Fake reviews in Chinese e-commerce : the case of wine

Abstract

The growth of the Chinese wine market has attracted the interest of wine exporters around the world. However, the Chinese market is very large and business conditions vary widely between regions. E-commerce appears to be a solution that is cheaper and simpler than alternatives and to be well established in the country as well. Yet many reports suggest that a large number of online reviews might be fake and are simply commissioned by merchants. This is worrying, as online reviews are crucial to sales performance, influencing purchasing decisions and search result rankings. To examine this problem, over 10,000 wine reviews were scraped from Jingdong, the second largest Chinese online retailer, and analysed using text classifiers created with autoML. The results lend credence to the suspicion that most wine reviews on Jingdong are fake.