19 November 2019, Bavaria, Munich: The Internet rating of a product can be seen on a computer ... [+]
Selling online is the ultimate confidence game. You are expecting consumers who have never met you to supply you their address and credit card number, search your site for the product that meets their needs, type in their order and trust that their package will arrive in good condition as scheduled — and if not, that you will make it right.
There are so many things that must go right for you to create and maintain customer confidence in e-commerce. For example, you have to keep hackers from stealing customer data, your site's product reviews must be objective, the products you sell must be high quality, you have to keep enough inventory near your customers, and your delivery and service must be up to snuff.
Given all the work that goes into creating and keeping e-commerce customers, it really surprised me to learn that Amazon is reportedly letting fakery seep into at least one part of its system — the so-called 'verified reviews' — which must be written by an Amazon customer who has purchased the product being reviewed. This matters to sellers because Amazon highlights verified reviews and gives better display on its pages to those products that have a greater number of verified reviews.
Amazon — in whose securities I have no financial interest — declined a request to comment on the record for this story (I will update this post if Amazon responds to my second request). An Amazon spokesperson said, “We have clear participation guidelines, and we suspend, ban, and take legal action on those who violate our policies.”
What is Brushing?
But what if those verified reviews could be written by the product's manufacturer? Consider this scenario from a November 25 report on Boston’s ABC affiliate, WCVB (in which I was interviewed): "Dawn Rennie, of Weymouth, [Mass.] said she’s been inundated for the last several months with Amazon packages that she didn’t order – everything from kids' toys to sparkling handbags.”
The story continued: “When Rennie first called Amazon, customer service told her not to worry and to consider the packages free of charge. ‘I asked them to actually send the packages back so that the company would get the hint that people didn’t want this and they told me they couldn’t do that. They told me they don’t know where they’re coming from.’ The company would not specifically tell her who was sending them, but said they were coming from Amazon sellers in China.”
Amazon provided the following comment to WCVB: “We are investigating this customer’s inquiry about unsolicited packages; as this would violate our policies. We remove sellers in violation of these policies, withhold payments, and work with law enforcement to take appropriate action.”
Sadly, this is not a new phenomenon. Rennie is an unwitting participant in what a 2017 Forbes article called "brushing." Brushers work on behalf of Chinese factories that are trying to boost sales by flooding their Amazon page with fake five-star verified reviews.
The brushers set up a phony e-mail account to establish an Amazon account, according to a February 2018 article in the Boston Globe. Then the seller purchases merchandise with a gift card — which has no identifying information — and sends it to a random person.
From here, the phantom seller, who controls the "buyer's" e-mail account, writes glowing reviews of the product, thus boosting the Amazon ranking of the product. Chinese sellers pay very little to purchase and ship the items — making brushing a quick and effective way to move up the sales rankings.
Brushing pays. In 2015, College of William and Mary researchers tracked the sales of 4,109 sellers using brushing methods on Taobao, China's equivalent of eBay, and discovered that they were able to raise their rankings up to 10 times faster than they could via legitimate means. They also found that it was a relatively low risk tactic, as just 89 — or 2.2% — of the accounts they monitored were penalized, according to Forbes.
Brushers pick their targets with a little help from “scooping.” According to the Globe, starting about two years ago an Acton, Mass. couple started receiving packages they had not ordered. One of the two ordered goods on Amazon and received them directly from a manufacturer — one of which was based in China. The brusher might have scooped his name and address from that manufacturer's website.
Why Doesn't Amazon Stop Brushing?
Amazon has a ready response to the media and to customers but brushing persists. A spokesman told the Globe, "Amazon's No. 1 consideration is what's best for the customer. And customers need to know that the reviews they read on Amazon are not fraudulent."
Why? I'd guess that the benefits of brushing outweigh the costs. To keep its stock price rising, Amazon needs to sustain double digit growth and when you get to be a $232 billion revenue company, you need to win a piece of a large market. And what could be larger than the Chinese e-commerce market?
Sadly for Amazon, it has only been able to win about 1% of the Chinese e-commerce market — which is controlled by China-based companies, most notably Alibaba, according to the Wall Street Journal. However, Amazon taps the opportunity by connecting Chinese factories directly to Amazon consumers (Amazon's cut of third-party seller revenue is around 15%).
This is a huge business. Amazon does not publish the number of Chinese sellers operating on its site, however, estimates are that of the 2.5 million active sellers on Amazon, between 10% and 25% of them are based in China, according to e-commerce marketing advisor, Ecomcrew.
Customer satisfaction with Amazon had been eroding. Between 2013 and 2018, Amazon's customer satisfaction score fell from 88 to 82, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index).
If Amazon wants to improve that score, it should crack down harder on brushing
