How much is a good review worth?

Reviews are helpful.. especially when they're good reviews. But in some cases, they are essential to doing business well. For instance, I was on Amazon.com shopping for printer toner cartridges. Some toner cartridge sets had terrible reviews. This scared me because I realized that the issues I had been having with my printer were due to leaking ink that other people who had written reviews had experienced. So I was specifically looking for toner cartridges with good reviews. I found one et of toner cartridges for sale had a ton of good reviews at a fairly cheap price.

I bought the toner cartridges and when I received the package, I got a coupon that told me that if I wrote a review on the product, that they would send me a $10 Amazon gift card. I immediately thought "cool, I can get $10 free" but then I thought, "wait what's the catch?" I quickly realized that all the reviews were written by people who received the coupon for the free gift card and immediately went online and wrote a good review before even knowing whether the ink was good or not.

Why do I know this? Because that's what I was about to do! Because why would you wait to write a review if you know you can get a $10 gift card now, and of course why would you give up your chance of possibly not getting the $10 gift card by writing a bad review? Very smart marketing technique I have to say. Makes you think how much does it cost to sway people to buy your product instead of someone else's by making sure that you get a ton of good reviews? Maybe only $10, maybe only $5, maybe less… people love free money so it's a great incentive to them. You can always add that extra into the sales price because having the good reviews will put you ahead of the competition with cheaper prices and bad reviews. This is great for products that have a lot of competition or products that people may be unsure of the quality when purchasing online.