Somewhere, former product reviewers laugh ruefully, their vindication realized, yet their jobs are just as gone as they were before. E-retailing giant Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has finally awakened to the extent of bogus reviews on its site and has enlisted a variety of other companies to join in the fight to take out fake reviews. That’s not good enough for investors, however, as Amazon is down fractionally in Tuesday afternoon’s trading.
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Amazon is building a full coalition of online customer-facing entities, including Glassdoor, Trustpilot, Tripadvisor (NASDAQ:TRIP), and more, to form the Coalition for Trusted Reviews. The group is ideologically committed to ensuring that customers have access to “trustworthy consumer reviews” and is taking steps to ensure their ideology becomes a reality. So far, the plan amounts to developing a set of “best practices” in regards to hosting online reviews and sharing methods on how to detect fakes and weed them out.
The move comes at a particularly good time for Amazon, which is having some serious issues with consumer trust. A Reddit post detailed how “thousands” of shoppers were complaining about getting either mislabeled products or otherwise counterfeit products from their Amazon orders. Some attribute this to some of Amazon’s warehousing policies, but it’s not a good look either way.
Is It Worth Having Amazon Stock?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on AMZN stock based on 41 Buys and one Hold assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. Furthermore, the average AMZN price target of $176 per share implies 33.69% upside potential.
