Dive Brief:
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SnagShout, a site offering discounts in exchange for reviews on products on Amazon, launched Wednesday, the company announced.
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Users enjoy discounts of 30% to 90%, and obtain their coupons through SnagShout to use on Amazon.
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Merchants, meanwhile, can view their products’ reviews and conversion through SnagShout’s automated review dashboard.
Dive Insight:
It’s easy to see the appeal of SnagShout for consumers, but hard to know how useful such incentivized reviews are for merchants.
Research shows that consumers use product reviews to help them make decisions and favor online retailers that include reviews. In fact, a recent survey by PowerReviews asking 800 U.S. consumers how ratings and reviews impact their decision-making, where they look for information, and how it affects their purchase behavior found that consumers value reviews, both positive and negative, and expect to see them in every channel.
But reviews must be trustworthy, and paid reviews — which these essentially are — may disrupt the honesty that trustworthiness requires.