The End Of Amazon Incentive Reviews

Amazon changes ripple through the ecommerce sector. What might this mean?
There is simply no bigger online retailer on the planet than Amazon. Having originally started out as a humble bookseller, the shopping juggernaut has managed to expand into nearly every product category imaginable, from beauty and homewares to electronics and plumbing equipment.

Giants Among Us

Thanks to its ease of use, the Prime membership program and huge variety of products (a reported 20 million different products are available on Prime), Amazon has staked out a hugely loyal consumer base. In fact, it’s reported that 30% of online shoppers in the US have a Prime account. But with market dominance comes responsibilities: when Amazon makes changes to the way it does things, it tends to have ripple effects not just on the millions of buyers and sellers that use the website, but on the entire internet commerce sector itself.
One of these changes came recently and has to do with Amazon’s product review system. One of the big appeals of Amazon is that customers can read what other people who have bought a particular product before they decide to purchase it. However, this hasn’t always been the most honest and unbiased way to get an accurate picture of an item, due to the phenomenon of incentivized reviews, where reviewers are given free or reduced price products in exchange for writing a review online.

End of Incentive

After hinting at the move earlier in the year, Amazon recently cracked down and ended its system of incentivized reviews and has been removing all such posts from the website. A new analysis of 32,000 products and around 65 million reviews shows that the company has made good on this promise, with the vast majority of biased reviews no longer visible.
The Verge reported that Amazon “says these types of reviews make up a tiny fraction of overall Amazon.com reviews. Yet studies have shown that incentivized reviewers are less likely to give products negative feedback and review hundreds of products on average, potentially affecting the overall sales performance of otherwise mediocre items.”
Amazon seems serious about its commitment to ending this system. Not only have they taken steps to stop any future incentivized reviews from being posted, they have also been deleting these biased reviews retroactively.
As TechCrunch wrote, “This is especially interesting because Amazon had said at the time of the ban’s announcement that it would only remove incentivized reviews from older products if they were “excessive” or if they didn’t comply with the prior policy. Review Meta found that Amazon had deleted over 500,000 reviews, 71% of which were incentivized. The average rating for these deleted reviews was 4.75 stars – clearly much higher than the typical average.”

What does this all mean?

So while Amazon’s shift in direction is ostensibly a win for consumers—in particular those who rely on trustworthy reviews to decide whether or not to spend their hard-earned money on a particular product—the question remains: how will it affect the internet economy at large? After all, the concept of incentivized reviewing or endorsements is not specific to Amazon, though the website served as one of the largest examples of this practice.
On Instagram, for example, the practice of sponsored posts, wherein a user of the platform uses their own account to endorse a product to their followers and receiving money for it in return, works in a similar way. Both are designed to attract more sales by vouching for a given product, even though the praise is contractual and not genuine.
It could be that the inability to post incentivized reviews on Amazon pushes the practice elsewhere and we see a flourishing of these sponsored posts on social media. However, Amazon could also be unknowingly setting a new standard for internet consumers, who may soon tire of being marketed goods on untrue terms. Only time will tell what the long-term effect of Amazon’s move is but, given the size of the retailer, it’s unlikely to be negligible.

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