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When Online Vendors Do A Pump & Dump – Online Services At Epinions

Jun 09 '04 Write an essay on this topic.

The Bottom Line The public are fickle, they will be loyal to you as long as you are loyal to them …

Anyone that spends any amount of time reading the reviews in the Online Services section of Epinions will tell you this, sometimes you have to really question what you are reading. I’m not talking about members who write about sites they never shop through or even surveys that are sent to people who have never made a purchase through a site, I’m talking about vendor abuse. Something that I have said, over and over again, will be the downfall of the site. While this may not cripple or bankrupt the site, it is something that poses a real risk to damage the integrity of the site. Basically, all it takes is a few major catastrophes to ruin what Epinions stands for – reviews written by consumers who have purchased a product and want others to know the pro and cons of it. Ever since this category was introduced at the site, abuse has existed on one level or another but with the addition of the Express and Survey reviews, things have gotten more than a little out of hand.

The Basics

If you are already familiar with the online section then feel free to skip this paragraph or two, it’s only included for those who don’t hit the section often. There are three types of reviews that can be written at Epinions; regular reviews, merchant surveys and express reviews. Express reviews were first introduced for several reasons; to allow the shorter one to get some exposure [rated show or don’t show], for the merchants surveys that are sent to a customer after a purchase is made and to try and get more people to come to the site and voice their views without having to meet the minimum word submission. This section was then divided into surveys and express reviews – something that still sort of catches me by surprise. In the online section there are several major categories including ISP’s, online stores, services and a variety of online activities [search engines, postage, betting etc] so each section sort of gets rated a different way – with an online site a 75 word review might be enough to convince someone to check out a site but an online service like AOL or Cox will need a lot more information since you are committing to a monthly fee for a service. There are also merchant surveys which are sent to customers after they make a purchase and ask for their views of the transaction, store and product. This allows the customer to give their feedback so others will know what to expect from a site if they choose to do business with them.

The section has really grown over the past few years and includes a plethora of interesting, off beat and unusual stores – a great place to be a Top Reviewer as well as an Advisor. At times it gets hard to rate reviews though, especially when you can feel it in your bones – hundreds of reviews that basically say the same thing without any real detail to speak of. Express and Surveys are a good way to gauge how quickly a site delivers a product or their prices but to get a true feel of a site you need a standard review written by someone who has used the site a few times. Look at sections like Amazon, NetFlix and eBay, they have a tremendous number of reviews but when you really sit down and read them, only a handful of them actually break down the core of the site, how it’s used, customer service and the nitty gritty. Not everyone is going to have positive feedback about a site and those reviews are just as important as the ones that give them high marks, I’d rather know about a return policy before I visit a site than to get all jacked up about finding a great deal only to discover that the site has poor customer service or sells gray market items.

This brings up to one of the “black holes” of online services – camera and electronic stores in the New York area. I know from reading the various reviews that there are definably more than a few scam artists operating in the area and I got suckered by a few of them – one of which I am still fighting with to get my money back. Well, I’m not, my credit card company is. It doesn’t take much to set up a website these days, look at the one kid from Michigan that set up a site, snagged photos of cameras and camcorders from other sites and set up an online store and ripped off a ton of people. This left a big mound of egg on Yahoos face since his store was run through their portal, since then they have checked out vendors but not nearly as close as they should. So how do you know if a site is on the up and up? There is no way. Epinions and other review based sites can only provide a posting area for reviews but there’s no way to validity them – but when you see 25 – 35 reviews a day come through the Just In section from a small camera store in New York, that in itself should be enough to set off some alarms somewhere.

So what exactly is a pump and dump? It could be something as simple as a person that creates a storefront, gets a few hundred orders for low priced electronics then shuts its doors. Often times these people are working as teams and have several operations running at once, when you call to find out the status of your order you are either pressured into buying overpriced accessories or told that the order will ship out the next day. They string you along for as long as possible until enough people start to complain or contact the Better Business Bureau. When that happens they just vanish. Money is transferred from PayPal account to PayPal account often times with a small amount in each of them so if one get frozen for suspicious activities, it’s no big loss for them. If this is starting to sound like a conspiracy theory or something Oliver Stone would come up with, think again, it happens all the time. 99% of the time the shops are set up in other peoples names, they pay a homeless person or someone who needs the cash a fee to open a post office box to receive money orders as well as the website fee if they purchase a name – yes, it is a tangled web and it’s something that I’ve spent more than a few hours researching.

So how can this damage Epinions? Simply put, if you tick off enough people eventually they will tell others – and they’ll tell others and so on, and so on and so on. NetFlix went through the same sort of problem – they had outstanding service for a while then their ego got the best of them. Why should they try to get someone 15 movies on their list every month when they can retain the same number of members by only sending out 10 movies a month. DVD’s are slow to ship out, cancellation requests are ignored, customer service is lacking in every area, damaged DVD’s are held against the member etc. Sure there is a huge difference between NetFlix and Epinions – but bear with me for a minute here. If Epinions continues to allow the abuse to continue eventually people are going to hear the name of the site and laugh – they’ll talk about their Uncle Joe who went to the site to get some information about a camera and found an online site there, he read the reviews and decide to go with it only to get ripped off and be out a few hundred dollars. Sadly this is something that is rapidly on the horizon and something that a few Advisors have been saying for the past two years but it seems to fall on deaf ears. I guess the only way to get the attention of the higher ups at the site is to say this – allowing this to go on will cost you money. Maybe that will get their attention and they’ll address the situation with more than a form letter …

Types of Abuse

Vendor Abuse: The most common abuse is that of what I call “vendor abuse”. This is when a company plants their own reviews of a site to make themselves look better or to try to lessen the blow of bad reviews. Most of the time a merchant or vendor that is on the up and up will post a message on the review page rather than leaving a message in the comment section – but that doesn’t always happen. Vendor abuse can be something as small as writing glowing reviews about customer service, quick shipping or low process or something as incredulous as posting negative reviews on competitors reviews. If all this sounds like it is stuff that happened in primary school or a conspiracy theory, rest assured, if you spend enough time in the section and actually read the reviews, you’ll see there’s something fishy going on. Epinions really has no way to check out the reviews or to validate them but I am sure if they started checking the IP addresses they’d see there are a lot of duplicates showing up.

My big question here is this – if merchant surveys are supposed to be filled out after a customer has placed an order – how it is that people who never placed an order or cancelled their order are getting emails asking them to fill out a survey? I can understand a few glitches here and there but when you see up to ten of them a day in the section you have to start to wonder what’s going on. If people who have never made a purchase from the site are getting invites to fill out a survey – wouldn’t that be an extremely easy way for a vendor to fill out the surveys as well and make them look a little better to the general public? And let’s not forget the obvious bullying tactics that some sites have adopted – someone posts a negative review about a site and all of a sudden ten or fifteen new members jump all over the reviews, rather their review DS don’t show] or NH [not helpful] and try to sink their review to the bottom by writing their own “reviews” that seem to be nothing more than a cut and paste job from one review to another. And the comments they leave for other reviews are not only rude, they are borderline terroristic.

Member Abuse: This is probably the type of abuse that happens the least, but it does happen. Whether it be blind rating, down rating or just trying to meet a quota, it happens. But what happens when members write about stores they’ve never shopped at? Could they be part of the problem? Without a doubt, yes. How, you ask? Simple. Let’s say Member123 writes a review of a store that only had three or four reviews, nothing that says one way or another that a site is on the up and up or trying to run a scam. If this member writes a glowing review of the site without having ever ordered from them – it could really screw with the balance of the site. Al it takes is ten or fifteen people to read that review and say “Humm, this person had good luck, I might give them a try”. What happens when they get ripped off, receive something less than what they expected or have trouble with their credit card getting billed several times? Do you think those people aren’t going to turn around and tell others that they got false information from the site? Think those people will ever come back to Epinions? Chances are they won’t and trust me, they will let it be known to all that will listen that they got burned by using Epinions for information.

Hey, I Am Just One Member, What Can I Do?

Well, if you take that attitude, nothing will ever get done at the site but without one person standing up and calling bull$_hit on this stuff – the ball will never get rolling. If you see a NH rated review or one that is rated DS and there’s a comment about it, don’t just slap a rating on it – read the comment to see what the deal is. Sometimes it’s a duplicate review, sometimes its something more – but unless you take the three seconds it takes to click on the link and read it – you’ll never know and there’s a good chance you’ll look like a complete moron a few days later when it has 50 NH or DS ratings and yours is the only VH or S rating. The word moron may seem a bit excessive or harsh but if you aren’t going to read a 50 word Express Review or Survey and simply blind rate your way through a page … well … you sort of deserve the title. This goes for both title and non-title holders in the area – there are far too many people playing follow the leader when it comes to ratings – another thing that adds to the abuse in the section. How so? If you see a review with four VH or S ratings you can click the rating without ever having read it – and what if those other ratings were from people who planted their own reviews of a company to boost their appeal or degrade them? Other members of the site see your name and are familiar with it so they go along with it… get the picture?

So what’s my point? Epinions has weathered the storm in regards to online marketing, shopping and reviews … but can it keep up the pace on the path that it is on? Will they finally start to listen to members that complain, send in abuse reports and invest a hell of a lot of time into trying to keep the site “legit”? Maybe if they feel a real threat to their wallets they will … but should it really have to come to that? I am just one member of the site but I know that there are others that feel the same way, they have left comments about the bogus reviews that merchants post as well as the obvious abuse by “new members” that write one review but feel the need to attack those who post up negative reviews … yeah, I might just be one person but I’ve been around the block. I saw some of the biggest sites come tumbling down when they refused to listen to reason – sure Epinions won’t close it’s doors next week – but their reputation is in jeopardy. Without checking out sites before they are added or checking out ones that are fed into the system, there is no way for Epinions to really police the area without listening to member feedback. It would be almost impossible to make Epinions a scam free environment but taking some basic preventative measures would be a huge help.

The Category Leads, Advisors and higher ups of the site can only do so much without direct intervention from those who control the power of the site. And ultimately, these are the people that will feel the impact of their lack of actions last. They won’t see Income Share dwindling from month to month nor will they see the number of hits decline – no, they will still make money from the site. There’s nothing wrong with making money but you have to keep your eye on it at all times – all it takes is a few weeks of neglect and you’ll have weeds sprouting up all over the place and in this case the weeds are the online reviews, merchants and vendors that are gaming the system for their own benefit – something that could definitely come back to bite the rear of every Epinions member. It isn’t just a few strange reviews that I’m talking about, it’s hundreds of them all over the place – and when Joe Smith from Plano Texas goes to read about some company in New York and decided to place an order after reading several hundred reviews that all say the same thing … and he gets ripped off … don’t you think he’s going to be just a little sore at Epinions. And please, don’t quote the disclaimer that appears at the bottom of almost every page … those words are useless drivel to someone that got ripped off …

The Bottom Line

I’ve said my peace here and I’ve vented some real frustrations that I have about how the site is policed. Those that do report it are called snitches and “fun police”, “site nazis” etc … that’s something that I’ve learned to laugh at. Why? Well, I must have submitted over a thousand abuse reports over the past four years at the site and saved Epinions a nice sum of money in Income Share that they would have paid out … money that went beck to other members. Sadly Online Services is a breeding ground for this type of abuse – greed. Regardless of whether or not someone shopped at a site or even visited the damn thing – the point I am trying to make is this – how you rate and what you write does have a bearing on how the site is perceived. Try thinking about the big picture when you are rating … regardless of whether or not you are an Advisor in a section, how you rate and the comments you leave do make a difference … even if it’s to other members of the site.

Ultimately I’d like to see Epinions implement some type of background check on sites that are seeing a tremendous amount of reviews at one time. I understand some of the surveys and reviews are uploaded at one time but when a small camera store in New York has more reviews than Amazon or eBay – you have to stop and wonder what the hell is going on. When a member asks one of the Category Leads to add a site it’s usually a sure bet that things are legit – but what if that member is new and they are just submitting a scam website? Epinions can’t be held responsible for it according to their disclaimer since they are only providing information – but again – that will do nothing for the people that lost money in the process and sadly, they will blame Epinions for having the site listed. It would take about ten to fifteen minutes to check out a site – call their toll free number and see how their customer service acts, make a small test purchase to see if you actually get the goods or if you are pressured into buying over priced accessories, check with the Better Business Bureau to see if there are any complaints … things that will only help to protect Epinions and the reputation that it’s built up over the years.

The public are fickle, they will be loyal to you as long as you are loyal to them … but screw them over and it will take years to get back on their good side …

As always, thanks for the visit …

~^V^~ Freak ~^V^~

© 2004 Freak369

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