Customer review

A customer review is an evaluation of a product or service made by someone who has purchased and used, or had experience with, a product or service. Customer reviews are a form of customer feedback on electronic commerce and online shopping sites. There are also dedicated review sites, some of which use customer reviews as well as or instead of professional reviews. The reviews may themselves be graded for usefulness or accuracy by other users. Before the advent of the internet, methods by which customers could review products and services included customer comment boxes and customer service helplines. These methods are still in existence today although internet review sites have grown significantly in recent years. The reliability of customer reviews has been questioned. Abuses akin to ballot stuffing of favourable reviews by the seller (known as incentivized reviews), or negative reviews by competitors, need to be policed by the review host site. Indeed, gathering fake reviews has become big business. In 2012, for example, fake book reviews have been revealed as significantly affecting ratings on Amazon. In 2016 Amazon banned the practice of reviewing complimentary products, researchers have shown that the process still continued as of 2021, but without any disclosures. Since few sites restrict users to reviewing only items they have actually purchased, it is difficult to know if a customer is real, has actually used the product they are reviewing, and is giving honest, unbiased feedback about the product or services being reviewed. Tools like Fakespot and ReviewMeta can help spot fake reviews on shopping sites like Amazon. Unfortunately, the tools do not work on most other websites that show customer reviews. Public calls have been growing stronger, demanding that review sites be held accountable for publishing fake reviews. Most recently (June 2021), the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the United Kingdom has launched an investigation into whether Amazon and Google are doing enough to prevent fake reviews from being published on their sites.