After lengthy legal battles, Amazon reports success in fending off purchased reviews on its websites. Three internationally active rating companies have therefore stopped selling positive product reviews and other ratings on Amazon. This is reported by Dharmesh Mehta, the manager responsible for the topic in global Amazon customer service, in a blog post published on Friday.
Three companies are involved: Fivestar Marketing, Matronex, and AppSally. According to Amazon, these were active in the USA, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
Fivestar Marketing is particularly well known in the Federal Republic. The company was temporarily based in the small Central American state of Belize and is currently based in Sofia. “The only German provider that delivers ratings worldwide,” advertises Fivestar Marketing on its website. “Top reviews, perfectly tailored to your business.”
Amazon is no longer there: “Please note that Fivestar Marketing has completely discontinued the offer for ratings and reviews on the Amazon platform,” says the Fivestar website.
Burda-Verlag, which defended itself against bought reviews on the holiday portal “Holidaycheck”, had also sued Fivestar.
According to information from company circles, Amazon first sued Fivestar in 2018, and four lawsuits were still pending.
Amazon manager Mehta wrote in his post that the group uses more than 10,000 employees worldwide to prevent fraud, including false reviews. The company is now taking legal action in the US and Germany against another provider of purchased reviews, the Hong Kong company Extreme Rebate. (dpa)