Fighting fake reviews: Experts explain why Ozon tests public customer profiles

Maxim Popov, a market expert and co-founder of the OneScreen analytics service and Paragraph Collection brand, believes that public profiles are a way to assess the suitability of reviewers.

“This is necessary so that other buyers can assess the suitability of the person who left the reviews. Self-repurchases and, therefore, “self-reviews” – the mechanics of improving ratings and search results by repurchasing one’s own products from fake accounts – are still flourishing on Ozon,” Popov said.

According to the co-founder of analytics service OneScreen, many current reviews are fictitious.

“To make it easier for buyers to distinguish between real users leaving a review and fake ones, it’s a good idea to open profiles,” Popov added.

Popov also believes this is a way to attract attention. Customers will now have to log into the app to see their shopping list and consider making their account public.

“And if a person enters the ‘basket’, he or she will probably order something else or continue ‘travelling’ around the market, thus being able to increase sales volume again,” the expert concluded.

The Ozon marketplace has begun testing open user profiles to possibly go beyond the media advertising market, says Maxim Samoilenko, marketing director of the Anabar marketplace analytics and promotion service.

“If Ozon continues to promote this feature, we can talk about its desire to make money from the influencers who came. The market is becoming an increasingly important player in the media market. For example, Ozon media advertising is a clear competitor to Internet advertising in its classical sense, among players such as Yandex, VK, etc.,” says Samoilenko.

• On September 9, it became known that the Ozon marketplace started testing a new option in the app – “Public Profile”. It will contain reviews of purchased products. The marketplace is confident that customers will want to follow other buyers with a similar purchasing profile in order to choose the right products. During the test, you can go to the page of a person with a public profile using an invitation link that the user will send to another Ozon buyer. Based on non-anonymous reviews left about a product, it will also be possible to access the buyer’s public profile and subscribe.

According to the marketing specialist, the next step is to address the influencer marketing market.

“There are opinion leaders on social media, they can post advertising content and their audience will follow suit. What is the ozone layer now? It is tens of millions of users who spend much more time on the site than it seems at first glance,” the expert added.

Popov adds that the story with influencers is possible, but it should be noted that their accounts will only publish advertising actions and not actual purchases on the markets.

Sellers praised the new Ozon feature, including the ability to make anonymous reviews. As one of the sellers, Ksenia Yanina, told RB.RU, the new feature will allow removing low-quality products from the marketplaces. At the same time, following other users with a similar purchase history will make it easier to advertise products.

Safe Internet League director Ekaterina Mizulina became interested in Ozon’s open profiles and started receiving complaints about the automatic disclosure of customers’ personal data. In Mizulina’s response, the marketplace explained some of the features of how public profiles work.

• The “Public Profile” will only include reviews that the user has left that are not anonymous and are not related to products for people over 18 years of age. If the user has not left any comments, no one will see their purchase.
• The information that the shopping list is available to everyone is not true.
• The client, if he wishes, can always change the public name and hide his profile by completely disabling the “Public Profile” function.
• Subscribing to other users will help you choose the right products.

Previously, Wildberries launched a new feature “WB Club”, within which users can receive discounts on subscriptions and a special checkmark for being a member of this club.