After what he saw as a rip-off attempt by Brooklyn camera merchant PriceRitePhoto, popular blogger Thomas Hawk published his experiences – which got picked up in a big way. Over three hundred different inbound links, featured on Digg and Slashdot and everyplace else, and a world of hurt for the company (read the updates to Thomas’ post – they’ve been delisted from the comparison shopping engines, a major source of their business.)
Abusive bait-and-switch camera merchants aren’t rare – I’ve used the phrase “as crooked as a Brooklyn camera merchant” in regular conversation. ‘If I read the reviews, I’ll be fine,’ you might think. Not so. PriceRite had a four-star rating on Yahoo Shopping when Thomas placed his order, and he still had a very unsatisfactory experience. You should never trust a good review on a comparison shopping site, because the reviews can be gamed – and there are many merchants gaming them. Here’s how it works:
a) Any merchant can write a couple of good reviews about himself – one from his home computer, one from his work computer. Easy. There’s no way to stop this. The employees can all write good reviews from their home computers. Unless they’re dumb enough to sign on to the comparison shopping site with their work e-mail, this just can’t be detected. Sure, it might be suspicious, but no comparison shopping site risks deleting a review and antagonizing a merchant giving them bushels of pre-paid cash out of suspicion.
b) Next step – the merchant gets his own customers to write the reviews. Merchants can ask their customers to review them, include links to the review form in their checkout receipts, or even pop-up a review form on the checkout page, all with the blessing of the comparsion shopping sites. (Shopzilla is great at this, with a whole system of customized surveys merchants can configure from their site and pop-up on checkout.) Any merchant can easily get a lot of comparison shopping reviews. But how to get a lot of good reviews? Assuming you’re not leaving a bad taste in the mouth of every customer that crosses your path, you just put in place a two-step process. First, you send out your own in-house survey, and use that to separate the happy customers from the hostile. Then, you send only the happy customers the links to the comparison shopping review pages. Easy.
c) But let’s say you leave a bad taste in the mouth of almost every customer you come across. The bad reviews are starting to pile up. What do you do? You break out the bribes. Offer free shipping or a trinket or a ‘next time, $25 off’ coupon to every individual that signs up for and writes a good review. This is explicitly against most comparison shopping sites’ policies, but they have to catch you red-handed before they’ll act and even then the consequences vary from site-to-site – the risk is often worth the reward. According to a comment in Slashdot, this is what PriceRite was doing:
Their email tells the user to leave a five star review at shopping sites using the following link:
[ed: deleted] and the text below: **Please do NOT mention this in the review, we do not offer this to all our customers. **Please do NOT mention my name or the fact that we asked to write a review the websites will not post it. This will also make you eligible for FREE shipping on any accessory purchases in the future
I believe this is pretty common behavior for the other shady class of Internet merchant, OEM software retailers. Here’s some free – as in ‘old enough to have no commercial value’ – software in exchange for your good review!
d) If that’s not getting enough good reviews in, you can always badger your customers into not writing bad reviews, or writing good reviews in order to get their orders cancelled. I’ve got no proof either way, but some claim PriceRite was doing this as well. Here’s some snippets from ResellerRating’s PriceRite page:
After that I decided to cancel my order and they directed me to the supervision where he mocked me and said he would charge my card $50 for being so rude to him and not wanting the camera. [...] I had to call back a second time and wait almost an hour to reach someone. Where he told me to post three good reviews on sites such as these to get my $50 dollars back. That I did and I now I am telling the truth.
Classic. And then there’s the ‘no negative feedback, or we’ll charge you a hundred dollars’ clause:
Before the product could be shipped I was asked to sign and fax a form, appended below, that indicated that if I wrote any negative feedback I would agree to have my credit card charged $100, and that I also agreed to waive my right to chargeback to the credit card company, and that product could not be returned for any reason.
While the above behavior goes beyond the aggression-level of your garden-variety review manipulator, even the less extreme schemes – enlisting your friends to write reviews, only getting satisfied customers to write reviews – are enough to drastically skew online ratings. I believe the whole system of online reviewing is broke, and we badly need a system of reviews tied to our own trusted networks. I’m keeping my eye on Outfoxed, and not just because its creator is a friend of mine – I think Stan is onto something big. Until such a system exists, for big ticket items I recommend reading only the negative reviews, being as paranoid as possible, and buying in person whenever practical. Happy shopping!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Online there is still a dearth of detailed information about merchants, service providers and the like (compared to the amount of information there is about products, for example, often written by enthusiasts or prosumers). Many of us have started to become conditioned to provide “quick-hit” feedback like star ratings on iPods, Netflix and Yahoo! News, but actually sitting down and describing an online transaction and nuances or things that might be red flags to other consumers is still fairly infrequent. Simple ratings are easier to game. Also, the tendency is to have very positive or very negative feedback; without incentives, consumers are often not bothered to write about a somewhat standard transaction. As long as Amazon’s patent doesn’t spoil the party, with access to more transactional data there could be a second coming of consumer ratings and reviews. (where there is more hard data and systems will be able to filter out bogus and non-transactional comments)
You do a really good job of bringing up a great sub story to Hawk’s tell. Yes there was a problem with the merchant, but there was also a problem with Yahoo! Shopping as well. This is a little embarassing for them because only two weeks earlier they had announced a new system to prevent abuse. They did the right thing by looking at the evidence and delisting the bad actor.
I think that the ebay model works much better. You can’t leave feedback unless you make a purchase. Merchants arer encouraged to solve disputes because a negative rating on Ebay prevents that brand from selling. PriceRite actually had a very high ebay rating, but they also had quite a few mutually withdrawn comments as well (over 50) I suspect that they used Ebay as a clearinghouse for products they couldn’t sell through the engines.
One thing I found interesting is their offer to ship future “accesories” for free. This is where they make their profit margins. Sometimes they will say that a brand name is out of stock and then offer you the generic instead.
Just let them know you are charging back on your credit card for the entire amount. Call your bank, charge back, then tell them you believe somebody unscrupulous has your credit card information, and they will cancel, and re-issue you a new credit card.
Dont’ let companies take advantage of you.
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