Fake reviews
Posted: December 1st, 2009 | Author: John | Filed under: Shipping | 1 Comment »I hate when people play dirty.
I was reading a review about Shipito someone wrote on the xmarks:
This really caught my attention, because Shipito really has the lowest rates for shipping. I never heard anyone complain about that. So clicked on the user to see what other reviews he/she wrote.
Bad review for MyUS, BongoUSA … and great review for ForwardIt. This is really suspicious that one customer would even try all of these services. Also all reviews were written on November 28/29.
This is not the first time I see something similar. I don’t think this is the right way how to succeed.
Updated 2/9/10: I have no idea who is writing the reviews, but I just look who is getting benefit. I cannot imagine real customers doing this. I really wish xmarks looks into this. I changed the title of the post which implicated Forwardit to write the reviews. I really cannot prove they dit it so therefore the change of title after email from Forwardit owner. The rest of the post stays.
My name is Brian and I am the founder and owner of Forwardit.us. I would like to address this accusation. According to your post you think that our company wrote bad reviews of Bongous and myus and then wrote a positive review of my website. Your basis of coming to this conclusion was that they wrote reviews of two other forwarding companies, which did not happen to be flattering, within two days of each other. This is hardly conclusive evidence of your accusation. With a bit of research one can easily find that this user wrote positive reviews of USA2ME, Zappos, Nordstrom, and FedEx as well. Conversely they wrote negative reviews of Nike, Sony, and UPS. Using John's logic, they must also be from USA2ME, Zappos, Nordstrom, and FedEx, since they wrote positive reviews of those companies while writing negative reviews of competitors in some circumstances. This is also not surprising. I know many people do use several services to try each service, to find the one that works best for them. People frequently try different companies to find the one they like the most– airlines, cars, even toothpaste! We all do this, so I am confused why John sees this as suspicious.
Our website has been around for eight years, and we rely solely on word of mouth advertising. We have three employees, and hardly have time to Google our company and create fake reviews for our company–especially right before Christmas. Internet reviews are not relevant to us, because our customers are referred to us by family and friends, and that is the best type of advertising for our company. I would trust what my friends and family say before I would trust an internet review. This model of referrals has served us well for over eight years, and we have no need to change that now.
It seems from this blog that the poster is associated with Shipito. The poster belittles our company for being unethical, yet writes blog posts on competitors and accuse them of doing things with very thin to nonexistent proof? To me, this seems quite unethical. It seems that John's sole interest is discrediting companies that you compete with. Maybe this is how some companies must compete, and it is of course up to readers to decide for themselves what company to use. However, we prefer to gain customers by offering a quality service and having them refer our service to their friends, not by writing fake reviews on review websites or by defaming our competition in blog posts.