Review manipulation.

[Wayne]

My wife's fitness watch broke, so she asked me to find a new one for her. I looked on Amazon and found one that was similar to the one she had before. They also had an offer on if you picked a certain colour, less than £20 instead of the £70 for the other colours. She doesn't need a fancy one, so it was perfect. It arrived and works fine, but then today I received a letter offering a £20 Amazon gift card if I gave it a 5 star review. I've heard about this before, but never received one. Do I give it the review and claim the voucher? Of course not. Firstly, let's ask ourselves a question here. If someone offers you a voucher for more than the price of the item, they'd be losing money. Why would they do that? It makes no economic sense. Let me jump back in time a bit here. A number of years ago I bought some antivirus software at my local Tesco that was on offer for 50% off so worked out less than £20. When I put my clubcard through it spat out a voucher for a £20 refund on the software. As it would mean the software was free due to the other discount, the staff had no clue what to do and had to call over a manager to work out what needed to be done. They ended up giving me a refund on it plus a 2p coin. The staff and I had a good laugh at my essentially getting a £40 piece of software for -2p. Is this something similar? Of course it isn't. Let me explain why.

This is something known as "review manipulation" and you can find posts about it all over the internet. Higher reviews mean the item is likely to end up higher on the list than similar items sold on the same platform. Do you actually get the voucher? Quite often it seems you don't. The company has basically tricked you into giving it a 5 star review. Amazon even has a post about it at https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer ... T9GLRRSV3G as well as places like the FTC telling you how to report them. If you get something similar, don't be fooled. Don't give them that 5 star review and report it to the company they're selling it on.

Looking at the page again while writing this, I see they've now added another colour to the offer and put the price of the "full price" ones up another £20. Suspicious much?