How to have more reviews

How to have more reviews on amazon? True or false opinion, legal or illegal vis-à-vis Amazon, practices are not always honest to get positive opinions! If you're looking for new wireless headphones, you'll go to Amazon... and discover more than 100,000 listed results. Fortunately, reviews written by other customers naturally direct you to this pair with a near-perfect score of 4.9 out of 5 stars, awarded by no less than 89 Internet users (as of September 23rd). The latest review, which praises "bluffing sound quality" and "the ease of use of Bluetooth", has convinced you. Problem: it is as dithyrambic as... lying. His editor, who also wrote this article, negotiated the publication of his opinion in exchange for the seller's reimbursement of the purchase price. By joining a Facebook group called Amazon Community of product testers, we got in touch with several dozen people offering this type of deal: a refund in exchange for a simple laudatory comment coupled with a 5-star rating. Facebook has several dozen such groups in UK alone. Private discussion forums that intermediaries, working on behalf of Chinese sellers looking for visibility, have transformed into a market where everything is good for attracting customers. Some even offer the beneficiaries, known as "testers", a remuneration, generally between 5 and 10 euros. Every day there are a lot of product ads: slimming belts, iPhone shells, shower heads, external batteries, sex toys... Their price displayed on Amazon varies between 5 and 30 euros. It’s cheaper for this companies to give free products than buy amazon reviews But to take advantage of this 2.0 drugstore for free, Facebook users must first show their white paws. Each transaction, which is negotiated by private messages (PM), starts with the same question: "Can you send me your Amazon profile?". The latter is accessible from a tab little known to the general public. It provides a history of reviews and comments posted by an Amazon customer. It allows the intermediary to judge the buyer's credibility in the eyes of the e-merchant. The oldest profiles, with comments spaced out and ideally not all flattering, are the most popular. Newcomers, who have never commented, will find it more difficult to be accepted. An intermediary asked us to wait one or two months before we could take advantage of his offers. "It's dangerous for you and for my client's shop," he explains. Understand that you shouldn't attract Amazon's attention with an activity that is as sudden as it is laudatory. Indeed, the e-commerce giant has specific algorithms to detect cheaters. The latter can have their accounts closed, while the sellers at fault risk being expelled from the marketplace. However, all we had to do was publish 5 comments on orders placed in previous years to become eligible in the eyes of intermediaries. And these 5 reviews, posted in a single day, August 13, 2019, did not alert Amazon. The intermediaries, a majority of Chinese but also a few French auto-entrepreneurs wishing to round up their ends of the month, must therefore be cunning. Few will give you a direct link to the product you need to put in your basket. "We risk being spotted because Amazon is tracking its origin", explains one of them. So most of them provide a list of keywords to type into Amazon's search engine. One middleman even asked us to go through the product description for a few minutes and then look at one to three other similar products. In short, anything goes to make you look like a regular customer. In our Amazon shopping cart, after a few days on Facebook, we found Bluetooth headphones, power cables for the iPhone, an external battery and even a flea collar for the cat. For each product we will follow the same procedure, i.e. wait 3 to 7 days after receiving the article to post the comment. "This is to ensure the credibility of the article", explains an intermediary. The refund will generally be made two to three working days after sending the screenshot that proves that the comment was well made. It is done via a Paypal transfer, out of sight. Many sellers on Amazon have found that they are willing to do this, according to ReviewMeta, a specialist in the analysis of Amazon reviews. More than 60% of the reviews left on certain high-tech products such as speakers, headphones or connected watches are unreliable, according to the American. For UK is far from being an isolated case. In the United States, the FTC fined a seller $12.8 million last February. In the UK, the competition authority has urged Facebook to act and close down such groups. Also across the Channel, a consumer organisation called Which took an interest in April 2019 in 14 types of articles offered on Amazon. With edifying conclusions: 99% of the opinions on the first four connected watch references posted on the site were false, as were 10,000 of the 12,000 opinions on the first page of results on headphones, which only highlighted sellers unknown to the general public. On Amazon, the success of generic products depends first and foremost on their price and the reviews obtained. Not only does the latter reassure the consumer in the face of an unknown brand, but, in addition, "Amazon's algorithm values products that are appreciated and sell well. Accumulating glowing reviews allows a merchant to move up the search results". Rather than going through Amazon's Vine programme to present their product to a club of testers, with no guarantee of a positive return, Chinese sellers therefore prefer to make sure of the deal by spending a few hundred or even thousands of euros to buy Trustpilot reviews. With an almost immediate ROI. Going from 4.2 to 4.5 stars can generate a hundred thousand euros in additional turnover. Some people are pushing the scheme even further. A fairly big string, consists of changing the type of product assigned to an ASIN (the Amazon ID) to allow a new offer to benefit from reviews posted in the past. The highlighted product changes but the reviews remain... even though they are not related to it at all. To see this, just take a look at the history of photos posted by users who have made a (mostly paid) return on the product. Amazon, which has no interest in its consumers being misled in this way, is not standing idly by. Amazon works tirelessly to protect the integrity of customer feedback and in the last year alone, we have spent more than $400 million to protect our customers from abusive comments, fraud, and other forms of misconduct. Amazon blocked more than 13 million attempts to write false notices last year...

• 1,082