One in 10 Amazon customers offered ‘bribes’ for positive reviews
Over four million people could have been offered an incentive in exchange for a five-star review of an Amazon product in the last year, a Which? survey has revealed.
Our nationally representative survey of 1,556 people run in August 2023 found that 10% of people who bought from Amazon in the previous 12 months had received a note or card in the packaging of an Amazon product offering an incentive for leaving a five-star review. When scaled up, this equates to 4.5 million people in Great Britain.
Of those who had shopped on Amazon in the previous 12 months, 8% told us they were asked by a seller to leave a five-star review in exchange for an incentive, and 4% were offered a reward for changing a negative review to a positive one.
- Find out more: learn how to spot a fake review using our in-depth guide
What is review incentivisation?
Brands or sellers on Amazon offer rewards or incentives to buyers in an attempt to manipulate reviews and star ratings, often in the form of an Amazon gift card – which sometimes even surpasses the value of the original product, a refund or a free product. They will usually only be given in exchange for a four or five-star review.
It’s not the first time we’ve uncovered evidence of this type of review manipulation on Amazon: in 2021 we found bestselling products that showed signs of fake and incentivised reviews. We’ve also found agents in Facebook groups offering payment for positive reviews on multiple occasions.
How incentivisation can lead to review manipulation
We were contacted by a Which? member who told us they had actually changed their review after they were offered an incentive.
The member had originally written a negative review of the product (a pair of pillow cases designed to keep your head cool) but changed the review to a positive one after the offer of a refund from the seller for doing so. After leaving a positive review, they received questions from people on Amazon looking to buy the product, which suggests people were placing trust in the review.
Another Amazon shopper told us they had received an offer for an incentive but assumed it was a scam, so asked for a higher value of Amazon vouchers. He ended up leaving a positive review, which he felt was justified, and got £50 in Amazon vouchers plus a full refund.
It may seem harmless to leave a five-star review in exchange for payment, but we’ve found that fake reviews can make shoppers twice as likely to choose poor-quality products. We’ve also uncovered products on Amazon that people have bought because of the five-star ratings that have turned out to be poor quality or even dangerous.
Examples of review incentivisation on Amazon
The incentivisation of reviews is strictly against Amazon’s terms and conditions, which is why sellers often state that reviewers shouldn’t mention the incentive letter when leaving a review - as in the cases listed below. This makes it difficult to know just how many reviews have been incentivised, but some reviewers openly state that they’ve been offered an incentive or ‘bribe’, and we uncovered the evidence fairly easily.
Fake reviews on a potentially dangerous vacuum cleaner
A Which? member told us that she ordered a handheld vacuum from Amazon, and in the box was a letter offering a £10 gift card in exchange for a five-star review. At the time of writing, the Lyyxll Handheld Vacuum has 4,264 ratings, 55% of which are five-star. According to the listing, more than 1,000 have been sold in the past month.
We looked at the reviews for the vacuum cleaner, and found evidence of multiple types of review manipulation – including review merging. Even more concerningly, some people reported potentially dangerous faults with the product while others found the quality to be truly sub-par.
Four reviewers claimed that the power switch on the vacuum cleaner failed, meaning that they were unable to switch it off and had to wait until it ran out of battery. One had received the same incentive offer of a £10 Amazon voucher.
We also noticed that there were more than 100 reviews for a completely different product – a worm on a string. Ninety of the reviews were five stars, and the rest were three or four. This practice is known as review merging, where sellers merge the positive reviews of a dormant Amazon listing with their own to boost the number of five star reviews.
A Which? staff member received the below offer after buying a water flosser. It clearly states that the £25 Amazon gift card is for a five-star review, and advises not to attach a picture with the review.
Turning down 'bribes' for a five-star review
Elsewhere we easily found evidence of incentivisation on a £170 ClokoWe mini projector. In fact, the top review states that they’d had a letter a month after buying the product offering a 'bribe' for a five star review. The top critical review (chosen by an Amazon algorithm) states: ‘I got a letter about the projector from Amazon offering me a £30 voucher if I made this review 5 stars! So be aware they are bribing people to leave 5 star reviews so they may not all be genuine. I don’t think it’s worth 5 so I’ll forgo the voucher thanks!’. Another review – which was five star – stated that they'd also got a letter from the seller offering £30 for a five-star review.
If you've been offered an incentive for a review, let us know at fakereviews@which.co.uk
Harassed to change an Amazon review
A member of the Which? Facebook group told us that he had bought a cheap IOWODO smartwatch from Amazon but had to return it after a week because it was faulty.
Since returning it, he said he has been ‘plagued with offers of a free watch’ and had reduced his review to one star. He checked when contacting us, and said his one star review had disappeared.
On the listing for the smartwatch we found other people who had also been offered an incentive for changing or removing a review. One said they’d received ‘harassment’ from the seller and that it had been ‘over a month of hell’. Another said that the seller had promised them money to remove their negative review.
How many reviews are incentivised on Amazon?
It’s impossible for us to know how many of those who are offered incentives go on to leave a review – whether that’s positive or negative. The practice is happening behind closed doors, targeting buyers in the privacy of their homes or via their personal email inbox (sellers are only supposed to contact buyers via Amazon). However, four of the products mentioned in this piece were dispatched by Amazon.
Amazon also has access to a huge amount of data that we simply can’t see – signs such as a high number of people changing their reviews could be a flag to investigate a seller or listing.
It’s worth noting, too, that the value of the incentives sometimes even exceeds the value of the product itself, suggesting that sellers place a huge amount of worth on five-star reviews for driving further sales and profit.
In response to our findings, Amazon told us it has clear policies that prohibit review abuse, and does not allow sellers to contact customers directly about a review or offer incentives to change a review. It suspends, bans or takes legal action against those who violate its policies – and said it had already taken action against the sellers identified by Which?, and removed a number of reviews. Amazon acknowledged the challenge of stopping abuse coordinated outside of its store, and said it is constantly developing new ways to prevent review abuse to ensure reviews remain trustworthy. Amazon also queried our figures, and said it didn't feel our sample was large enough to be sufficiently reliable.
Customers who have received direct contact from sellers offering compensation of any kind can send this evidence to Amazon by emailing report-review-compensation@amazon.co.uk with details of the product name and a photo or screenshot of the compensation offer.
Which? was unable to contact Lyyxll, ClokoWe and IOWODO for comment.
Which? calls for tough action on fake reviews
Which? has today released a report calling on platforms to properly assess the risk that their system design and business model poses in relation to fake and misleading reviews and take reasonable and proportionate measures to ensure the reviews they host are genuine – including robust pre-publication and post-publication checks.
The government is currently consulting on how to tackle fake reviews. UK Business Minister Kevin Hollinrake said: 'Fake reviews are totally unfair, and dupe customers into purchasing products that just aren’t up to scratch. That’s why we are consulting with industry on this very issue as we speak.
'This consultation will feed into our Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill, and is aimed at clamping down on these fake reviews and holding companies to account who purchase or host these bogus reviews.'
We are calling on the government to ensure that there is legal certainty in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer (DMCC) Bill and that hosting reviews without taking reasonable and proportionate steps to ensure they are genuine is made a criminal offence, alongside adding offences on the buying and selling of reviews. This would help to guarantee tough action is taken to crack down on the problem.
Rocio Concha, Which? director of policy and advocacy, said: 'It’s clear that sellers on Amazon are bombarding customers with incentives in order to cheat the system, and we have seen evidence that they are successfully evading Amazon’s defences.
'Amazon and other review-hosting websites need to step up and do more to banish fake reviews from their platforms by taking measures that ensure the reviews they host are genuine.
The government must make hosting fake reviews a criminal offence in its Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill so that regulators can take strong action to crack down on the problem.'
