I was looking to buy a camera and I was amazed how many fraudulent companies are in this business, the first dozen companies are scams
! Moreover, looking them up in different websites (including RR) does not show that off hand. The reason is that these companies know that people are now looking at sites like RR and they are using tactics to fight that, the most common being creation of many made-up accounts and posting good reviews.
I think RR should have an antidote for this behaviour that directly misleads consumers and act as exact opposite to the reason sites like RR exist. I know that some of these posts are removed but this is laborious for the site operators and it is not community based.
(Unfortunately most people look at the store number "rating" and not necessarily read each and every post)
Here are my proposals for fighting this:
1. Have a 'helpful' 'not helpful' 'fraudulent' buttons, so people can report fraudulent posts. In such case the post will not be erased but removed from the site statistics. This should not work if post is already "trusted" by the community (so not to provide a tool for shop owners)
2. Have an 'under investigation' sticker on the company page. For example, look at
pricerunner.com method. They have a
Stop List and an
Observation List this list can be automatically generated from stores that have many fraudulent posts (I guess there are not that many, so manual check for this is reasonable as well)
Many thanks for reading,
NR