Reviews not helping e-commerce

Whilst e-commerce customers have come to rely on product reviews over the last few years when making purchasing decisions, there has always been a slight air of suspicion over whether this has been abused.

Finally on Sunday, IT hardware manufacturer Belkin have come clean that they were paying outsourcers with no prior knowledge of using their products $0.65 to create positive reviews across the web.

Totally unethical, and of course they have distanced themselves from the employee doing it and removed the reviews, but it is a massive amount of bad publicity.

This is online PR 101 - customer reviews are very beneficial and are a strong motivator for sales, and even if you get negative product reviews, adopt an open policy and respond to any service or product flaws.  The one thing to avoid is ignoring problems or create fake reviews as chances are you will get caught out, and when you do there are millions of bloggers just waiting to rub your nose in it!