Some of the most used platforms for travel and online shopping said Tuesday they’re going to team up to battle fake reviews. Amazon, reviews site Glassdoor and Trustpilot as well as travel companies Expedia Group, Booking.com and Tripadvisor announced they're launching a group called the “Coalition for Trusted Reviews."
People still fall for obvious online scams, crypto bots and email phishing, and you think there aren’t enough people won’t fall for fake reviews? Amazon has great damage control, they’ll most likely offer mad users deals they can’t refuse to prevent them from writing a bad review. I’ve been offered same product or a close enough product for free when I complained to Amazon support.
Amazon isn’t some startup that few bad news can take down anymore. They’ll say they investigated themselves, make a pr statement that they banned thousands of fake accounts and people will eat it up. It can keep expanding in new markets and keep the bad reviews rolling in while some mad customers scream into the void.
Of course they calculate quite well if it is worth the effort to get rid of fake reviews. I definitely think that they are something that Amazon would eradicate right now if they could do so easily. So as the quantity and quality of fake reviews is bound to rise with recent technological developments, the scales might tip into the direction of them having to do more about it. Because offering good deals as apology is not something that they’d be happy to do for more and more people.