For a fee, sellers can hire legions of workers, often from less developed economies, to spend their days searching for and clicking on their products on Amazon. The more clicks a product earns, the greater its apparent popularity, and thus, the higher it tends to appear on actual product searches by legitimate consumers. Although Amazon keeps its ranking algorithms closely protected, popularity is clearly an important and understandable criterion; consumers like to know which products lots of others have found sufficiently appealing to buy. The new tactic threatens to undermine the familiar and relatively well-trusted recommendations that Amazon offers though. For sellers, a legitimate option is to request reviews by Amazon’s authorized reviewers, for a fee. However, sellers complain that this option is both expensive and not always effective. To ensure the legitimacy of the process, Amazon never guarantees that its authorized users will offer positive reviews. Thus, a seller might devote considerable resources to this marketing tactic, only to find itself with lower ratings and negative word of mouth being spread about it. There is no such risk in hiring the fake searchers and customers, though sellers do risk sanctions and reprisals from Amazon. The company claims that it remains constantly alert to abuses and signals of fake clicks, banning fake reviewers from the site and scrubbing their contributions. But the “click farm” methods keep shifting and growing more sophisticated, such as adding lots of 5-star reviews to a rival’s product to trigger an investigation and potentially get it banned from the site. Whether Amazon can keep up with these developments may determine how well consumers will continue to trust its recommendations.

Source: Laura Stevens and Jon Emont, The Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2018