From having only 5-star ratings, Des Count, our man in the gift shop, is being hit by mysterious 1-star ratings which lack any comments. What funny business is this?

WE HAVE BEEN in retail for around five years now. Once we began trading, we were advised by the website guru who was building our retail website that we should set up a Google My Business account as soon as possible. This would enable us to post photos and information about our brand to the search engine.

Our future-seeing website man advised us the phone book and Yellow Pages would be obsolete in a few years and most people would search for our business online. He turned out to be right. The majority of calls and enquiries we get to our stores come via search engines.
One of the important things about having a Google My Business account is your shop is able get its star rating. You’ve seen
them - most companies range from 3-star to 5-star ratings.

Up until the middle of last year we had a 5-star rating on Google, which we were very proud of. Our customers stated they had given us a 5-star rating for our impeccable customer service, our friendly staff, and our amazing product range.
Not only does a 5-star rating give you a warm feeling inside and confirmation you are on the right tracks with your business, it also puts you at the top of any organic search.

So, when people are searching for “shopping” in your town, if you are lucky enough to have 5-star rating you generally feature at the top of any search. On many occasions, we have had customers come in just because we have appeared at the top of an organic search.
A few months ago, however, we suspected a little foul play and skullduggery was going on. We noticed that one or two visitors to our Google page were leaving just star ratings, rather than full reviews. This was unheard of before. The shop got just a 1-star and then two 1-star ratings, with no additional comments. We had never had such a low rating before.

We were devastated and wondered what we had done wrong. This of course started to bring down our average star rating. The following week another 1-star rating appeared and then another. Our overall star rating was starting to plummet.

The odd thing was that all these 1-star ratings were from men, but our shop is aimed primarily at women. We had never had a review and star rating from a man before, so to have a number of them in a matter of weeks was a little suspicious.

As we don’t have any hard evidence to present to Google, this is only anecdotal. We would be given short shrift from them, I think. But fake reviews are a growing problem for those of us who own small businesses. It is very easy to create a new account and leave either a positive or negative review for any business.

Google has policies covering people who leave reviews, but how do I prove these people are trying to leave reviews to reduce my rating? I guess if I wanted to monitor all this, then I could take the evidence to Google. They are fairly easy to get hold of via social media and they do answer, but here the keyword is proof. And we have to find the time to do it.

The ease with which the review system can be abused was revealed in 2017 when journalist Oobah Butler tricked TripAdvisor into making his fake restaurant the top-rated place to eat in London.

The venue, The Shed, turned out to be an actual garden shed in Shoreditch, where he’d invited friends to dinner and asked them to leave positive reviews on dishes he made from household products. And the review website fell for it.

With that story, no one was hurt and nobody’s living was endangered, it just provoked a few red faces at TripAdvisor HQ.
But if we believe in our case there is foul play going on with our Google rating, to force it lower and therefore make our brand less desirable for potential customers, where’s our redress? What’s the offence? A bit of corporate retail sabotage maybe, but how do we prove it?

The answer is you can’t. You just have to live with it. We have sent emails to the ‘reviewers’ asking the reason for the low star ratings, but of course they don’t reply, probably because they don’t exist.

While having a few negative reviews on Google won’t ruin us, it’s just another thing to worry about in the ever-changing world of retail.

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