It's been something that has been puzzling me for some time now, as to why e-commerce websites are so fond of fake reviews when they could use that energy to improve their services. The answer is extremely simple: it is more cost-effective. Rather than improving your supply chain, paying a few bucks for a review seems to be cheaper. And lots of websites here are relying on a cheap, English speaking workforce for that purpose.

But don't get me wrong: the idea does not come from Indian e-commerce websites. Amazon has been striving on such a system and they have been able to refine it to a remarkable level - a glance at their best-selling products should convince you of such.

Here, the sheer scale compared to operations is amazing. The focus is also something. Take Yebhi.com which has written perhaps hundreds of fakes reviews to make up for the negative reviews. I do not mind much them spamming their own websites (cf Amazon), but when it comes to "independent" review websites, I say stop.

Even worse: some deny their own actions, and use fake accounts to write comments against complaining customers. Like they did not have enough problems as such... Note that some "complaining customers" may also be hired by competitors to wage ware against the website - but this is not the issue here. I will talk about it in a future post.

However, fake reviews do trick some customers, marginally, but they do, as not everybody is a "smart shopper". And good fake reviews can even trick these "smart" guys.

All in all, I just have two words to write: Stop that. It's really hurting e-commerce here and people are becoming aware of the trick.

I'll be giving constructive comments about reviews I judge as "fake" - though I may be mistaken sometimes. Next post will be about the art of writing fake reviews.