We hope you’ll rate us 5 stars because you want to, not because we sent you exotic butters.
Have you ever noticed a product that has pretty good reviews, but when you get it, it end up not working out? Let’s talk about why that may happen in today’s episode!
This month I am plugging Ranken Jordan Pediatric Hospital. To donate, please visit https://rankenjordanfoundation.org/donate/
Sources:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazon-vine-reviews-2025-high-stakes-gamble-most-sellers-steven-pope-lar2c/ https://www.nber.org/papers/w34161 https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/document/2025-08/The%20Market%20for%20Fake%20Reviews.pdf https://www.forbes.com/sites/shephyken/2025/01/26/the-dark-side-of-five-star-reviews-why-customers-dont-trust-perfect-ratings/
Example Reddit Thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonVine/comments/14xdvq0/are_reviews_really_honest/
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Let’s do a little thought experiment, shall we? Imagine that you have a classroom of 30 high school students and you have to give them a grade based on your impression of how well they did in class.
Now, we all know how the grading scale works, right? An F is one star – it means failure. A D is two-star – it means they barely did anything correct. A C is three-star – perfectly average. A B is four-star – pretty good, but not perfect. And an A is 5-star – the best of the best.
This scale makes perfect sense, and if it’s applied correctly, we should see most of the students earning a C, a good majority of the rest earning a B or D and just a handful earning an A or F.
But I’m gonna guess most of you aren’t going to be the people who hand out a bunch of B’s, C’s and D’s. You’re probably going to try to give as many halfway students as possible an A or B, a few slackers a C and a handful of those suckers who really deserve it a D or an F, mainly because they barely tried and you really want to get their attention.
In fact, out of 30 students, you give out 12 A’s, 8 B’s, 5 C’s, 2 D’s and 3 F’s.
Now, repeat this for several classes, where you give out roughly the same proportion of grades for every class. Sometimes, you hand out a few more A’s, sometimes, fewer C’s, D’s and F’s. But A’s and B’s are always your most common grade, and it’s rare that at least 2/3 of your students don’t receive one of those two grades.
And because of this, for each class, your average student is not earning a C like the scale suggests, but somewhere between a B and an A – above four stars, but not quite five stars. It’s rare you have a class that dips below four stars on average, and it’s also rare you have a class that rises above four and a half.
Now, let’s replace the word “students” and “products” and instead of “grades,” let’s say “review scores.”
Suddenly, we’re looking at a very real problem that’s all over the internet – online reviews have developed this weird tendency to tell us that almost every product we’d ever want to buy needs to be within the range of a 4.0 to a 4.5 out of five to be acceptable. If it goes above that, it’s a great buy. If it goes below it, it’s best-avoided.
And the people selling products online have definitely noticed, especially on Amazon, because they will go out of their way to make sure that if they have a product listed, it lands in this range with regard to review scores. It’s how they optimize their listings for top placement. They have all sorts of techniques to do this, too, like participating in review programs where they can massage good reviews from participants, giving away incentives to people who post nice reviews and buying fake reviews through gray market sources if they need to bump things up a bit.
This is why you’ll go on Amazon looking for a new case for your phone and find hundreds of listings with thousands of excited reviews for cases from brands with names you’ve never heard of and which often, aren’t even pronounceable in English. It’s all a big game, a scam, a ruse, a way of getting you to trust in a product that probably is good enough, but which probably isn’t getting fairly reviewed by actual users.
But even if we know this is how the game is being played, why do so many of us seek out online reviews when we’re shopping online… and why does consumer research tell us this is not just common behavior, but part of the modern buying process for online purchases?
Let’s dive into this topic and see if we can make any sense out of it, and how it applies to marketing!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
Believe it or not, online reviews have not always been a part of internet commerce, and they really became a facet of online shopping during a movement 20 years ago called “Web 2.0,” which advocated for making web pages on the internet less static and more available for users to contribute their own ideas and points of view. This movement gave rise to comments on articles, social media and yes, online reviews as a standard feature on ecommerce platforms. Unfortunately, online reviews have long been a problem because they’re impossible to monitor manually on large sites and they’re really prone to abuse, scams, bot activity and plain old spam.
Believe it or not, it’s still not a standard requirement on many ecommerce platforms that users have actually purchased the item they’re reviewing, and even those platforms that restrict reviews to verified purchases are still easily manipulated through scams that entice people to place reviews for products they ordinarily wouldn’t.
So, let’s first acknowledge the elephant in the room – a lot of reviews, especially for products and brand names that you’ve never heard of, are outright fake.
I want to note here, I’m not talking about Vine, Amazon’s legitimate review service. But we’ll get to Vine in a moment!
Nope, I’m talking about gray market reviews purchased from social media suppliers who either run fake review mills or botnets operating zombie user accounts – those are accounts that are no longer active but which have been hijacked and are now being used by bad actors.
This problem has actually gotten a lot worse thanks to generative AI because it’s very easy for providers that have access to thousands of accounts to sell access to them, script an AI tool to write a bunch of fake reviews, and then use another tool to post them in different intervals and from locations that appear to be in different parts of the world.
Big sites like Amazon are regularly playing whack-a-mole with these sorts of operations, and they’re often invisible to users because once the reviews get taken down, the company that owns the product will delist it and then relist it with a fresh set of fake reviews. Some of the companies who engage in these practices get tossed off Amazon and other large sites for good. One of my go-to Chinese brands for inexpensive wireless headphones, for example, got permanently banned from Amazon for fake reviews, and I have to buy those products from Ebay. And they’re a real brand with a long history of marketing actual products!
Many of the oddly-worded brands you see today on Amazon and other online marketplaces are fly-by-night brands that only exist online and which are as easily set up as they are discarded because the products themselves don’t have any actual branding on them.
But the more careful operators actually use real users and incentive them to purchase products, review them and, this is important, not return them so the product doesn’t get flagged. They’re incentivized to buy the product itself and to share their thoughts – say, maybe given a $25 digital gift card to buy a $20 product and write a 4 or 5-star review.
This sort of operation’s a bit more expensive, but think about it – for just a few thousand dollars up front, it’s possible to buy 100 reviews from just legitimate users, and you’re getting most of that money back in guaranteed sales. If reviewers forget to hold up their end of the bargain, they’ve purchased the product and it looks like a real sale. And if they do what they’re asked, you not only have a sale, but a seemingly independent review to show for it.
So if you’re wondering why something as boring as a phone case has so many wonderfully descriptive and positive reviews, yeah, that’s probably your explanation.
But fake reviews are not the only problem with online reviews. There’s also a perceived credibility gap that many users have instinctively learned from Youtube and other social media. It’s quite simple – if a product has a perfect score, or even all 4’s and 5’s, most users will immediately dismiss it as being bogus. After all, even the most popular videos on Youtube get some downvotes, right? There’s always someone for whom things aren’t quite as rosy. And so products that have a smattering of 1-star, 2-star and 3-star reviews are viewed as being more credible than those that don’t.
For products using fake reviews, this actually isn’t too much of a problem, because their shoddy products tend to attract a lot of 1-star reviews immediately once people realize they’ve been suckered. The problem, then, becomes the distribution of review scores – they have to have a P-shaped pattern where there are a lot of 4s and 5s but taper off the lower they go or else people don’t trust them.
So, given everything I’ve said, how do you think online brands correct this? If they’re legitimate brands, they usually don’t do anything because the fact that you can go and buy these products in other stores means they have some baked-in trust. But if they’re online-only brands that rely on these digital storefronts for 100% of their sales, you’d better believe they massage their numbers.
One tactic that’s used on many storefronts, but banned on Amazon, is incentivizing customers to leave a four or five-star review by including a postcard or email by promising the purchaser a reward of some sort if they share their review with the seller. This doesn’t even need to be a monetary incentive – they may promise free samples, enrollment in a giveaway or other things like that.
Another tactic that’s commonly used is to request reviews by playing on peoples’ sympathies – “we’re trying to grow our business and these positive reviews are really important because they make us more visible.” I don’t have a problem with this, of course, if it’s a legitimate ask, but it’s hard to tell if it’s being used to cover fake reviews with legitimate ones or if it’s truly an appeal for grassroots support unless that seller has a social media presence built on engagement with a core audience.
And then there’s Amazon Vine.
So, the premise of Amazon Vine is that it’s a reviews program that allows sellers to boost feedback for their products that don’t have many reviews. Reviewers are invited to participate and then enroll in the program and select products they want to test, and Amazon only allows product sellers that meet specific criteria. The reviewers are not compensated for their reviews and just do it for the free stuff, and they’re supposed to be unbiased, and being in the program boosts your visibility and credibility as a brand. Right?
Unfortunately, the program’s never worked quite as intended. One of the biggest problems is that brand owners don’t control enrollment in the program – Authorized Resellers can enroll products as well without the brand owner’s permission.
And then there’s the reviewers themselves, who are often quite critical and who review a lot of products because they want to become more prominent in the program. And since the most prolific reviews have to pay taxes on the goods they receive – they’re considered taxable income – they pay attention to the dollar value of the products and have even less tolerance for a “good enough” product than an actual buyer who can simply return it.
I’ve also read many reviewers on threads like Reddit observing strange patterns like people writing critical reviews but giving high scores in the star rating. The speculation is that Amazon will kick out Vine reviewers who are too negative – mainly because they get complaints from the sellers who feel the reviews are unfair – and so reviewers will give a nice star rating but still provide an honest review to avoid scrutiny. It turns out their words matter a lot less than their stars.
Like giving a student a lot of honest feedback on how to write a better paper and then still giving them an “A” for effort.
So, what do we do with all this as marketers? The unfortunate truth is that reviews matter for online selling – quite a lot! And so if part of your strategy for selling products online doesn’t include some engagement with your core customers to offer good reviews, you may find yourself less visible and slowly losing sales to people who play the game better… or who aren’t afraid to game the system.
On the other hand, digital storefronts are primarily designed to push reputable goods ahead of those being sold by smaller sellers, and so if you have a good online presence and customers are searching specifically for your brand or products, you will naturally rise to the top. And, surprise, reputable products from known brands tend to sell well regardless of their review scores, especially if they’re being offered for a discount or with free shipping. Affiliate reviews, social media influencer campaigns, digital marketing and traditional marketing can all override so-so review scores because they drive traffic both directly and indirectly to product pages, and so long as the product hasn’t been review-bombed by people who are angry at your brand for some reason, chances are good those other marketing methods will help override the stigma of a review score that averages in the high 3s or low 4s… and even encourage your actual customers to leave nice reviews on their own accord to help you out.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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