Now you can add one more concern to that list: receiving Amazon packages you didn’t order.Īs Clark Howard reports, there’s an e-commerce scam going around called brushing, in which sellers use fake accounts to buy their own products, then mail them to unsuspecting people. Your package could get lost or stolen, or arrive far later than you anticipated. In fact, on the other side of the postcard, the seller advised her not to include a photo of the card in the review:Īttention: For your account security, please don’t attach this picture card when you leave product review.īut there’s another reason that the Amazon seller may have wanted to keep its “picture card” from public view: Amazon prohibits sellers from offering customers “compensation of any kind” in exchange for writing reviews, regardless of whether or not the incentive for posting is disclosed.Plenty of things can go wrong when you’re ordering from Amazon, or any other online retailer. Nothing in the instructions said she had to reveal in the review that the reason she wrote it was to receive an Amazon gift card. While the seller did not stipulate in the instructions (see below) that the review must be positive, the steps to redeem the gift card showed five yellow stars as an example of a star rating our staffer might want to consider leaving. The offer couldn’t have been any clearer: Write a review on Amazon and receive a $15 Amazon gift card. Which brings us to a postcard a staffer recently received from an Amazon seller from whom she purchased a highly rated electric kettle weeks earlier. If they want to use incentivized reviews in their marketing, they need to ensure that whatever they did to obtain the review that might affect its credibility is adequately disclosed to consumers making purchasing decisions. However, under FTC law, companies have no choice. “It’s unwise to incentivize positive skewed consumer reviews,” the FTC wrote in a business blog in April 2019.Ĭompanies are understandably hesitant to admit when they’ve compensated customers to write positive reviews.
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