> There are far too many businesses who've been open 10+ years with thousands of customers that have never felt the necessity to leave a review.

I wonder what could be a good way to incentivise this. If I like a restaurant, I'll go back multiple times. At most, I may leave a good review once. If I go to a bad place, I'm more likely to leave a bad review.

Maybe businesses could integrate a "did business here $x amount of times" button, similar to a like button or a check-in that would increment next to a review. If it was your first time, it could lead straight to leaving your first review.

My immediate thought is to have a 'universal review code' on your invoice, which somehow encodes the monetary amount of business as well as the date. Reviewers could use this code when leaving a review on a 3rd party site to prove they were a genuine customer. There's an opportunity for stalking or harassment if the business was able to correlate the code to an individual though, so the money and time might have to be bucketed. If a customer got a refund the same system could be updated to show the fact.

A company that sells a POS system (like Square) could do this. They'd have a record of verified purchases, and if you input your email, similar to with Amazon purchases, they can follow up with you to ask if you want to leave a review.

We were thinking about giving cards with the Tripadvisor name/link to restaurants to give then only to those customers that seems specially happy; however the local restaurants where I live are really technophobic so they just saw it as overhead with no benefit.

Technophobic? The industry that keeps insisting on just uploading PDFs of their menus instead of maintaining a proper website?

No way.

If a person has posted a completely bogus bad review, I, as the maligned merchant, have three choices. I can ignore it. I can post a response. I can sue the person.

I think it is quite reasonable for Yelp to note when merchants use the third option. As a consumer reading reviews, I learn slightly different things when I see:

A: Three good reviews and one bad review; the merchant responded to the bad review and their response sounds well-reasoned.

B. Three good reviews (one deleted review, but I can't see that) and one note from Yelp stating that the merchant has used the legal system to suppress reviews.

I do think it is important that since Yelp (not a customer) is making the statement that the legal threat was used, that Yelp take reasonable steps to ensure the legal threat actually occurred. Otherwise, a malicious user could falsely report receiving legal threats from a business as a way to harm their reputation.

A powerful aspect of foursquare is even if you don't check in, they've likely marked you as having been in a restaurant.

Feel like Yelp could at least use this for popularity measurements

Off-topic, but would Amazon have anything to lose if they completely purged all reviews by users without verified purchases?

It would certainly combat the spam reviews problem.

>but would Amazon have anything to lose

Potentially sales. Unfortunately they are in a spot right now where lots of normal people not aware of the fraud see a product with 2000 reviews and 4.5 stars and take that as a strong signal that it's a good buy. They are conditioned to think that 'lots of reviews == well vetted'. If suddenly the review counts plunge by 90% people might be more wary of making a purchase.

They almost need to figure out a way to keep both. Maybe keep the review count for everyone but make the star rating just based on verified purchases...

It'd be cool if they added a checkbox to see only verified reviews in your searches and product pages.

Amazon is already weighting reviews based on whether they are verified purchases, among other features: http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/amazon-updates-customer-reviews-...

Companies are gaming verified purchases now. There are several sites that provide a service of connecting reviewers with companies who provide their products for a hefty discount with the expectation of getting a perfect review.

Companies are allowed to vet your previous reviews to determine how likely you are to give a good review before giving you a discount code. If reviewers don't deliver, they stop getting discounted products, or even get banned from these sites.

That sounds like something the FTC should be all over.

Seems like an obvious thing for Amazon to check out then ban all reviews and or products on these services.

A few problems.

Banning products: Companies could knock out competing products by starting a "false flag" review campaign that Amazon eventually discovers.

Banning reviews: It can be legitimate to provide samples of products for people to review and helps encourage competition, it's more about the method of the approach.

The best approach is if Amazon just facilitated the whole approach to ensure integrity. I think they attempted this with their Vine program, but that might be too one-size-fits-all for some companies.

Banning products is not something you would do every day. It's the kind of thing you do randomly in large swaths so "false flag" operations are likely to hurt you as help and are not free.

Banning reviews: No it's not legitimate. Customer reviews are useful specifically because they are by people that thought the service might be worth while. If you can't afford a 911 or don't like the way it looks then your opinion is not meaningful.

From amazon's perspective review integrity is expensive but so is giving up. As a customer it feels like they gave up a while ago which opens them up to competitors.

EX: Newegg is where you buy video cards not Amazon.

Even verified purchases aren't necessarily real — some companies will reimburse reviewers to buy the product themselves so that it looks cleaner on paper. A good reviewer will mention that prominently first thing, but not all do.

probably those products which are only sold 'used' and only have 0-3 reviews total.

on anything with over 100 reviews, non-verified ones are just noise.