Star reviews have become an important factor for some when deciding to purchase a product or not. Some even practice hiding low reviews in order to maintain a high rating for their product and service.
It looks like it is time to stop such practice now.
Fashion Nova, an American fast-fashion retailer, has incurred a $4.2 M settlement order from the FTC for hiding reviews that are below 4 stars.
The fashion retailer used a third-party review management tool that lets users review the items that they buy from the site. From 2015 – 2019, they had 4-5 star reviews appear automatically on the site while lower rating reviews needed approval.
Hundreds of thousands of reviews lower than 4 were not approved, which led to artificially inflating the reviews of the products on the site.
According to the FTC:
Fashion Nova misrepresented that the reviews on its website accurately reflected the views of all purchasers who submitted reviews to the website. The proposed settlement puts provisions in place to address Fashion Nova’s deceptive practice and orders Fashion Nova to pay $4.2 million for harm consumers incurred.
And the FTC doesn’t stop at that. It has announced that it is also sending letters to ten companies that offer review management services, warning them to not take improper steps to avoid collecting or publishing negative reviews.
More details on the issue from this FTC blog post on it.
The FTC has also updated their guidance when it comes to online customer reviews and you could read more about it here.
Though Fashion Nova is a big retailer and serves as an example for such practice, if you are doing such practice for your small or medium business, it is the best time to stop now.
Aside from it being against consumer guidelines, moderating bad reviews to build a positive review profile can hit you back, eventually and misleading reviews will eventually lose your customer base.
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