This is a good thing, but it won’t reduce the incentive for sellers to cheat the system. Now you just won’t know people are getting things free, or everyone will use Vine. I have never found the reviews where people got the product for free to be that useful on Amazon and I frequently click No on whether the review was helpful.
I think some reviews, typically the ones that are technical in nature, can be helpful even if the person gets the product free. HKJ’s reviews of batteries and selfbuilt’s reviews of flashlights, which have a lot of analysis and data are very useful whether they get the products free or not.
This is great news! No more fake reviews which are ruining the buying experience. I always check for % of “honest & unbiased” vs verified purchases reviews before buying something, and many times these paid reviews make up as much as 30% of the total.
However the seller can always tell the reviewer to buy the product at full price and then refund them via paypal, which is already happening.
Paragraph breaks added for online readability of the big block quote at the top.
Now, seems to me, the game becomes getting lots of friends and employees vote up your chosen reviewer’s history as “helpful’ so he/she gets invited to be a Vine. Or a Grape. Or whatever they call their designated members.
Then there is this . . . check out this product page for Comcast internet service on Amazon, which is as despised as it is popular. 868 reviews, 86% of reviews are 1 star, but the “average” comes out to 4 stars!
Yah, well, I wish they’d go after those who advertise 1000lm!, no, 1200lm!, wait, 1300lm! SK68 zoomies and the like.
I’ve done my share “reporting” them, but nothing ever happens. HappyLucky888 stops selling them but then SunMoonStar just picks up from where they left off.
They recently started weighting the ratings to verified purchases to limit the effectiveness of vote brigading. That’s why the “unbiased” review products still cost something, even if only a dollar. For example, you might get offered a coupon to review an item sold on Amazon. You buy it on Amazon, enter the coupon code to get the price reduced to one dollar, and now you have a verified purchased with full rating power.
Not to go off on a tangent… as I go off on a tangent- but when die people stop being able to compose something without paragraphs? You see it all the time. I just received a letter from a college sophomore that was one giant three page paragraph.
Seriously, what are we teaching people?
Now, as far as Amazon no longer allowing incentivized reviews, it is probably a good thing, though it won’t stop people from gaming the system.