Without a doubt, Amazon is the main retail platform in the current digital ecosystem, with an extensive community of sellers around the world. For this reason, and in order to maintain that position, the company is continuously strengthening its platform to guarantee a better browsing experience and compliance with your policies for sellers.
In recent months, the company’s main focus has been on this second aspect, which has ended up generating a particular conflict between the international retail giant and a series of sellers in China who have been permanently blocked from their platform.
Amazon removes 600 Chinese sellers from its platform for product review fraud
The comments and ratings on the products are one of the main factors for a buyer to decide, or not, to buy a product. Therefore, a bad review can be a great detractor for potential consumers, and not only that, but it can also affect the position of the product in the search.
For sellers on the platform, this is a big problem, so many choose to use strategies to guarantee better reviews on their products, which go against Amazon policies. As an example we have the fake reviews, which are comments and ratings paid by sellers to improve their ratings in the marketplace and which are not even created by real consumers of the product in question. There are also campaigns to encourage users to leave reviews, a practice blocked by the company since 2016, since it goes against the company’s policies for the development of a fair market for all its participants, whether they are large brands or small businesses.
However, this is a practice that some sellers still manage within Amazon, disguising them as loyalty strategies, extended warranties or VIP programs. For this reason, Amazon began to take more severe measures on this situation in the first months of the year, leading to the suspension of up to 600 vendors, among which we can find best-selling brands in the marketplace such as Aukey, Mpow either RAV power.
This last case came to light in an article published by the columnist of the Wall Street Journal, Nicole Nguyen about his practices to earn reviews, as he explains in the following tweet: “(RAVpower) offered $35 gift cards in exchange for reviews on a product that Amazon itself sold directly.”
Following my fake review story, listings for Amazon-native electronics brand RAVPower are gone.
The company offered $35 gift cards for reviews on a product that was sold directly by Amazon itself. RAVPower acted as a wholesale vendor on that listing.
— nic nguyen (@nicnguyen)
The blocking imposed by Amazon not only removes the presence of sellers and their products from its platform, but Amazon has also withheld funds from some companies, in accordance with its legal protocols to deal with these cases. So, in July, Shenzhen Youkeshu Technology one of those affected, reported that the retail company had closed 340 of its stores in the marketplace and frozen around 20 million dollars in assets, approximately 17 million euros. To this, the Bezos company responded that the measures taken were to guarantee compliance with the regulations of its marketplaces.
As the company explained to The Verge, “These 600 brands were banned by knowingly, repeatedly, and materially violating Amazon’s policies, especially those related to review abuse.”
“Amazon works hard to create a great experience in our store so customers can shop with confidence and sellers have the opportunity to grow their business amid healthy competition. Customers rely on the accuracy and authenticity of product reviews to make informed purchasing decisions, and we have clear policies for both reviewers and selling partners that prohibit abuse of our community features. We suspend, ban, and take legal action against those who violate these policies, anywhere in the world.
We will continue to improve detection of abuse and take enforcement action against bad actors, including those who deliberately engage in multiple and repeated policy violations, including revision abuse. We are confident that the steps we are taking are in the best interest of our customers, as well as the honest businesses that make up the vast majority of our global sales community.”
Another of the popular sellers that are no longer on Amazon is Aukeya brand that in recent years has built a great reputation by offering electronic products such as accessories for mobile devices, headphones or speakers, and whose business is basically focused on this marketplace. As you can imagine, this measure by Amazon means a great impact for the brand that for now it does not have any products available on Amazon in several countries of the worldSpain included, which has left it without one of its main distribution channels.
The response of the sellers has not been long in coming
In the same way, this situation was only the beginning, since recently seven blocked companies have filed a lawsuit against Amazon, alleging illegal and improper retention by the company of funds estimated at 550,000 dollars, about 474,000 euros. These companies are Sopownic US, Slaouwo, Deyixun, Cstech US, Recoo Direct, Angelbliss and Tudiwhich have been blocked since the past 2020.
Nevertheless, These types of class action lawsuits appear to violate the policies set forth in the Amazon Business Solutions Agreement. As stated in this agreement, signed by all sellers on the platform, the parties must resolve any dispute through a binding arbitration without going to court. On the other hand, in addition to this compulsory arbitration clause, the agreement also states that each dispute must be made individually. Taking this situation into account, it is very likely that this process will be dismissed, leaving the merchants without a common basis to proceed with the lawsuit.
May precedent :fdata leaked from over 200,000 consumers offering fake reviews on Amazon
The research firm discovered a few months ago a database with over 7 GB of records implicating over 200,000 people who were willing to provide fake reviews in exchange for financial compensation and free products.
It has not been clear who owns this huge database 04although the vendors, at least for the most part, . However, the leak has shown what the inner workings of a reality that has affected the retail giant for years, and that continues to affect the online retail market until now. The information discloses the process by which certain Amazon brands or vendors get good ratings for their products while consumers get free or heavily discounted products.
The sellers they send a list of products to users to choose from, consumers buy them, leave their 5-star review on Amazon and once it is published, the consumer notifies the seller to issue a refund via PayPal. This way Amazon will never suspect that the review is sold.
Consumers can report abuse they find in reviews on Amazon
As for consumers and the stores themselves, he assured in May that there is a “team of researchers” as well as a “series of machine learning tools” capable of analyzing more than 10 million reviews a week, in order to adjust them to
“We have clear policies both for the people who write product reviews and for our commercial partners”, assured the spokesman. “We take action against those who violate our policies that may involve the suspension or deletion of their accounts or the initiation of legal action.
Amazon also encourages its customers “concerned about the authenticity of reviews you may see on a product to use the “Report Abuse” feature available in each of these reviews, so we can investigate and take appropriate action.”.
Amazon strengthens its fight against counterfeits
One more of the controversies that always surround its great marketplace is . around it the platform assured in May that it seized more than 2,000 million counterfeit products before sending them to customersin addition to preventing them from being resold at other points in the retail supply chain.
In his first Amazon assures that it invested more than 570 million euros last year and employed more than 10,000 people in order to protect customers against fraud and malpractice.
The report outlines the retail giant’s strategy to combat these practices and provides data that proves its success, including:
- Amazon verification processes prevented more than 6 million attempts to create fraudulent seller accounts
- Amazon seized more than 2 million products that it detected as counterfeits in its fulfillment centers.
- Blocked over 10 billion suspicious product descriptions.
Amazon ensures that continues to innovate and improve its preventive controls and tools to fight counterfeiting in its marketplace, and that is why it established its Counterfeiting Crimes Unit to clarify and report to the authorities cases of product counterfeiting.
Image:
Stay informed of the most relevant news on our news channel
Facebook Comments
Disqus