THE GOVERNMENT has recently launched a consultation on fake reviews found on online trades websites including ones that unfairly promote certain tradespeople and trade companies over others.

Many micro roofing firms and self-employed roofers rely on trades websites as a source of new work. But sometimes these trades websites will be seen to rate competitors more highly, despite the business being known to carry out unsatisfactory work.

While online reviews from customers can be a useful way of assessing customer satisfaction, they are also open to abuse.

Launching the Smarter Regulation: Consultation on Improving Price Transparency and Product Information for Consumers, the government says 11% – 15% of all reviews were found to be fake on the nine most used websites, from research it commissioned last year.

Fake Trader Reviews Work

For costly roofing work, often priced for hundreds or thousands of pounds, the same research found that fake reviews, which usually cannot be spotted by consumers as false, increased consumers likelihood of buying by almost 10%.

The most common way of getting fake trader reviews is for a trader to pay or incentivise others to submit a review. Sometimes these will be negative reviews designed to eliminate competition.

Even when reviews are genuine, the rating system the trader website uses may not reflect the feedback honestly acquired. The website might cherry pick reviews, or give more weighting to good reviews so that ratings are artificially inflated. In other cases, the way the reviews are presented, such as good reviews being listed first, may be restricted to create an artificially good impression.

Now, in the consultation, the government is proposing stronger action against “those who seek to deceive consumers through the buying, selling, commissioning, and publishing of fake reviews”. They are also proposing to make the legal responsibility clearer for online platforms to take action to stop false reviews on their sites from deceiving consumers.

The government is putting the onus on trader websites to develop stricter policies for preventing and removing fake reviews. They will have to be transparent regarding how they go about rating companies or individuals, or endorsing them on their sites.

The CMA will publish guidance to the websites on what they are expected to do and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers (DMCC) Bill currently going through Parliament will make the penalties greater if trading websites are found to publish fake reviews.

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