Buy positive reviews or delete negative ones

In the pool of competitors trust is crucial. Therefore, a large proportion of all consumers pays attention to the opinion of other customers when choosing a shop. Reviews, especially positive ones can have a decisive influence on your sales and consequently also on your turnover. There is hardly any other better way to generate trust with new prospects than through positive reviews. But especially at the beginning collecting a lot of positive reviews seems difficult.

So, what to do if you don’t have enough reviews? Everything can be bought these days, why not reviews? This quick way seems tempting, but is it really a good idea?

Our clear answer is NO. 

Why you shouldn’t buy any reviews

Hundreds of reviews with just one purchase or maybe even as a monthly subscription for one price? Doesn’t this sound way easier than collecting them from real customers and seems to be a practical deal?

Not really – buying reviews is illegal in most cases. According to the German law § 5 Paragraph 1 No. 1 of the Act against Unfair Competition (UWG) this can be a misleading commercial act, as the reviews are written without knowledge of the products or services with all their advantages and disadvantages. Interested parties receive a more positive or a distorted picture than they in case of real reviews and are intentionally deceived or misled.

As a result, customers which buy based on incorrect reviews may expect more than they get. In consequence they’ll be dissatisfied at a later point and in turn leave a negative review for your business or product. Your customers may even feel so deceived by the fake reviews that you will lose them forever. Purchased reviews are anything but beneficial for long-term, sustainable customer loyalty. It can also cause enormous damage to your image as soon as it becomes public that reviews have been manipulated and bought.

Since the topic of purchased reviews is being discussed more and more in the media, customers are being far more suspicious. They not only pay attention to the relevance of customer reviews, but also to the answers of the rated companies and fake reviews.

Last but not least, you would of course like to learn from the reviews for yourself and your shop or gain valuable insights in order to improve your marketing, your offers and your service or to develop something completely new. The more reviews you buy, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish real from false feedback and the more blurred your knowledge will be.

“The trust your customers and guests have in your shop or restaurant would be destroyed within a second by bought reviews, along with your sales and permanent loss of some customers. Honesty lasts the longest: It is worth it to collect reviews legally. You need real followers, real reviews, real engagement and real customer loyalty.” Markus Demirci, founder and CEO of mPocket.

Why you shouldn’t delete any reviews

Finding a friendly and personal answer to every review can be very exhausting in the case of negative or neutral reviews.

It would be much easier to simply delete unwanted and upsetting reviews.

But be careful: You should only delete customer reviews in absolute exceptional cases, for example if the statements violate the law or are demonstrably not the truth. Otherwise, word of you deleting easily will quickly been spread and will cause a lot more bad reviews.

Negative reviews often say more about the reviewer than about you, your service, or your business. Even neutral observers know that. So, use the opportunity to answer in order to present yourself openly, capable of criticism and solution-oriented.

The good news is: You don’t have to buy reviews or delete unwanted ones.

The key to satisfying customers and winning them is a professional review management, starting with actively asking your customers for reviews. Even more important is to respond promptly to all customer reviews. Regardless of the rating there is always a suitable answer. Stay calm and friendly, show understanding and empathy for all feedback and respond as personally as possible to every review. You may not be able to convince that one angry customer like this, but certainly silent observers who are thinking about buying from you.

With the right system, collecting reviews can in fact be faster and cheaper than manipulating.

How to collect more reviews, manage and respond to them in a clear and timely manner you can find out at www.mpocket.io.

With our mPocket app you create a direct connection between your customers and your local business. The app helps you to increase your customer frequency and your sales per customer by sending review requests with just one click or directly in the store. It will be easier for your customers to write reviews about your business, which helps you to achieve a better ranking and more visibility online and thus also offline. On average, our customers receive 40% more reviews with mPocket than before.

* For reasons of better legibility, the simultaneous use of male and female language forms is dispensed with. However, all descriptions apply to all gender types.

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