Q&A: "Help, my Amazon competitor is buying fake reviews!"

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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Back at it today, welcome to Side Hustle School. This is your host, Chris Guillebeau. Thanks for tuning in wherever you are in the world. You know, I love hearing about real challenges that you or our other listeners are experiencing. Today, we're gonna hear from a listener who is an Amazon seller, and she's got a problem that is sadly not unique.

The problem is not that she lacks a great product, nor is the problem that there is insufficient demand. The problem is one of her competitors is buying up fake reviews, buying fake reviews in the Amazon store or for their Amazon listings. And by doing so, it gives that competitor an advantage in several ways. You know, anybody who looks at this category is gonna see all those reviews, those bright, shining, positive reviews. Most of them won't look at it that carefully.

They'll just see that there are a lot of happy customers or at least seemingly so. So a lot of them are gonna go and purchase from that seller. That's why the seller or the competitor is buying those fake reviews. So if you find yourself in such a situation, what, if anything, can you do about it? That's the subject of today's episode coming up after this quick sponsor message.

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Hey, Chris, this is Debbie from Seattle. I've been using the Fulfillment by Amazon program to sell yoga mats and meditation journals. Both of these markets are crowded with a lot of sellers, but that's partly because a lot of people buy yoga mats and journals. So I think there's plenty of room for small businesses like me. I don't mind fair competition, but there's another seller who's been cheating the system.

How are they cheating? Their reviews are fake, at least many of them. They have thousands of reviews and it's obvious when looking carefully that many of them are from the same person or company. They use similar language and phrasing and even the same spelling mistakes. But most of these reviews have the verified purchase tag, so they have to actually purchase from the business.

I've reported this to Amazon, but Amazon doesn't seem to care. Meanwhile, the sellers' thousands of reviews have catapulted them to the top of both categories, taking sales away from honest sellers like me. Can anything be done about this? - Debbie, I'm so sorry to hear about this. Well, first let me say congratulations on your business.

Sometimes these crowded markets are good markets to go into. Indeed, there are a lot of people buying yoga mats in journals. So good for you. And I am sorry about this difficulty. Unfortunately, a lot of people experience this, particularly with selling on Amazon.

There are a lot of unscrupulous sellers who pay attention to product sales categories and such. And when something is taking off, they're like, we're gonna enter that market and we're gonna do everything we can to gain an advantage, including buying some reviews that are pretty clearly and obviously fake. So they've gotten better about this over the years. So that's why it is a huge problem. Like Amazon has been cracking down, but it's also an arms race because the companies behind the fake reviews get smarter.

They're selling these reviews basically. Then they found ways to make all these fake reviews verified purchases, like Debbie mentioned, which obviously cost the seller a lot of money, but it might be worth it if those reviews end up staying up compared to others that get taken down by the enforcement team or compliance team or whatever. I think ultimately, okay, so what do you do about it? Ultimately, even though this is annoying, you really just need to focus on what's within your control because it's an arms race. It's not just one seller that's doing this.

There are a lot of them. You can try reporting it and you probably should, but once you do that, once you've reported it to Amazon through their protocol, their system, I would just kind of let it go and move on to all the things you can do to serve your own customers. Hopefully, Karma and Amazon will catch up to these unethical sellers in due time. I just don't know that it's worth investing so much energy and resentment over, even though it is worth resenting, but it's just that thing about what can you control. So that's my two cents, but again, Debbie, congratulations on your store.

I'll be rooting for you. If you send me the name of your store, I'll go and buy a yoga mat and then leave an authentic positive review. And listeners, if you've got a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions, let me know your experiences, what's going well, what's not. We'll continue to feature them throughout the year, along with updates from listeners as they launch their projects. I love making this show for you.

It comes out every single day. Thanks for being part of it. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

from the Onward Project.