Amazon Has Deleted and Scrubbed Reviews From This Listing
Amazon is making good on its promise to ban "incentivized" reviews from its website, according to a new analysis of over 32,000 products and around 65 meg reviews. The ban was meant to accost the growing problem of less trustworthy reviews that had been plaguing the retailer's site, leading to products with college ratings than they would otherwise deserve.
Incentivized reviews are those where the vendor offers free or discounted products to reviewers, in exchange for recipients writing their "honest opinion" of the particular in an Amazon review. However, data has shown that these reviewers tend to write more positive reviews overall, with products earning an average of 4.74 stars out of v, compared with an average rating of four.36 for non-incentivized reviews.
Over time, these reviews proliferated on Amazon, and damaged consumers' trust in the review organisation as a whole. And that can bear upon consumers' purchase decisions.
According to recent findings from ReviewMeta, a business concern that analyzes millions of reviews to assist consumers find those they can trust, Amazon has been quickly deleting incentivized reviews – even retroactively.
This is especially interesting considering Amazon had said at the time of the ban'south announcement that it would but remove incentivized reviews from older products if they were "excessive" or if they didn't comply with the prior policy.
But patently, Amazon is going back to remove a large number of older reviews, too.
In a higher place: percentage of incentivized reviews per day since viii/one/2016
ReviewMeta checked upwards on Amazon'due south progress past analyzing its own dataset of around 65 million reviews beyond 32,060 products in all categories.
Information technology establish that Amazon had deleted over 500,000 reviews, 71 per centum of which were incentivized. The average rating for these deleted reviews was four.75 stars – clearly much higher than the typical average. Some products even saw thousands of reviews removed – like this cosmetic scrub, which had nine,000 reviews removed, for example.
Above: average rating for all reviews per day since eight/one/2016
The company and then analyzed a subset of products from over the past two weeks to get a sense of how many incentivized reviews still remain on Amazon'south site.
Across the over 10 million reviews analyzed (a dataset based on those consumers entered on the ReviewMeta website), only ane.five percent of the reviews were incentivized.
"This is considerably less than we were seeing previously," says Tommy Noonan, ReviewMeta CTO. "For every incentivized review we found on Amazon, there were 2.6 in our database that weren't there anymore," he adds, referring to the deleted reviews.
What the figures seem to point is that, though Amazon is deleting a big number incentivized reviews, information technology hasn't managed to catch all of them. Role of the problem could be that incentivized reviews are still rolling in, despite Amazon'due south ban.
That said, the number of incentivized reviews has dropped significantly following the ban, and this, in plow, has lowered the average rating for all reviews. The day earlier the ban was enacted, for example, the average rating for all reviews that twenty-four hour period was 4.73; on November 1, the average rating for all reviews had dropped to iv.65.
What's also interesting, Noonan notes, is that Amazon's production ratings were largely unaffected, despite the mass deletions. The production ratings – that is, when Amazon tells y'all that a production is "4.5 out of 5 stars" – appear to have already been adjusted to discount the incentivized reviews when calculating the overall rating.
"We're seeing that many incentivized reviews effectively conduct zero weight in Amazon's product ratings," says Noonan.
This is probable due to the fact that a bulk (95%) of the incentivized reviews didn't have the "Verified Purchaser" tag attached – meaning the customer had bought from Amazon directly. And unverified reviews were already conveying no weight in Amazon's rating system. (The exception being if they were the just reviews a product had, in which case they were used to summate the overall score).
Noonan concludes that Amazon's actions take sufficiently addressed the problem with its ban.
"It'due south obviously not 100% perfect," he says. "It seems [Amazon has] removed a majority of the incentivized reviews and pretty much put an cease to more than beingness created. They finer killed this industry," he adds.
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Source: https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/23/amazon-made-good-on-its-promise-to-delete-incentivized-reviews/
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