The Federal Trade Commission banned businesses from writing and buying their own reviews in an August ruling. Now, it’s alleging that a customer review site, Sitejabber, published “misleading” ratings and reviews on behalf of the 130,000 businesses on its platform. The FTC’s proposed order would stop Sitejabber from “misrepresenting” customer ratings and reviews “in the future.”
The FTC’s complaint alleges that Sitejabber collected reviews at the point of sale, or before customers received or experienced a product or service. In one example, customers were asked to rate their overall shopping experience out of five stars and write something quickly directly after checking out.
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These quick ratings and reviews, or Instant Feedback Survey results, become part of a site’s profile on Sitejabber. The FTC says this could mislead people into thinking prior customers rated a business’s product or service highly when they were actually just rating the shopping experience.
“Presenting [Instant Feedback Survey] results as post-fulfillment reviews and ratings can mislead consumers into believing that a business’s high review count and high rating means thousands of customers have had positive experiences with the business’s products or services, when in fact the ratings and reviews displayed primarily reflected only customers’ experiences shopping on the business’s websites,” page four of the FTC complaint reads.
Businesses can avoid FTC scrutiny by making sure their Instant Feedback Survey ratings and reviews are unentangled from their product ratings and reviews — so customers clearly know what’s being rated.
This is one of the FTC’s first enforcement actions under its new rule.
“Along with our rule on fake reviews and testimonials, cases like this one show that we’ll act to stop all forms of deception in the review ecosystem.” FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection director Samuel Levine stated.
The FTC’s earlier rule on fake reviews and testimonials stops businesses from buying or selling fake reviews, including AI-generated ones.
