Amazon Suspends Chinese Sellers Over Fake Reviews

Amazon has suspended hundreds of Chinese sellers over policy violations in the last two months. The suspended sellers include Mpow and Aukey, which are among the major Chinese sellers on Amazon.

Marketplace Pulse data says that nearly 300 individual seller accounts based in China have been suspended. These also include sellers of dozens of best-seller items on Amazon, exceeding annual sales of $1 billion.

This suspension is a result of fake reviews that the sellers were posting on the website. Amazon claims to have removed 200 million fake reviews before anyone ever saw them. However, the Chinese sellers posting fake reviews on Amazon apparently managed to bypass the platform’s automation.

How Chinese Sellers Posted Fake News On Amazon?

While Amazon has automation in place to detect fake reviews, the suspended Chinese sellers tricked the platform. They did so by adding product inserts with gift cards in exchange for reviews. Some were also part of discount groups on social networks.

What’s more surprising is that many of the suspended sellers are selling decent products acknowledged by multiple websites for their quality. These are not all shady products looking to make a quick buck. However, the sellers decided to do it anyway to stay on top.

Among the removed products, there’s also the Fairywill electric toothbrush, which was appreciated by GQ as one of the best electric toothbrushes. This should give you some idea about the quality of the products that were suspended because of the seller’s suspension.

Marketplace Pulse also says that a few Chinese sellers suspended from Amazon have declared layoffs and bankruptcies. The removal of sellers has also put Chinese Amazon seller aggregators’ work on a hold.

Currently, Amazon is facing an antitrust case in India for favoring a handful of sellers. Now in China, Amazon’s suspension on sellers has put 300 sellers in a tough spot. However, in China’s case, the sellers are also to blame for tricking the platform for fake reviews.

Seeing from another angle, if the users posting a positive review were later dissatisfied with the product, there would’ve been returns of refunds initiated. The Marketplace Pulse report says nothing about returns, so the major reason for the suspension of these sellers has to be Amazon policy violation.