Author: Giles Thomas

Giles Thomas is the author of AcquireConvert.com. He is an experienced ecommerce expert.

He is the CEO of Whole Design Studios an official Shopify expert and partner agency since 2014.

He is also the Executive Director of FOE.Global, where he runs a merger and acquisitions fund for web 2 digital assets.

He was previously the head marketing mentor at the Google Launchpad accelerator where he helped incubate many ecommerce brands.

He is also a member of the Shopify commerce coach progam.

You can find him on Linkedin and the agency Whole Design Studios on Linkedin as well.

You can also follow Giles on his AcquireConvert profiles on Youtube, Twitter and Facebook.

Ecommerce UX Shopify App

Fake Shopify Reviews: What Are They & Should You Consider Them?

Post author By Giles Thomas
Post date June 13, 2022

Genuine five-star reviews are the social proof you need to establish credibility and build trust with would-be customers. Brightlocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2022 found that 77% of customers “always” or “regularly” read reviews when browsing for local businesses.

If fake reviews are part of your Shopify marketing strategy, you need to take a long, hard look at your business and start considering the steps needed to improve its quality so that you get so many great reviews from real customers that you don’t need fake ones.

Let’s take a closer look at fake reviews and what search engines, Shopify and you can do to stay on the right side of the line with your review strategy.

What are fake Shopify reviews?

Successful Shopify merchants understand the power of positive reviews, like this product page from the Manitobah Mukluks store:

Having people write fake Shopify reviews is a strategy employed by some businesses to try to boost credibility amongst potential customers. It is usually attempted by merchants who are new to the marketplace and struggling to compete with the businesses that have patiently built credibility and trust amongst their target audience.

Fake reviews written for your own store generally fall into three categories:

Written by someone who has not used the product or service
Written by some who is paid to write the review
Written by someone who receives the product or service for free on the understanding that a positive review will follow

But there’s a darker side to fake reviews too: fake negative reviews.

Some ecommerce businesses pay fake reviewers to ruin the reputation of a competitor by leaving fake reviews on their store.

If a potential customer is comparing products between your business and a competitor and reads a damaging review of the competitor’s product, you can guess what might happen next: if all else is equal, the customer may favor you.

The business impact of fake Shopify reviews

Whether you’re the target of paid negative reviews or you pay reviewers to leave positive reviews about your own products/services, these activities can damage your Shopify business.

Consider what happened to one skincare brand that sells products through the Sephora website in late 2019…

Sephora is one of many makeup brands to use Shopify. One of its partner brands, Sunday Riley, was investigated and fined by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for misleading consumers by posting fake reviews of the company’s products on the Sephora website. This was done at the CEO’s direction and the company failed to disclose that the reviewers were company employees!

In other words, employees of Sunday Riley were asked to create fake accounts through Sephora and leave glowing reviews on their products. This has damaged the Sunday Riley brand and, by extension, Sephora.

Brand trust takes a long time to build but can be shattered with one FTC ruling. Andrew Smith, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection said the following about fake reviews:

“Dishonesty in the online marketplace harms shoppers, as well as firms that play fair and square…posting fake reviews on shopping websites or buying and selling fake followers is illegal. It undermines the marketplace, and the FTC will not tolerate it.”

In another example of fake reviews seriously backfiring, Cure Encapsulations was caught paying for fake Amazon reviews to falsely advertise its products in 2019.

The company paid for positive reviews, claiming that the products it sold were “powerful appetite suppressants” and weight loss supplements. It wanted to back these claims up and keep the rating above 4.3/5 stars because high Amazon customer ratings can significantly boost sales.

But the FTC investigated the company and discovered the reviews to be unsubstantiated. The settlement included an agreement to never repeat such claims and a $12.8 million fine!

There have been many other settlements in the US in such fake review cases as they also violate the practices of the Advertising and Marketing Communications Code of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), which includes the US advertising legal frameworks.

What can search engines do about fake reviews?

It’s not only the FTC that you need to watch out for if you decide to engage in fake review solicitation. You will be in Google’s bad books too.

Ultimately, Google must protect the user experience and accuracy of its results pages to protect its brand. It recognizes that “reviews are only valuable when they are honest and unbiased.”

So, including fake reviews on your Shopify website is a violation of Google’s terms of service. Google says this about it:

“Reviews are automatically processed to detect inappropriate content like fake reviews and spam. We may take down reviews that are flagged in order to comply with Google policies or legal obligations.”

Google’s policy towards “fake engagement” (as it is termed) can be summarized as follows:

Google is not letting this go any time soon. You can expect the platform to ramp up its checks with more elaborate measures to identify fake reviews as its technology develops even further (especially AI technology) and it develops further review guidelines for users to abide by.

A Google penalty for fake reviews is not something you want to happen to your Shopify store. That could severely impact rankings, traffic, and sales. You could even face a Google ban. Think twice (or more) before going down that road.

What can Shopify do about fake reviews?

Besides violating FTC and Google guidelines, fake reviews also breach Shopify’s Terms of Service.

Fake reviews can damage the Shopify brand and the company understandably wants to protect against the minority spoiling it for the majority.

According to Shopify, your store can be shut down at any time if you are caught:

Running a random review generator on your store or
Uploading fake reviews through an app

What can you do about fake Shopify reviews?

First up, understand that an odd bad review from customers should be expected. Not everyone can enjoy a stellar user experience every time.

Most shoppers understand this and will not be deterred by a bad review or two if there are enough positive reviews to drown them out. Customers also understand that it’s easier for an unhappy customer to lash out with a bad review than it is for a happy customer to take the time to leave a positive one.

Customers are also savvier now about spotting fake online reviews. They are not so easily fooled and make allowances for the competition potentially leaving fake reviews. However, if they spot you intentionally trying to mislead them with fake positive reviews you have paid for, they will be far less forgiving.

Genuine negative reviews should be responded to and learned from — so that you can improve your products, service and support. Feedback is an essential part of the growth process for ecommerce stores.

So, if you have paid someone to leave fake reviews on your Shopify store, remove them immediately. If you are a target for fake negative reviews on your Shopify store, consider the following:

Respond in a friendly way and offer a full refund. Even if there was no purchase, it shows that you have the best interests of customers at heart. If you can prove that the negative review is a fake one posted by the competition, consider reporting them to Shopify.
Identify “verified buyers” next to reviews. Every genuine customer who leaves a review on the Allbirds Shopify store is identified as such, as you can see here:
Gather plenty of legitimate reviews using a dedicated app. The more legitimate positive reviews you have, the less a few fake negative ones will matter. Drowning out fake reviews with happy customers is good for business. Reviews are so important that you should consider using a dedicated app like Fera, which helps you verify, manage, gather and display your reviews so that fake reviews are no longer an issue.

Fake reviews are just not worth it!

There’s no doubting the importance of social proof to ecommerce businesses. But fake social proof can derail your Shopify store in the long run and should not be an option for you.

Your customers and potential customers won’t mind a poor review or two if there are enough genuinely positive reviews to compensate.

The focus of your Shopify business should be on improving your products, marketing strategy, customer experience and support — not on trying to “game” the system by fabricating reviews.

Collect real review with a great app like Loox instead.

SEO Shopify Resources Hub

Ecommerce Blogs: WordPress Subdomain vs Shopify Blog

Post author By Giles Thomas
Post date May 31, 2022

Why should ecommerce stores set up a blog?

Don’t underestimate the power of a blog and its potential to drive traffic and potential customers to your store.

Regardless of what you sell, someone is searching online right now for more information, the latest news, and opinion on what’s best in your product niche. Your content helps answer those questions and can get you ranking highly in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

For instance, the supplement provider Bulletproof, a Shopify client, writes posts on supplements and nutrients, educating its audience and answering their main questions with detailed, long-form content like this:

When you search for what to look for in a greens powder supplement on Google, this is what the top of the page looks like:

The blog content that Bulletproof has written features directly at the top of the search engine results page in the most prominent position possible (it’s called “position zero” or the “featured snippet”).

So, by directly answering a question that its target clients search for, Bulletproof’s post can generate a large volume of click-through traffic to read it. Once readers are in the store, guess what? They look around and maybe buy there and then — or add the store to their watch list for next time.

Either way, blogging is good for business and ecommerce stores should get on board with developing interesting, informative and original content like this to reap the benefits.

Now, how do you do that?

Should you run a blog off your Shopify website, using the in-built blogging platform or use a WordPress blog hosted on a subdomain of your primary hosting (so it appears as a seamless attachment to your store)?

Let’s break it down into a few categories and see how they compare:

WordPress vs Shopify blog: Which is easier to set up?

Shopify makes it very simple to set up a blog using its inbuilt platform.

After logging in to your Shopify admin console and clicking on Online Store, you click on Blog posts and then the Create blog post button, like this:

When you click on Create blog post, you get taken to a page to start writing your blog post in a WYSIWYG editor (no HTML knowledge needed) like this:

With Shopify, it couldn’t be easier. No domain adjustments are required as it uses a sub-folder system on the main site. It may take a little time to get your posts looking how you want them to with the right design, images, headers and so on but basically anyone can do it.

With WordPress, there are a few more hoops to jump through.

You will need a WordPress blog hosted with its server somewhere. We recommend WPX. Then you will need to contact the domain registrar to get a subdomain of your main domain setup to point at the WordPress hosting IP address:

myshopifystore.com may point to your Shopify store.
blog.myshopifystore.com may point to your WordPress blog.

You will also need to add a Blog menu item in your Shopify store settings and link to the blog so that visitors to your website can access it from the main menu on every page, like this:

In fact it’s best to copy the whole header and footer of your Shopify store to the WordPress blog for UX. Although from an SEO perspective its best to leave the blog as only a blog. As Google likes to make it hard to rank collection and product pages, because they want you to pay for Google Shopping ads.

WordPress vs Shopify blog: Which is better for search?

Improving performance in search is a big reason for investing time and money into a blog, so this is a key factor to assess for Shopify and WordPress.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is complex and many ranking factors go into successful search performance. Backlinko names 200 ranking factors for Google.

As far as WordPress vs Shopify blogs go, the SEO advantage is with WordPress.

Page-load speed affects SEO and user experience, especially for mobile users. WordPress outperforms Shopify for speed as you have more control over the server, server type (Eg Apache etc), caching, CDNs and more.
People believe the Shopify subfolder blog will perform better than one on a subdomain like WordPress, in fact due to your inability to change the URL structure in Shopify WordPress ranks better. This is because the Shopify blog URL depth is 3 layers deep which is not recommended by Google. Eg bhoma.com/blogs/jewelry-blog/types-of-bracelets/ Whereas WordPress is just blog.bhoma.com/types-of-bracelets/

Both Shopify and WordPress allow you to look after the on-page optimization of your blog posts relatively easily, adding title, meta descriptions, and optimizing keyword usage but it is mainly the overall quality of your content, backlinks and usability signals that will dictate search rankings.

WordPress is far better for SEO due to the URL structure of Shopify blogs its really

WordPress vs Shopify blog: Which is better for branding?

How well your blog fits in with your overall branding is another factor that may influence your decision.

How do WordPress and Shopify blogs compare for design and branding? When potential customers arrives on your blog, do they associate the content immediately with you and your store?

Both WordPress and Shopify offer a variety of themes for your blog.

WordPress offers thousands of eye-catching designs for your blog. Shopify is more restrictive in this respect but there are still plenty to choose from and this should certainly not be a deal-breaker.

Besides, the blog that’s built into the store shares the theme with the store so it retains the same look and feel, which provides consistency for your brand. If you change your store theme, the design of your blog changes with it. This is important in developing trust with customers, who want to be sure they are dealing with the same brand. And trust equates to sales, as we know.

If you use WordPress, you will need to play around quite a bit more to develop a consistent look and feel and make your blog appear as an extension of your main store. It can be done, it’s just not as automatic as with a Shopify blog. You may need the help of a developer or at least someone with good technical design skills.

Ultimately, the themes on offer from both Shopify and WordPress will be adequate for most stores but, if not, a developer can help you custom-design what you need for either platform.

WordPress vs Shopify blog: Which is more flexible?

When it comes to flexibility and adaptability, WordPress may win the day over Shopify.

One thing to be aware of is that Google changes its policies and algorithms regularly so search performance can rise or fall according to the prevailing thinking. Many sites have experienced rapid “overnight:” falls from grace due to a change of Google’s algorithm.

When this happens, as it inevitably will again, it pays to have a flexible blog that can adapt quickly to the changes. We cannot predict where Google will take its algorithm but by focusing on high-quality, informative content, you can’t go far wrong.

In recent years, Google added “rich snippets” and “People may also ask” sections to its results pages, for instance — which has caused many blogs to change their approach.

Say that Google started to reward posts of 2,000 words or more or gave priority to posts that included video. You may need to adjust your blogging approach to retain good rankings.

Shopify keeps a fairly tight control on what you can and can’t do with your blog. It is less flexible than WordPress in this respect. WordPress has a huge ecosystem of almost 60,000 plugins, including thousands that relate to blogs. These expand functionality and allow extra flexibility. You can also ACF or Advanced Custom Fields in WordPress to control the blog meta data however you want.

The Shopify app store has plenty of blog apps but much fewer relating directly to blogs than WordPress. It’s something you might bear in mind when comparing WordPress vs Shopify blogs.

Certain features that you might like to add to your blog posts are easier with WordPress than Shopify because of the extra plugins to add to these features — including comments section functionality and adding a table of contents.

These rather basic requirements are more difficult with a Shopify blog as they are not part of its native functionality. You may have to add a table of contents manually (with internal linking) or hire a developer if you can’t find a suitable app to look after the task, for instance.

Conclusion: WordPress or Shopify blog?

Ultimately due to the SEO URL structure of Shopify blogs, serious stores focused on SEO have no option but to use WordPress as a subdomain blog. We’ve tested this with our own stores like Bhoma.com and it’s much easier to rank even with building a new backlink profile for the WordPress subdomain. If Shopify changes the blog to allow a different URL structure, then we will revise our position.