Free with your five star review

I’ve been reading a  lot today about VIP Deals, a company obviously run by boneheaded morons. They offered to (and did) refund Amazon.com customers’ purchases if they reviewed a VIP Deals product that they purchased, the Vipertek Kindle Fire case. The incredibly helpful company strongly hinted that these reviews should give the products 5 stars. As of last week, 93% of the case’s reviews gave it 5 stars. Amazon for its part, denied knowing of any wrongdoing before being approached by the New York Times about this matter. Within days though, the reviews were gone from the online merchant, and the product went from unavailable to being removed entirely from Amazon.com.

This whole sequence of events leaves me with a ton of questions. The first is, how did VIP Deals even make any money off of this? They refunded customers’ entire purchases in return for (favorable) reviews. There’s no way to know if everybody who bought this case received the offer, or how many of them accepted it, but I wonder how many customers actually ended up paying for this item? Was it really cheap enough to make that the amount paid by those who didn’t write reviews covered the costs of those who did? Also, how did Amazon not smell a rat with this? It’s pretty telling that some of the reviews even mentioned a deal or having their money refunded. While I don’t expect a human at Amazon to read every single review before it’s posted (even though that’s what the retailer says happens), you’d think that somebody, human or machine, would have caught wind of something weird with this item.