China to start punishing Taobao shops with fake product reviews…if it can catch them

The world of C2C ecommerce on sites like Taobao revolves around user-written product reviews. It’s one of the first things customers check before buying an item, and good or bad reviews also help determine where a shop’s products end up in the rankings when users do a search. That system has led to widespread fakery: merchants posting positive-but-fake user reviews on their own products. But beginning on March 15, faking comments on your own ecommerce shop becomes illegal in China. Chinese legal authorities will be able punish shop owners caught engaging in the practice.

But will Chinese authorities actually be able to catch them? That’s a wholly different question. Alibaba has never condoned faking comments on Taobao, but the way most reviews are faked is difficult to detect. The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about this phenomenon, called “brushing,” and in essence it works like this:

This approach is difficult to detect even for Alibaba, because in the system everything appears normal: a shop gets an order, ships a package, and then later receives a user review from the customer.

Chinese authorities will have the same problem when they begin attempting to enforce the new law that forbids this kind of fakery next week. “When the new law is enforced, it will definitely have a shocking effect,” Nanjing Qinhuai Sales Association secretary-general Gao Fei told Techweb. “But as to the particulars of enforcing it, I fear that collecting evidence will be very difficult.”

(Source: Techweb)