Bad Recommendations
We found more discrepancies between the store recommendations made by shopping engines and the warnings about the same stores from consumer groups. When we went window shopping at NexTag for a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT digital camera, the shopping engine recommended, by way of its Trusted Seller logo, several online stores with "unsatisfactory" BBB ratings and complaints filed against them at the New York Department of Consumer Affairs.
One of NexTag's Trusted Sellers is IbuyDigital, a company based in Brooklyn, New York. Despite positive reader ratings on NexTag's site, the store has earned an "unsatisfactory" rating with the BBB. The most common complaints were delivery and refund problems and dubious selling practices. IbuyDigital has received 30 complaints in the last 12 months, and in nearly half the cases, the company made no attempt to settle the dispute through the BBB.
When we searched at Yahoo Shopping for popular consumer electronics (a portable DVD player, an iPod, a digital camera, a camcorder, a GPS navigator, a portable game system, and a flat-panel display), nearly a third of the merchants that came up in search results had "unsatisfactory" ratings with the BBB. In one case, a search for a Panasonic portable DVD player on Yahoo Shopping delivered prices from seven stores; four of the companies had "unsatisfactory" BBB ratings.
The current systems are better than nothing, Comparison Engines' Smith says. Even a few negative merchant reviews can be all a shopper needs to decide to investigate further into a company's reliability, he explains; without merchant reviews, consumers would be completely in the dark.
Review Déjà Vu
Positive customer reviews can bring lots of business to a retailer. Forty percent of adults use consumer product ratings and reviews in their online purchase decisions, according to Forrester Research. But how reliable are those ratings?
An examination of the customer reviews at Shopping.com, Yahoo Shopping, NexTag, and PriceGrabber showed patterns that seem to indicate cheating. For example, on Shopping.com, we found a comment that read "my order was delievered [sic] on the day promised at the agreed upon price." We found the exact same comment--with the misspelling--and the accompanying rating across multiple engines used to praise VioSoftware.com, Computer3G, and Butterfly Photo.
We were able to find numerous additional instances of duplicate merchant reviews used across multiple engines--all of them overwhelmingly positive.
Butterfly Photo's Eli Sakkal said he was unaware of the identical merchant reviews for his store. He said he would investigate the matter further.
"Duplicate ratings can sometimes be a bogus review left by the merchant or an interested party," says Kamran Pourzanjani, chief executive officer for PriceGrabber. He also suggests that sometimes lazy reviewers will copy someone else's review and switch out the company name. "Finding fraudulent reviews is a hard game of cat and mouse," he says, and adds that PriceGrabber rejects 5 to 7 percent of submitted reviews for being suspected fakes.
Shopzilla's Malani says that, "In the same way that Google is constantly having to improve its methods for defending against the spamming of its index, so too are we (and our comparison shopping competitors) defending the quality of our ratings against periodic spamming."
Shopping.com's Goldman investigated our findings, and subsequently several merchants--in addition to Butterfly Photo--were suspended from the Shopping.com network.
Chris Sato, senior director of products for Yahoo Shopping, declined to comment on our findings, except to say that Yahoo Shopping "takes fraud very seriously, and when a company is found committing fraud, the merchant is removed from the Yahoo Shopping database." He also added that merchant reviews are simply a "starting point" for consumers doing their homework.
Like a Bad Penny
It is policy at most shopping-engine companies to kick off merchants that use deceptive practices like posting fake reviews to boost their rankings. Even so, bad merchants often try to sneak back in the engines' listings by using different business names.
When PriceGrabber started receiving an unusual number of consumer complaints about a company called The New Connection, it removed the company from its index of stores. Later, according to Pourzanjani, the company tried to get relisted under a new name, Foto Connection. When PriceGrabber figured out the connection, it removed Foto Connection too, he says.
Links between digital e-tailers are never straightforward, says Tony Barbera, an investigator with the Better Business Bureau serving metropolitan New York City. We'd agree, based on our examination of Foto Connection. The company does business under at least 11 different names, according to the BBB, which also reports that "Complaints to the Bureau indicate that this company has a pattern of misleading and deceptive business practices."
Without much effort we were able to find other examples of companies listed on shopping engines' sites that appear to be independent but share a single postal address, according to BBB records and Internet registration paperwork. In some cases, these companies come up in the same product searches, allowing them to dominate the shopping engines' listings.
When we searched the shopping engine NexTag for a Pentax Optio A20 Digital Camera, we found IbuyPlasma, IbuyDigital, and dbuys.com--all of which share the same postal address--in the same search result. Each of them offered a different price, but within a very narrow range. Searching on Shopzilla, Shopping.com, MySimon, and PriceGrabber for the same product produced similar results, with at least two stores that are owned by IbuyDigital, according to BBB records, showing up in searches at each shopping engine.
PriceGrabber's Pourzanjani said he permits some stores that have been listed with PriceGrabber for years to maintain multiple identities. Yahoo Shopping's Sato says that its engine allows companies to operate on its site under multiple names, adding that doing so allows them to appeal to different audiences. But Shopzilla's Malani says the practice of one store dominating search results gives consumers less choice of who to consider shopping from. The practice is prohibited on Shopzilla's site, she says, and added that any instance of it happening would be investigated.
"If comparison engines really want their services to deliver the best prices from the largest selection of online stores, then they would do a better job at preventing essentially the same company from appearing multiple times in search results," says e-commerce expert Gary Stein, of Freestyle Interactive.
Conclusion: Skepticism Required
The shopping engines say they are doing their best to deliver the lowest prices from top-notch merchants. "If we let our customers down, they don't come back," Malani says. She says the industry has nothing to gain from steering customers wrong.
There is no question that shopping engines are valuable tools for shoppers seeking product, merchant, and pricing information. But it's clear from our investigation that unsavory vendors and questionable reviews regularly make their way onto shopping engines. Consequently, you might want to view their recommendations with some skepticism. Digging a little deeper into stores' reputations could save you time, money, and aggravation.
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