Abstract
Consumer reviews on platforms like Amazon are summarized into star ratings, used to weight search results, and consulted by consumers to guide purchase decisions. They are emblematic of the interactive digital environment that has purportedly transferred power from marketers to ‘regular people,’ and yet they represent the infiltration of promotional concerns into online information, as has occurred in search and social media content. Consumers’ ratings and reviews do promotional work for brands—not just for products but the platforms that host reviews—that money can’t always buy. Gains in power by consumers are quickly met with new strategies of control by companies who depend on reviews for reputational capital. Focusing on ecommerce giant Amazon, this article examines the complexities of online reviews, where individual efforts to provide product feedback and help others make choices become transformed into an information commodity and promotional vehicle. It acknowledges the ambiguous nature of reviews due to the rise of industries and business practices that influence or fake reviews as a promotional strategy. In response are yet other business practices and platform policies aiming to provide better information to consumers, protect the image of platforms that host reviews, and punish ‘bad actors’ in competitive markets. The complexity in the production, regulation, and manipulation of product ratings and reviews illustrates how the high stakes of attention in digital spaces create fertile ground for disinformation, which only emphasizes to users that they inhabit a ‘post-truth’ reality online.
Highlights
Consumer reviews seem to fulfill the promise of an inter‐ active digital environment transferring power from mar‐ keters to ‘regular people’ (Kuehn, 2017; Novak, 2021)
Whereas star ratings historically were a summary of an individ‐ ual reviewer’s evaluation, decades later, websites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes added the innovation of aggregating critic ratings, just as consumer ratings were being datafied on sites like Amazon
In con‐ trast, an ecommerce consultant estimates that a one‐star rating increase results in a 26% increase in product sales on Amazon (Nguyen, 2019b), a claim reinforced by He et al.’s (2020) findings of large and statistically significant improvements in product sales and search ranking after sellers bought fake reviews on Facebook groups, at least in the short term
Summary
Consumer reviews seem to fulfill the promise of an inter‐ active digital environment transferring power from mar‐ keters to ‘regular people’ (Kuehn, 2017; Novak, 2021). As Dean and Hearn imply, consumer ratings and reviews are an example of the “free labor” that ordi‐ nary users perform that creates value, for platforms espe‐ cially (Terranova, 2000) Critical scholars studying this online practice question how users are encouraged to ‘participate’ in ways that primarily benefit large corpo‐ rations, cultivating an ethos or aesthetic of democrati‐ zation rather than concrete gains in the distribution of power (Kuehn, 2017; Novak, 2021). Social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube have attracted the most attention as sites of information disorder, ecommerce platforms like Amazon should not get a pass, especially when the ratings and reviews being gamed send unsafe products, or books and films with disinformation about health, his‐ tory, and science to the top of the search results (DiResta, 2019). A close examination of Amazon’s reviews space reveals an ongoing tug‐of‐war between a tech giant that recognizes the value of reviews for driving sales and for the platform’s informational value to con‐ sumers, and the third‐party sellers for whom Amazon is practically the only game in town
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