Image: dailyfinance.com

Yesterday, I received a deluge of emails from worried friends. The reason? This update on Amazon reviews, posted on Amazon’s blog by Chee Chew, VP of Customer Experience. It announced how so-called ‘incentivized reviews‘ – i.e. reviews in exchange for free stuff – are now prohibited:

“Our community guidelines have always prohibited compensation for reviews, with an exception – reviewers could post a review in exchange for a free or discounted product as long as they disclosed that fact. These so-called ‘incentivized reviews’ make up only a tiny fraction of the tens of millions of reviews on Amazon, and when done carefully, they can be helpful to customers by providing a foundation of reviews for new or less well-known products.

Today, we updated the community guidelines to prohibit incentivized reviews unless they are facilitated through the Amazon Vine program.

Mercifully, it turns out that…