Especially in e-commerce there is an increasing use of evaluation and comparison systems for goods and services and more and more companies are flourishing that offer certified opinion services , unfortunately the reliability of the reviews released by users is poor and fraudulent use is always more extensive.

Recent is the sentence that sentences to 9 months the owner of a business that sold invented reviews on TripAdvisor , in this specific case the reviews were intended to damage the economic activities targeted by the same. And if on the one hand we can applaud the sentence - after all it is a question of defamation - on the other it would be necessary to legislate to stop this business, also affecting the clients. Without falling into defamation, there are many online services that offer positive reviews of products and services, likes and social shares in order to "cheat" the end user.

Only France has tried to regulate the sector by placing the correlation of the obligation between the review and the actual purchase of the product and service (Decree No. 2017-1436 of 29 September 2017).

The news of the sale by Amazon employees of confidential data and a real illegal service to remove unwanted negative reviews is very recent (18 September 2018). A round of bribes that reveals a grain of privacy on which the eCommerce giant is investigating.

Even without the fraudulent use as reported by PC Professionale (5 July 2018 n. 328) article by Dario Orlandi which takes up the study published in the Journal of Marketing Research : "... the demographic profile of the reviewers is different from that of the average customer: yes it deals with a small number of people (about 1.5%), who buy four times the average number of products and are often looking for a bargain. " The review can also be influenced by the competence of the person issuing it, especially for products and services intended for professional use.

There are many factors that influence the vote and the review expressed that have nothing to do with the product and the service, another study published on Electronic Commerce Research brings out a correlation for example regarding travel and holidays between the type of company and the evaluation of the stay. Those who travel for work and alone are, according to the study, more critical.

Most shoppers read criticisms carefully, mistakenly believing them to be more trustworthy and authentic than positive reviews because they are less frequent. However, it is enough to read some viral reviews left by Amazon users to realize that the reliability of the opinions expressed is practically nil whether they are for or against the product and service.

It is very easy to damage a competitor with a negative review , especially where the reviews are in the order of a few tens, mathematically only when the reviews are in the thousands it becomes difficult for a single attacker to cause harm, but there are really few products that can achieve such a milestone.

The integration of a review service in your eCommerce can be beneficial or harmful, it depends precisely on the popularity of the eCommerce itself. If our online store is popular it becomes indispensable , if it is not we risk having few positive reviews that users will not believe much. However, it is important to link the review to a real purchase and as merchants always have control of what to publish. We remind you that regardless of whether they are certified by a third-party company or simply managed internally (simpler at the GDPR level), the credibility of positive reviews will always be low, which is why the best review modules available for PrestaShop invite the customer to share the same on Social Media . In fact, the customer becomes the testimonial of our product and service.

I recommend the following modules to add reviews to your eCommerce in PrestaShop :

Author: Loris Modena

SENIOR DEVELOPER

For Ind Loris Modena , owner of Arte e Informatica , he began working in the IT sector in 1989 as a system engineer in charge of the maintenance and installation of IT systems. He started programming for the web in 1997 dealing with CGI programming in PERL and then moving on to programming in PHP and JavaScript. In this period he approaches the Open source world and the management of Linux servers.

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