Late last year Amazon changed its community guidelines and started to clamp down on 'fake' reviews, those that were perhaps paid for by sellers or incentivized in some way.
I had started to make progress with Amazon UK and reviewing products to the point that I was hovering near to the 1000 reviewer rating and that infamous top 1000 reviewer badge. This was something I enjoyed doing and was doing this with products that I had purchased for use myself. One such review was on the Betron KBS08 Bluetooth Speaker. This is a really popular speaker and I was lucky enough to get the video review I had done to the top reviewer space on this product detail page. This was great, it attracted about 150 helpful 'likes' to the review and kept my reviewer rating around the 1000 mark.
Today I logged in to my profile on Amazon to discover my reviewer rating had jumped to around the 4500 mark and I had lost 150 odd helpful votes from the profile. A deeper investigation into my profile revealed some of my reviews had been deleted and marked as uncompliant. This effectively meant that I couldn't re-review the items and fix whatever the problem was. This, in turn, spurred me on to contact Amazon and establish what the problem was.
The Problem
A short conversation with Amazon revealed that someone linked to my account had also reviewed the same speaker. This confused me until I remembered my wife buying the speaker for her brother as a present at Christmas. It turns out that a community guideline prohibits a second review by another account on the same item if the account is linked to yours in some way. The link between us, our address.
This was a bit of a relief as it was clearly not something I did but did cause me some annoyance as the review my wife completed was done out of a real love for the speaker and not as an attempt to dupe anyone. As a result, the seller of the speaker (Betron) lost out on what I classed as a good video review which covered all of the salient points on the speaker. A sad fact but something I cannot change.
So, in conclusion, if you review on Amazon you really need to ensure all of the guidelines in the reviewing section of the Amazon community are adhered to. Amazon is ruthless with these guidelines and there is nothing us mortals can do about them.
Happy reviewing.
