Amazon finally prohibits incentivized customer product reviews -- mostly

Amazon is my absolute favorite retailer. Not only are its prices fair, but with a Prime subscription, I get free two-day shipping on many products. Instant gratification is a must nowadays, and waiting more than a couple of days for an item to arrive can be unbearable. Of course, Prime gives you much more than just fast shipping, but I digress.

Another great aspect of the site is the customer reviews, helping shoppers find quality products based on the honest recommendations of others. Sadly, incentivized reviews have damaged the trustworthiness of the feedback. Too many recent Amazon reviews have the caveat that the product was given to the reviewer for free in exchange for a review. Many people, including yours truly, were getting tired of seeing this. Thankfully, as of today, Amazon is prohibiting these incentivized reviews.

"Our community guidelines have always prohibited compensation for reviews, with an exception -- reviewers could post a review in exchange for a free or discounted product as long as they disclosed that fact. These so-called 'incentivized reviews' make up only a tiny fraction of the tens of millions of reviews on Amazon, and when done carefully, they can be helpful to customers by providing a foundation of reviews for new or less well-known products", says Amazon.

The retailer further says, "today, we updated the community guidelines to prohibit incentivized reviews unless they are facilitated through the Amazon Vine program. We launched Vine several years ago to carefully facilitate these kinds of reviews and have been happy with feedback from customers and vendors. Here’s how Vine works: Amazon -- not the vendor or seller -- identifies and invites trusted and helpful reviewers on Amazon to post opinions about new and pre-release products; we do not incentivize positive star ratings, attempt to influence the content of reviews, or even require a review to be written; and we limit the total number of Vine reviews that we display for each product".

This is excellent news for Amazon customers, as they can begin trusting customer reviews on the site again. True, Amazon is a bit hypocritical for keeping its Vine program running, but at least the company has checks in place to make sure abuses are limited. Ultimately, this move should restore order to the website, and it is a win for both the retailer and its customers.

Vine aside, Amazon is allowing incentivized reviews for one product type only -- books. The retailer claims that complimentary advanced copies of books will still be allowed for review purposes. Amazon claims that this is an "age-old practice", but tradition hardly seems like reason for an exception.

Are you happy to see incentivized reviews (mostly) banned from Amazon? Tell me in the comments.

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