Since May 7, panic has been spreading in South China City, where cross-border e-commerce sales in Shenzhen have been crowded together. Several cross-border Amazon stores were found to be abnormal, and the products were in a state of being removed from the shelves. Many Chinese cross-border merchants there have not yet fully recovered.
Some cybersecurity experts discovered an open AWS Elastic Search database containing more than 13 million direct exchanges between suppliers and customers who are willing to provide false reviews in exchange for free products.
According to the database, a routine for “click farming” on Amazon was exposed: the company will use servers to build open general programs, and Amazon sellers participating in the program provide product links that require five-star praises, and then comment writers will take orders to buy the product after seeing the links, and wait a few days after receiving the product and then create a 5-star review. After the Amazon seller confirms that all reviews have been completed, the reviewers will receive a refund via PayPal and can keep the products they purchased for free.
China’s cross-border e-commerce industry generally associates it with the above-mentioned incidents. When cross-border e-commerce became popular in China, a crisis came unexpectedly.
1. Click farming database leaked
After May 1st, a cybersecurity expert named Safety Detectives announced an open AWS ElasticSearch database. The data is related to fake review organizations on Amazon. More than 13 million direct exchanges between suppliers and customers show that these customers are willing to provide false reviews in exchange for free products.
This database also caused a large number of store and buyer accounts involved in false reviews to be leaked, including identity, chat, email address, Amazon account information, and other sensitive information of up to 13,124,962 pieces (data volume of more than 7GB), in addition, 75,000 Amazon accounts’ data has also been leaked.
At the same time, the database server was found to be located in China, but the owner of the Elastic Search server cannot be identified at the moment.
Through the above database, the click farming routines of big sellers have also been exposed. At the same time, many cross-border products from China were removed from Amazon. On the eve of the May Day holiday, some merchants discovered that a large number of product links in the store of the main brand Mpow under Amazon’s big merchant Pattoson could not be sold normally, and the product links were retained, but the details showed ‘Currently unavailable’. In the following week, some products of several Chinese merchants on Amazon, including those of the brands Aukey and Tacklife under Aukey Technology, OUTAD under Youkeshu, and some products of TOMTOP, successively showed similar phenomena.
It is generally believed in cross-border e-commerce businesses in China that the relevant processing is related to the click farming behavior in the above-mentioned stores. According to Caixin.com, the non-compliance of the heavy-handed governance under the platform mainly involved false comments. According to the aforementioned Amazon source, this round of delisting is not “centralized governance”, but the result of the permanent compliance team and monitoring mechanism being triggered: “In fact, governance is an ongoing action, and the number of sellers from China affected this time is relatively large. It involves listed companies, so the attention is higher.”
On May 9, Amazon issued an official response to this round of platform governance actions: “For violations of mall rules, we will quickly take measures: such as suspending or revoking sales rights. Amazon has the responsibility to take such measures, and it is also rigorous and prudent. Take corresponding actions to maintain a high-quality business environment.”
Up to now, the above companies still have products that are unavailable for purchase on Amazon, and the relevant web pages prompt “We do not know if and when the product will be restocked.”
“Click farms will definitely be discovered, Amazon will clean up sooner or later,” Wei Ni (pseudonym) who operates Amazon stores in Guangzhou is not surprised. “Amazon does this every year, and the crackdown on click farming has never stopped.”
Regarding the handling of high-selling products, Wei Ni also believes that Amazon has nearly 3.5 million newbie sellers, and Amazon’s move can also bring hope to them.
2. Click farming is risky
In recent years, Amazon has continued to act on click farms. This is not the first time that Amazon has dealt with click farms on the platform this year. In February this year, many Chinese sellers reported receiving Amazon’s warnings.
But click farms and fake reviews on Amazon have not disappeared. In July 2020, “mysterious seeds from China” became a hot topic in foreign media for a while. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2020, thousands of people in the United States received mysterious seed packages. They did not order seeds, and these goods are often labeled as jewelry, toys, or other commodities. This phenomenon has also occurred in other countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom.
According to the above report, these mysterious seed packages come from Amazon’s click farms. In order to make the fake sales appear real on the e-commerce website, the click farmers will send a package with a tracking number to the actual address. However, the click farmers will not send the actual products being promoted, but send cheap and light items such as seeds.
In addition to deleting comments and temporarily banning links, click farming is illegal, regardless of whether it is in China or overseas, click farms cannot be protected by law. For cross-border sellers from China, click farming also means legal risks.
In April 2015, Amazon filed a lawsuit against the website buyamazonreviews.com because this website provides merchants with paid four- and five-star reviews.
In October 2015, Amazon also took to court more than 1,000 paid users who wrote false reviews on the online platform Fiverr. These people provided false review posting services and sold them for $5 on Fiverr.com. Seller’s products are left with a “five-star” review service that symbolizes the best level. But Amazon has not sued the website as a platform.
As an intermediary platform that connects small service providers and users, Fiverr does not directly engage in click farming and comment reviews, and it explicitly prohibits users from selling such services on the platform.
In October 2016, Amazon sued two US sellers and one EU seller because Amazon found that 50% of the product reviews of these sellers were false reviews.
On February 19, 2019, the Federal Trade Commission (Federal Trade Commission, hereinafter referred to as FTC) also initiated a lawsuit against Amazon’s false reviews for the first time. The FTC suspects that the seller of the company named Cure Encapsutions spent money to hire a third-party agency to write and publish false reviews for the weight loss supplement product on Amazon, so that the product’s rating on Amazon has always remained above 4.3 stars (the highest 5 stars). This is also the first case in FTC history that questioned marketers’ use of false paid reviews on independent retail websites.
Falsified reviews will also be caught by competing sellers and become a weapon against opponents in legal proceedings. There was a similar case in Utah, USA. Vitamin Online sued Heartwise under the Lanham Act on the grounds that the defendant manipulated Amazon’s customer review system.
In the end, the court ruled that the actions of the defendant NatureWise prevented customers from recognizing the reviews. Some NatureWise reviews had a huge number of likes, which were actually false. The court stated that it did not provide real products in exchange for reviews. They were indeed false. The defendants have been established as false and deceptive violations and face high compensation.
3. The small card placed in the package
But the act of clicking farming did not stop.
Twitter user Corbin Davenport found that the Aukey product he received was accompanied by a small card. As long as he wrote a review on Amazon, he could get $100. “This violates Amazon’s seller rules, so it’s no wonder Amazon is dropping the big stick.” Corbin Davenport said.
According to Huang Tong (pseudonym), a cross-border e-commerce practitioner based in Shenzhen, “If they are closed, they are not wronged.” Huang Tong’s company has many operators that had worked for the above-mentioned companies. Huang Tong found out that they all have the resources for click farms.
However, many Chinese sellers believe that click farming may be a last resort. According to Amazon’s rules, when a new review is published, the product’s rating level will be changed accordingly, and it will be added to the total number of reviews, the total number of star ratings, and the average star rating. In addition, users can vote on reviews to show their usefulness, and the most helpful customer reviews are designated in a special section of each product page.
The sellers can improve their rankings, increase their conversion rate, and get a higher Listing ranking by click farms, and they can stand out in the homogeneous competition. This is not only the need to place PPC advertising (that is, pay-per-click advertising), but also a certain amount of sales and user praise in order to get a higher weight.
In Huang Tong’s view, this is also a different operation strategy for different categories. For the categories currently traded, due to the high value of the goods and different operating modes, the demand for click farms is not high.
In fact, click farming is not unique to Chinese cross-border sellers. “A group of foreigners are engaged in this matter, and there are many in India. They all do click farming under the banner of free products.” Huang Tong said.
However, Huang Tong believes that it remains to be seen how this incident will ferment and affect. “The big companies in Shenzhen have many accounts, hundreds of them, all work in one office, and they have been deployed in the early stage, and they are basically not related.”
In fact, this is not the first time Aukey has experienced an account closure. In 2006, Aukey founder Lu Haichuan opened more than 20 accounts on eBay, with monthly sales reaching 1 million US dollars, after which these accounts were suddenly closed. In the subsequent development, Aukey Direct (Aukey exclusive store), Tacklife Direct (Tacklife exclusive store) and Funnyhome-US (Aicok exclusive store) have all been closed. Since then, Aukey has adopted a single-brand plus store matrix layout model.
“In the past, some sellers whose stores were closed went to Amazon to make trouble, but the result was still the same.” Huang Tong said.
Source: Zhixiang