If you receive online reviews for your Amazon or Ebay business, local business with a Yelp or Google Maps profile, or e-commerce store outside the big platforms (e.g. hosted on Shopify or BigCommerce), this post is for you.
Let’s say you run a Shopify store and collect customer reviews from an app such as Yotpo. You receive 1000 reviews. Yotpo (and other review apps) give you the option to display or not display each individual review on your website. Let’s say that some of the bad reviews are irrelevant, contain gibberish, profanity, exaggerated, or are truthful but happen to 1 out of every 1,000 customers (a “black swan” event). You also have good reason to believe that some of the bad reviews are fraudulently written by your competitors. Can you hide these reviews?
You want a “yes” or “no” answer. Unfortunately, the answer is “maybe”, “depends”, and “what’s your risk tolerance”?
In an earlier post “Beauty is Truth”, my colleague Elizabeth Ragavanis discussed what businesses generally cannot do with the customer reviews they receive. To summarize: it’s illegal to write fake reviews or hire someone else to do that; it’s also illegal to review your own products (even if you bought them) without disclosing that fact; and - many people don’t know this - it’s illegal to give free product, discounts, or other benefits to someone in exchange for writing reviews, unless you make it very clear to the reviewer that they received such benefits from you in their review. The FTC has recently cracked down on online sellers (e.g. Amazon sellers and mattress companies) for precisely these tactics.
Even where you give someone a free or discounted product without asking the person to write a review, or where you ask the person to write an honest review, you must nevertheless require that person to disclose the fact that he/she has received the product for free or at a discount. The FTC’s reasoning is that while someone who receives a product for free or at a discount can write an honest review, receiving something for free or at a discount colors their perception of the value or quality of the product. Thus, while these reviews might be honest, they may not accurately reflect the general customer experience.
But, to go back to beginning of this post, what about honest reviews you collect without any inducement or fraud? Can you display some but not others? The FTC notes:
Using Testimonials That Don’t Reflect the Typical Consumer Experience
We want to run ads featuring endorsements from consumers who achieved the best results with our company’s product. Can we do that?
Testimonials claiming specific results usually will be interpreted to mean that the endorser’s experience reflects what others can also expect. Statements like “Results not typical” or “Individual results may vary” won’t change that interpretation. That leaves advertisers with two choices:
1. Have adequate proof to back up the claim that the results shown in the ad are typical, or
2. Clearly and conspicuously disclose the generally expected performance in the circumstances shown in the ad.
How would this principle about testimonialists who achieved exceptional results apply in a real ad?
The Guides include several examples with practical advice on this topic. One example is about an ad in which a woman says, “I lost 50 pounds in 6 months with WeightAway.” If consumers can’t generally expect to get those results, the ad should say how much weight consumers can expect to lose in similar circumstances – for example, “Most women who use WeightAway for six months lose at least 15 pounds.”
___________
So, the answer appears to be that it is okay hide certain customer reviews, so long as the remainder of the reviews, viewed as a whole on average, accurately reflect the typical customer experience.
Under this rationale, it is probably okay to hide reviews that are clearly not good faith attempts at reviewing a product - e.g. reviews that are trolling, irrelevant, contain gibberish, profanity, exaggerated, in poor taste, etc.
It is unclear whether it might be okay to hide reviews that reflect “black swan” incidents (e.g. a customer receiving a defective product, which, let’s say happens to your business every 1/1,000 orders).
Obviously, if your product is mediocre, and your customer base honestly rates it a 3/5 on average, it’s illegal to massage the reviews to make it a 4/5. Improve your product.
Lastly, as with any article written by a lawyer, this article is for general information only. What’s written here may not apply to your particular situation. If you are unsure about what you can and cannot do while “curating” customers reviews, talk to your lawyer.