A study confirms what the e-commerce site had announced: deleted 500 thousand reviews. Put a weekly limit on those of unverified purchases
Amazon keeps its promises. A month ago the e-commerce giant had declared war on the so-called "interested" reviews, through the publication of new guidelines for the community. Now come the facts: on Bezos' platform thousands of comments have disappeared.
According to what ReviewMeta, a company that deals with investigations on reviews that are released on the web, documents, Amazon would have made a significant cut to "incentivized" comments. These forms of evaluations are expressed by some customers who, in exchange for a discount or the possibility of receiving a product for free, release positive feedback. The risk is to encourage the purchase of mediocre goods, thus damaging the reliability of the platform. The site, therefore, passes to the counterattack, as it had announced some weeks ago, cancelling over 500 thousand reviews.
The analysis of ReviewMeta
The numbers have emerged thanks to the investigation carried out, as said, by ReviewMeta. The company, in fact, has analyzed 65 thousand reviews released on 32 thousand products. From this study some interesting data emerges, confirming Amazon's intentions: 71% of the eliminated reviews were "interested" comments. Moreover, the average rating of these reviews was 4.75 out of 5 stars. According to what ReviewMeta documents, Amazon has retroactively eliminated even fakes released some time ago and not only, therefore, reviews written after the announcement of the new guidelines. Despite this significant cleanup, from the analysis it seems that the overall rating of the products has not been affected: it has gone, in fact, from 4.73 to 4.65.
Limit on reviews of unverified purchases
Amazon, moreover, has placed a limit of 5 reviews per week on products not purchased or on unverified purchases. In this way, the global e-commerce giant wants to further discourage "incentivized" reviews and those invented from scratch by "prankster" users. Excluded from this limitation are the categories "Books", "Music" and "Video", while anyone who wants to add reviews for all other types of goods - such as hi-tech devices - will have to put a stop to their "reviewer fever".