A month ago, gadget brands like Aukey and Mpow mysteriously disappeared from Amazon’s storefront. Now, the popular battery and charger brand RavPower has completely disappeared. Interestingly, today, Amazon also confirmed to The Verge that it has removed RavPower now and had previously removed Aukey and Mpow.
Though Amazon didn’t specify the reason, it is not hard to imagine what happened. Last Sunday, The Wall Street Journal’s Nicole Nguyen ran a story that her new RavPower charger included an offer for a $35 gift card in exchange for a review. This is a violation of company policy as Amazon banned incentivized reviews in 2016.
Nguyen tweeted “The company offered $35 gift cards for reviews on a product that was sold directly by Amazon itself. RAVPower acted as a wholesale vendor on that listing. https://t.co/6nazZZ5Wtb pic.twitter.com/znp9u48YHV”.
Earlier today, she tweeted “Following my fake review story, listings for Amazon-native electronics brand RAVPower are gone” retweeting Sunday’s post.
As of now, searches for “RavPower” don’t bring up any listings from the company. Existing links to RavPower products either point to Amazon’s “Sorry, we couldn’t find that page” cute 404 dogs, or listings that read “Currently unavailable.”
From this, we can assume, the same thing must have happened with Aukey, Mpow, and other lesser-known electronics retailers. RavPower has its own separate online shop with a high ranking in Google so it is not totally Amazon dependent like most other brands.
Fake, inflated, and paid reviews run rampant on Amazon so it seems the company has decided to take some against them. Though Amazon is not very successful in terms of getting rid of these types of reviews, Amazon is trying to clamp down on this kind of fraud.
In a blog post, Amazon claimed that last year, it has “stopped more than 200 million suspected fake reviews before they were ever seen by a customer.”
