launcht Research reveals that 93 percent of shoppers say the testimonials they read affect their purchasing decisions. In an era where we are buying things online without seeing them in person, this is somewhat understandable. The personal experiences of other consumers can resonate more than the sales jargon they may encounter in stores, and that’s why 85 percent of them trust online reviews as much as advice from friends.
But here’s the problem: not all review sites, nor the reviews left on them, are born equal. The trust placed in these platforms means there’s a lot of manipulation going out on there. According to the same survey, four in five of us have read a fake review in the past year, and 84 percent of us have admitted we struggle to decipher which posts are authentic.
Blockchain could help the public trust the substance of the reviews they see online. The technology has the potential to substantially reduce the number of testimonials which have been written with a hidden agenda – testimonials which mislead customers and cause them to spend their hard-earned cash on goods or services that aren’t up to scratch. Platforms such as UUNIO are vowing to create spaces where testimonials are written “without external influence or interaction.” It has the ambition of bringing together reviews of “everything in the world” and rewarding the people who write them with cryptocurrency – irrespective of whether what they’ve got to say is good or bad.
