes that “We find consumers have more trust in the information provided by review portals that display fraudulent reviews alongside nonfraudulent reviews, as opposed to the common practice of censoring suspected fraudulent reviews,” while adding that “The impact of fraudulent reviews on consumers’ decision-making process increases with the uncertainty in the initial evaluation of product quality.”
