Fake reviews are a huge issue on Amazon. So is fake products, and maybe even fake merchants: those sellers on Amazon Marketplace who are at best low quality and at worst serious scammers.
The new Fakespot app essentially wraps Amazon within a layer that identifies all the poor quality sellers and filters out fake reviews. At least, that’s the promise.
From my story on Forbes:
Amazon is more than a store. There are so many products, so many brands, and so many stores-within-the-store that it’s essentially an abstraction layer over commerce. With 75 million products on the digital shelves, virtually anything you want, from almost any brand, is available on Amazon. And that has enabled Amazon to take a massive $367 billion slice of digital commerce in the United States: bigger than the next nine players combined, according to eMarketer. That’s literally 50% of the market accumulating to one company.
Now there’s a layer on top of Amazon.
And it’s one that will eventually rest on Walmart, eBay, Best Buy, Sephora, and probably other stores as well. Fakespot is launching “the world’s first secure shopping browser” in a new app, Fakespot Secure Shopping.