Federal Trade Commission prohibited businesses from writing and buying their comments in an August decision. Now, it is being alleged that a customer review site, Sitejabber, published “fraudulent” ratings and reviews on behalf of 130,000 businesses on its platform. FTC's the proposed order would stop Sitejabber from “misrepresenting” customer ratings and reviews “in the future”.
FTC complaint claims that Sitejabber collected feedback at the point of sale, or before customers received or experienced a product or service. In one example, customers were asked to rate their overall shopping experience out of five stars and write something quickly immediately after checkout.
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These quick ratings and reviews, or Instant Feedback Survey results, become part of a site's profile on Sitejabber. The FTC says this can mislead people into thinking that previous customers have rated a business's product or service highly when they're actually just rating the shopping experience.
“Presenting results (Instant Feedback Survey) as post-fulfillment reviews and ratings can mislead consumers into believing that the high number of reviews and high rating of a business means that thousands of customers have had positive experiences with the products or business services, when in fact the ratings and reviews displayed primarily reflected only customers' shopping experiences on the business' websites,” page four of the FTC's complaint states.
How to avoid FTC scrutiny of your website reviews
Businesses can avoid FTC scrutiny by making sure that Instant Feedback Survey ratings and reviews are not confused with their own product ratings and reviews — so customers clearly know what's being rated.
This is one of the FTC's first enforcement actions under her new rule.
“Along with ours the rule about comments and fake testimonialsCases like this show that we will act to stop all forms of fraud in the review ecosystem,” said FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine.
The FTC's previous rule on fake reviews and testimonials prohibits businesses from buying or selling fake reviews, including those generated by AI.
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