Nicole Nguyen reports:
Ever wonder how cheap, no-name products on Amazon can amass hundreds, sometimes thousands, of nearly perfect star ratings, with just a handful of negative reviews?
Here’s one way: Some sellers are reaching out to unhappy buyers to revise or delete their negative reviews, in exchange for refunds or gift cards. With fewer disgruntled shoppers, the overall average star rating rises.
Sellers who ship products via Amazon aren’t supposed to reach out to customers outside of Amazon’s official channel—in fact, it’s a violation of the terms they agree to on the retail platform.
Read more on WSJ. Seriously: read more. This is creepy — and possibly unsafe. It’s bad enough if vendors/sellers get email contacts that they should not have and use them to pressure buyers into removing negative reviews. But what if a customer refuses and the seller decides to take things to another level? Do they know where you live? Did they fulfill the order themselves or did AMZ? There’s so much that I had never thought about until I read this article.
h/t, Joe Cadillic