Reviews play an important part in helping potential customers decide who they do business with.
If you offer a facility for customers to review your business, product or service, employ a third party to manage your reviews, or offer your services in relation to managing reviews for another trader’s business, you need to be aware of the rules that apply.
What is a consumer review?
A consumer review is an assessment of a product, service, digital content or experience, including an experience with a trader or any other matter related to a transactional decision.
Consumer reviews can take various forms, for example
- text a written blog or a comment posted under a product listing on a website
- speech a verbal opinion expressed in a video or sharing platform
- graphic representation a star rating next to a restaurant name in search engines or a thumbs up next to a ‘helpful’ review
A review does not have to be provided by a customer to be a consumer review.
What is consumer review information?
Consumer review information is basically any data that comes from or is influenced by what people say in their reviews. It can include overall ratings (e.g. five stars), review counts (e.g. 50 people have given a five-star review) or rankings (e.g, customer favourite or best rated.)
Types of deceptive reviews
- It is important that reviews and review information is accurate and trustworthy. There are several types of deceptive reviews and review information that your customers might see
- Fake reviews – a review that looks or claims to be genuine when it is not. A fake review can be a positive or negative review.
- Concealed incentivised reviews – a review that hides or does not make clear that they have been incentivised. For example, not making it clear that someone has been offered a free gift to write a review or an online influencer receiving payment or commission for making a video to review a product.
- False or misleading consumer review information – this includes information gathered from lots of individual reviews to give one overall score or rating but is based on fake reviews. It can include suppressing negative reviews and picking only good reviews.
How the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Act 2024 (DMCCA) regulates online reviews and consumer information
The DMCCA is concerned with preventing unfair trading practices when dealing with your customers.
Under the DMCCA, specific provisions take into account fake reviews, concealed incentivised reviews and misleading consumer reviews and consumer review information.
You are not permitted to supply with a view to publish, or to instruct someone else to supply or write
- a fake consumer review
- a consumer review that hides the fact that it has been incentivised
Publishing consumer reviews or consumer review information in a misleading way is also prohibited. Offering services to do any of the practices outlined above or to facilitate them is also prohibited. You are responsible for any publication formats you operate.
These might include
- websites
- social media pages
- search services
- online marketplaces
- specialist review websites
- trader recommendation platforms
- printed publications
Business responsibilities for handling consumer reviews
Each individual trader or third party who publishes reviews and review information is responsible for
- Taking reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent and/or remove fake consumer reviews, concealed incentivised reviews, misleading reviews or false or misleading consumer review information.
- Taking steps to prevent and remove banned content, even if you have made arrangements with a third party to monitor reviews and information.
- Considering outdated genuine reviews – if your product changes over time you need to consider if older genuine reviews could potentially now be misleading.
- Developing a published policy that clearly prohibits fake reviews and states your approach to incentivised reviews and consumer review information.
- Completing a risk assessment to assess the risk to consumers of encountering banned reviews or misleading review information on your media and identify measures to address these risks. Assessing the risk is not a one-off exercise, so you should do this regularly.
- Having processes in place to help detect banned reviews and false and misleading review information, then investigate and take actions to remove the content and prevent it from reappearing. You should regularly assess the effectiveness of your processes and actions.
