The quality of customer reviews greatly influences how well your business performs on Amazon. In fact, nearly 4 in 5 customers (79%) read reviews prior to making an Amazon purchase, according to price optimization platform Feedvisor. However, reviews can also be used against you by malicious Amazon competitors. Reviews are, unfortunately, just one way that you might be attacked (although they can be used by black-hat operators in various ways, as seen below).
Here are eight common
strategies of sabotage that have been used in recent years on Amazon and that
could hit your business on Black Friday:
Tactic #1 – Fake
positive reviews of their own products
Buyers on Amazon are greatly influenced by reviews,
so it has become common practice for unethical sellers to concoct positive ones
so they can rise up the rankings. Those who want to have better reviews through
shady means use various strategies. Relatives, friends, and employees of a
seller might post great reviews. The vendor may pay or otherwise incentivize
actual customers for a strong review – a practice that continues even though
Amazon made it clear it would no longer tolerate any
review incentives in 2016. A misbehaving seller might even hire a company that
specializes in leaving bogus reviews through “zombie” accounts.
Often the 5-star reviews from loves ones and
employees are completed without them having bought the item. In other, more
sophisticated cases, though, associates of the seller do in fact purchase the
product. The seller then reimburses them via PayPal or some other channel for
leaving the strong review.
In the case of going through real customers,
sometimes discounts on future products or extended warranties are offered in
exchange for 5-star reviews. Illicit sellers will sometimes call customers to
offer an incentive to take down a 1-star review or write a 5-star one. Free
products are sometimes offered via email in order to improve a negative review
or to create a positive one.
There are even rebate clubs that provide rebates toward
the cost of an item for giving an item a great review. Also called review
marketplace sites, these black-market institutions will often give buyers
80-90% off Amazon products — and perhaps even rebate the entire purchase price.
These sites will insist that you write 5-star reviews if you want to continue
to be a member, which in turn allows you to get the discounts and rebates.
Companies that
generate fake reviews create many different zombie Amazon buyer accounts that
mimic the typical browsing actions of legitimate buyers so that Amazon does not
detect any issues. These firms, called review farms, have sometimes been
run out of sweatshops in the Philippines and India. They
have their workers spend all day posting 5-star reviews for items they have not
bought – and expect them to be working overtime for Black Friday.
In a similar scenario, sometimes sellers will use
automated review-posting software that utilizes algorithms to submit false
reviews at randomized times throughout the day. To create the reviews, language
is copy-pasted from products (whether from your store or a rival’s) that have
similar characteristics to the one in question. In some cases reviews are built
from components of several different reviews to create a hodgepodge of snippets
and keywords that are the most positive.
Tactic #2 – Poor
ratings & reviews of your products
A rival company may
purchase your products through Amazon specifically so that they can leave you
terrible one-star reviews. Amazon is unlikely to consider a review fraudulent
because the competitor has actually bought your product and is, by definition,
a customer. In many cases, the competitor will offer misinformation that your
item is dangerous – and Amazon will often side with the buyer, assuming the
report to be honest. Do not think investigations will be excessively thorough
during the flurry of activity on Black Friday and in the leadup to the
holidays.
In the case of a
safety warning, the buyer could purchase an electronic product, set it on fire, and take pictures of it as
evidence that it had exploded when they attempted to use it. People also might
be paid to purchase items and return them, reporting bogus reasons to Amazon
about why they did not meet expectations. When products get these false reviews
related to their safety, the concocted situation and review are not your sole
concerns. You can end up with keywords such as “risky,”
“dangerous,” or “flammable” being associated with the
product.
Tactic #3 — Glowing reviews
At the opposite end of the spectrum from
damning negative reviews are hyper-positive reviews from bogus accounts. Since
a seller might themselves buy fake reviews in order to work their way up the
listings, competitors will sometimes try to make it appear to Amazon that you
are doing that by directing fake users to give your products 5-star ratings. In
other words, they take the fraudulent action on your behalf as a way to frame
you for misbehavior.
That is what happened to Amazon seller Zac
Plansky in August 2018. Plansky, who sells rifle scopes through the
marketplace, discovered one morning that 16 new 5-star reviews for his products
had been submitted in the middle of the night. The reviews looked like spam,
with copy that seemed to be scraped from elsewhere, often even mentioning
another scope.
Plansky was unsure what was happening but reported
the troubling reviews to Amazon to be safe. They disappeared in the following
few days. Regardless, Amazon emailed him a couple weeks afterward to notify him
that his listings were being taken off the platform and that he was banned from
selling through it. Amazon had determined he had violated its rules against
review manipulation. It proved incredibly difficult for him to get back
into good standing with the organization. Be ready for these types of tactics
to be widespread as sales are peaking on Black Friday and in the following
weeks.
Tactic # 4 – Brushing
Brushing, or the creation of false orders, is another way that a competitor can abuse the marketplace and boost itself in the listings. In a common brushing scheme, customers who have ordered from Amazon in the previous weeks or months will begin getting little envelopes with cheap baubles in them that are worth a few cents.
In these cases customer accounts have been used to fraudulently order products. Since the accounts have been hijacked, the seller can then also leave 5-star reviews for himself. Con-artists typically apply this method internationally so it is less likely that they are targeted through legal channels.
Tactic #5 – Alteration of your
listings
Many miscreants have official accounts and permission
to edit listings. These malicious vendors may change the descriptions of your
products. You can end up with titles that incorrectly identify the product;
other bogus information; and blurry or inaccurate images.
Anyone who assumes those descriptions to be true will
then not get the product they thought they would. They may respond by reporting
you to Amazon. Your account can be suspended as a result – which would be
particularly devastating on Black Friday.
This strategy often works with larger sellers who
have a huge catalog of items and who are busy managing various sales channels.
Sellers who have become successful do not want to spend all their time checking
their listings; they want the process to be as automated as possible.
Unfortunately, since you are put at great risk when people manipulate your
listings, it is necessary to persistently monitor your descriptions, so that
you can report abuse quickly and rectify any bad information.
Abuse of inactive listings is particularly common
since the perpetrator will assume that the seller is not paying much attention
to that description. Locating these products that are not actively being sold
is relatively simple for criminals. You can pull them up
by entering in a search engine, “site:amazon.com currently unavailable [type of
product].” If you have products that are out of stock and that you are not
intending to sell in the near future, it is a very good idea to take them down.
Tactic #6 — Switching your products to
irrelevant categories
The changing of your product information can
go beyond simple manipulation of the descriptions and images. Your listings may
even be transferred to nonsensical categories. For example, a lawn care item
with a “Best Seller” badge could be transferred to office products, in which
case the badge is freed for the wrongdoer to take.
Often black-hat users will transfer products
to sex toys, since that requires a buyer to click a button confirming they are
at least 18 before the listings are visible. One seller had a children’s toy
moved to the sex toys category. Another seller had a child-proof door lock
reassigned to sex toys.
Tactic #7 –
Counterfeit products
The counterfeiting of
products is a major issue in the world of Amazon. The company’s earnings report for 2018 stated that Amazon might not be
able to stop fraudulent users from selling stolen, pirated, counterfeit, or
illegal goods. It admitted that Amazon might not be able to prevent the
violation of proprietary rights, or the conducting of sales through unethical
or illegal means. The report concluded that Amazon “could face civil or
criminal liability for unlawful activities by our sellers.”
The issue with all
this trickery in the ecosystem stems from the fact that Amazon is similar to
eBay in being a place in which numerous users can sell an identical product. There
is no program at Amazon to audit products it receives at its warehouses to make
sure that they are genuine. The system is entirely reliant on the legitimacy of
the UPC barcode. Since Amazon will assume that a product is genuine if it has
the right bar code, a nefarious party can print a bogus bar code and affix it
to a counterfeit product.
Amazon seller Joe Cochran noted that his company had been fighting
counterfeit sellers of its products since the first year he had been in
business. Cochran said he had spent tens of thousands of dollars defending
himself against them.
Amazon has taken significant steps against
counterfeiting of products. One of those efforts was providing sellers with
trackable, exclusive barcodes via a program rolled out in 2018 called Transparency. In February 2019, Amazon released Project Zero, a program designed to make it easier for sellers to kick
counterfeiters off of their listings. Counterfeiting remains an issue despite
these measures by Amazon – so look out for counterfeiters on Black Friday and
through the holidays.
Tactic #8 — Hijacking your account &
listings
Changing your listings and where they are
located is a huge problem – but things can get even worse when a nefarious user
hijacks your account completely and steals all your product listings. To do
that, they trademark the name of your seller account through the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). It is a form of
identity theft and means that has been used by some criminals to successfully
take over the storefronts of legitimate sellers.
John Harris, who sells compasses, firestarters, and other survival gear, was hit with this kind of attack. Harris thought that he had protected himself sufficiently by registering his brand through Amazon and trademarking his goods. When other users would try to steal his Buy Box, he had a custom automated software that would immediately issue them a cease-and-desist letter.
However, in September 2017, he found that
another user had somehow stolen SharpSurvival, his seller name. His account was
changed to the generic name Seller123. When he reported the theft to Amazon, he
remained locked out of his account and listings.
The thief had trademarked SharpSurvival with
the USPTO, using photos from Harris’ account as evidence that they owned it.
Granted the trademark, the con-artist then had the proof of ownership they needed
to register the name with Amazon. That allowed them to take over his account
and block Harris from accessing his own listings.
Protecting yourself in the Amazon on Black
Friday
Many of these attack methods can make it appear to Amazon that you are responsible for improper behavior. If you are framed and end up suspended, it can be extraordinarily difficult to clear your name and to get your business back up and running quickly. Depending on your volume of sales, you can end up losing many thousands of dollars due to the downtime of the suspension.
If you are offline on Black Friday, you could miss one of your biggest sales days of the year.
While Amazon does have an appeals process, sellers
have often complained that it is confusing and frustrating. The Performance
department is in charge of suspensions, and there is no phone number for it. It
is impossible to speak with someone and get yourself heard if you believe you
are being victimized. In fact, some sellers have even flown to Seattle or
London to attempt to meet with someone from Performance in person, to no avail.
If you feel that you are being abused on Amazon, you need expertise to defend yourself. At Revision Legal, we have litigated against some of the largest corporations in the world, and when truly unique challenges arise, we show up ready to work. Contact us with the form on this page, or call us at 855-473-8474.
