It looks as though an employee at Belkin is trying to game the review scores for certain company products on eCommerce sites. Is this as morally reprehensible as I think it is? Should this guy be fired for trying to game the system or given a promotion for his hard work at promoting the company?

Companies rely heavily on word-of-mouth advertising and positive customer experiences to sell their products. The idea being that if one consumer is happy and tells 10 other potential consumers about their positive experience, some of those others could then also buy the product. It’s certainly more appealing to trust someone’s judgment over an advertising blurb.

The Web has made this whole process a lot simpler and more efficient. If you’re looking to buy a new product, it’s easy to Google the name and see what other people think of it before shelling out your hard-earned cash. This makes high profile sites such as Amazon hugely important.

Every product sold on Amazon has a section underneath it for customers to leave comments, both good and bad. There is also a chance to score the product out of five. But the system can easily be gamed, as it was when gamers decided to teach EA a lesson for saddling Spore with DRM.

Now comes news from The Daily Background that Belkin, or at least a rep working for the company, is trying to game the Amazon reviews for a wireless router that has received some less than stellar reviews in the past.

As well as its huge online retail sites, Amazon runs Mechanical Turk, a site where ordinary people get paid to do the work companies can’t be bothered to but can’t rely on computers to do for them. There are literally thousands of jobs listed on the site, each of which can earn you a few cents or dollars.

One such task up for grabs was posted by a Mike Bayard, who asks for people to write a positive review about a Belkin product on a Web site. One of these links leads to the router mentioned above although others are asking similar for products on Buy.com and Newegg. The advert states that it doesn’t matter if you’ve ever used the product or not, but you will get paid 65 cents for giving it the best review possible.

This wouldn’t be bad, although it would be strange, if Bayard was just some random guy with a penchant for all things Belkin. But he’s not. According to his LinkedIn page (now deleted) he is a Business Development Representative for eCommerce at Belkin. And he’s trying to promote the products under his care by gaming the review scores on various eCommerce sites. So, not dodgy at all.

I consider this morally repugnant. Rightly or wrongly, the reviews on Amazon and similar sites help people make purchase decisions every day. To falsely boost these reviews for 65 cents a pop is terrible. Now that it’s come out, this makes not only Bayard look bad but also Belkin. Are the company’s products really so bad that the only way it can get positive reviews for them is to pay?

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Entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 10:49 pm under Ecommerce, Internet, Opinion.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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