Found some competitors to my workplace today with quite frankly astonishingly good reviews listed on Google Shopping. Sounds good, I mean if almost 300 people felt compelled to leave positive responses about their shopping experience, then I want to shop there too and become another satisfied customer. Or do I? I’ll let you draw your own conclusions, but this is what I see.
First up, see the ratings here.
Look over on the right – out of 283 ratings, 280 are from ShopZilla.co.uk. Maybe that’s the only place they list where you can leave a review? No, they also list on Dooyoo.co.uk, yet have not received a single review from that source. They also have Google Checkout as an option, but do not appear to have received a single review from that source either. Google does also list three reviews from Reviewcentre.com. Oddly there are actually 9 reviews for this merchant on Reviewcentre – 4 out of those 9 are 1 out of 5 ratings though. Run that through a calculator and you’ll see that compared to the average rating of over 90% through ShopZilla, on Reviewcentre this merchant scores closer to 55%.
Now look through those ratings taking note of when they were posted. Spot a pattern? One review a day. Almost as if someone has this as a little “job” to do each morning at 9am before they have their first cup of coffee. It’s certainly not what I would call a natural pattern.
ShopZilla claim they have filtering technology in place to prevent abuse of their system, but it doesn’t look to me like it’s working particularly well. I thought maybe I should ask them what they thought about it, but have yet to receive either a reply or an acknowledgement that they got the message (I used the contact form on their site to be sure they did).
Now, I’m open to correction on this, but I can only see this as:
1) A deliberate attempt to mislead the consumer on the part of the merchant.
2) A shockingly bad moderation system in place at ShopZilla.
3) A “we’re not really concerned” attitude from Google Shopping. Trusting another online resource simply because they are “one of the big boys”.
Obviously I’ve chosen just one example. Unfortunately within a few clicks it’s easy enough to find another, and another. There are doubtless many more. Contrast them with the reviews for this well known merchant who clearly is not manipulating their reviews (if they are they haven’t got the hang of how many out of five is best).
Conclusion: Out there somewhere, I would guess someone is doing this as a “service”. For a scant 50p per day you too can probably get a seller review profile just like this. ShopZilla’s assurance that they stop abuse using IP address filtering clearly is ridiculous since spoofing an IP is so easy to do. That’s assuming they are even actually doing it.
I’m forced to ask myself who really benefits from a review system that’s dishonest. It’s certainly not hurting Google. They get to serve their ADs and as we all know that’s the core business – don’t feed me “do no evil” as a company motto! It’s not hurting ShopZilla – someones posting content onto their system for free day in, day out which in turn makes them appear to be on the side of the consumer by showing all these “impartial” reviews. Clearly if the system is being abused in this way, the merchants are doing it, so they must be benefitting or why bother?
Bottom line: unless a review system can prove it only shows reviews from people who ACTUALLY MADE A PURCHASE it’s not woth the web page it’s published on. Be careful out there.
