Hello, ho, ho! Here's an important message from Network Rail for anyone who's travelling by train this Christmas and New Year.

We'll be working over the festive period to make improvements to the railway. Most of the network remains open, but some train services will be affected from Sunday the 25th of December until Monday the 2nd of January.

So, to keep your festive plans on track, please check before you travel at nationalrail.co.uk slash Christmas.

Back at it today, welcome to Sideosel School. This is your host, Chris Killabo. Thanks for tuning in wherever you are in the world.

I love hearing about real challenges that you or our other listeners are experiencing. Today we're going to hear from a listener who is an Amazon seller, and she's got a problem that is sadly not unique.

The problem is not that she lacks a great product, nor is the problem that there is insufficient demand. The problem is one of her competitors is buying up fake reviews, buying fake reviews in the Amazon store or for their Amazon listings.

By doing so, it gives that competitor an advantage in several ways. Anybody who looks at this category is going to see all those reviews, those bright, shining, positive reviews.

Most of them won't look at it that carefully. They'll just see that there are a lot of happy customers, or at least seemingly so.

So, a lot of them are going to go and purchase from that seller. That's why the seller or the competitor is buying those fake reviews.

So, if you find yourself in such a situation, what if anything can you do about it? That's the subject of today's episode, coming up after this quick sponsor message.

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Hey, Chris. This is Dabby from Seattle. I've been using the fulfillment by Amazon program to sell yoga mats and meditation journals.

Both of these markets are crowded with a lot of sellers, but that's partly because a lot of people buy yoga mats and journals. So I think there's plenty of room for small businesses like me.

I don't mind fair competition, but there's another seller who's been cheating the system. How are they cheating? Their reviews are fake. At least many of them. They have thousands of reviews, and it's obvious when looking carefully that many of them are from the same person or company.

They use similar language and phrasing and even the same spelling mistakes. But most of these reviews have the verified purchase tag. So they have to actually purchase from the business.

I've reported this to Amazon, but Amazon doesn't seem to care. Meanwhile, the sellers, thousands of reviews have catapulted them to the top of both categories, taking sales away from honest sellers like me. Can anything be done about this?

Dabby, I'm so sorry to hear about this. Well, first let me say congratulations on your business. Sometimes these crowded markets are good markets to go into. Indeed, there are a lot of people buying yoga mats and journals. So good for you. And I am sorry about this difficulty.

Unfortunately, a lot of people experience this, particularly with selling on Amazon. There are a lot of unscrupulous sellers who pay attention to product sales, categories and such. And when something is taking off, they're like, we're going to enter that market. And we're going to do everything we can to gain an advantage, including buying some reviews that are pretty clearly and obviously fake.

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