Top Stories

11 investigates shady tactics used to get your sale on Amazon

Amazon is a popular way to buy items and one of the features on the website for shoppers is reviews. A recent study found not all the reviews can be considered equally, and nearly half may be unreliable.

If you've looked closely on Amazon, you may have noticed that some of the exact same products listed on the site have different ratings. The only difference between the products is the seller, and that star rating may not even be real.

Pierce Schiller, a Harvard Business School graduate and entrepreneur, invented "Tardisk," a storage device for MacBook computers.

"So a 128 gigabyte MacBook Air like this one used to be would easily become a 256 gigabyte MacBook Air," Schiller said.

Tardisk has been available for sale from Amazon since July 2015. The product has more than 500 customer reviews.

TRENDING NOW:

"Those reviews, to us, those Amazon reviews,are our lifeblood. People look at those reviews and they recognize them as the voice of the community," Schiller said.

Schiller said Tardisk earned their 4.3 star rating by keeping customers satisfied. And that's how the system is supposed to work, but not everybody plays by the rules.

WPXI found hundreds of "Amazon Review" groups and clubs on Facebook, where sellers openly offer products for free, or at deep discounts, in exchange for favorable reviews. Typically, the seller gets a glowing endorsement from a person Amazon marks as having made a verified purchase. The reviewer can then keep the item or re-sell it.

Sellers can also pay cash for praise. On Craigslist and Fiver, WPXI found professional reviewers soliciting business. The going rate is $5 to $15 per five-star review.

"There's all kinds of shenanigans that are happening behind the scenes," said David Gersof Richard, the president of Big Fish Tech Public Relations Firm.

Richard's company works with several Amazon sellers. He said if you look closely enough, you can spot questionable activity. For example, a two-pack of headphones advertised as "Amazon's Choice" features a favorable write-up by "Toni." That write-up is identical to a review left months ago by Ricky Rose. Each word, and even the punctuation, are the same.

WPXI also found that a woman named Tammy Stackhouse reviewed the same set of Tupperware three times, and the same knife set twice in just a matter of days.

Nobody has time to analyze reviews all day, but websites do exist to examine them for you. One is Fakespot.com. All you have to do is copy the URL from Amazon and paste it into Fakespot's page.

"We will take every single review that's been left for that product and our engine will also get every single reviewer and their review background," said Ming Ooi, one of the founders of Fakespot.

Fakespot will then give a grade based on what it finds. An "A" means the review is legitimate and trustworthy. An "F" means buyer beware.