Hi all,
I’m a pretty extensive Amazon user here in Japan, and I often get these little chits with my products that say something like ‘give us a 5 star review and we’ll give you a 1,000 yen gift certificate’ or something like that. I think anyone who has used Amazon enough will have gotten these (usually from Chinese distributors). I usually just chuck these and don’t give them a second thought, but now I’m thinking hey, this is basically free money. Still, I hate the idea even more of leaving fake reviews (that must be 5 stars) for incentives.
[Here’s a pic I took of one including its Google translation to English.](https://imgur.com/a/5xkcgNc)
At first these people really pissed me off and I wanted to report them immediately. Then I thought hmm… what if I give them the 5 star review, then email them my screenshot, receive my gift certificate and use it, and then edit my review to be my real rating and also post about their little scam. I mean, in that way, I could punish them even more by taking money away and getting them reprimanded.
Then I looked into this because I thought surely I’m not the first person to think of this. Then I found other threads like [this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonprime/comments/rhg4eh/will_anything_happen_to_a_seller_if_i_report_them/) and [this one ](https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonprime/comments/1929e6y/amazon_gift_card_offered_for_fake_5_star_review/)and I’m sure there are dozens of others on reddit. Basically, the gist that I got was that it’s against the Amazon terms of service to be compensated for a review, so doing the strategy of ‘5 star > get gift certificate > 1 star edit’ could get your account banned (and has for other redditors). So anyway, that seemed out of the question for me. Then I read several cynical views of people pointing out (correctly so), that Amazon generally benefits from having sellers and highly rated products so people buy more, and often they screw over the customer rather than the distributor. And also things like distributors can easily get negative reviews taken down, or even posting about the gift certificates could get your reprimanded as it’s not part of the ‘actual product’ kind of thing.
All of this has just made me fairly pessimistic about the whole thing – not even cashing in and editing reviews from 5 star reviews, but just taking any action against the sellers altogether.
Has anyone thought about this kind of thing or taken action? Has anyone reported sellers before, or had negative reviews taken down from Amazon or the seller or something? Do some people just cash in and just shut up about it?
I don’t know, I’d rather do the ‘right thing’ than just get a few thousand yen. Whole situation just kind of disappoints me.
Also PSA if you didn’t know already, but Amazon reviews are heavily manipulated as you can see here.
Thanks!
by JPThrowaway245