Sports & Outdoors
Sports & Outdoors: growing 98% through a wave of suspicious reviews
A strong launch was followed by repetitive negative reviews across the niche. The team investigated the pattern without allowing it to derail the account.
Period: 2022 to 2023Amazon PPC Management
Results
Sales
+98%
ACoS
−14%
Profitability
+11%
All changes measured against the account's performance before the engagement.
Run by Vadim Martsev.
Why no brand name. The client is under NDA. The competitor involved is also not named. This page describes a pattern of behaviour and how to detect it, not an accusation against an identifiable company.
The listing was good and the launch was strong. Sales began moving quickly. Then the negative reviews started arriving.
What was actually happening
The reviews looked strikingly similar: short, simple, and repetitive. That did not prove manipulation, but it was enough to stop treating each review as an isolated piece of customer feedback.
Looking across the niche made the pattern more concerning. One listing carried a healthy balance of positive reviews while several competing listings showed an unusually high proportion of negative ones. The pattern was consistent with coordinated activity, although the public data could not establish who was responsible.
How to check this yourself
Open Keepa and go back to the very first review on a listing.
Look at the rhythm of review growth, not the total. Genuine reviews arrive unevenly but in proportion to sales. Manipulated ones arrive in bursts that do not match any sales pattern.
Then compare review growth with the sales history you can observe. An abrupt burst of reviews without a corresponding change in sales is a reason to investigate. It is a signal, not proof on its own.
Why this belongs before the launch, not after
Money spent on a launch cannot be recovered simply because the market turned out to be riskier than it looked.
Assess competitive behaviour in the niche before you commit the set-up budget. It is the cheapest diligence available and almost nobody does it.
The result
Through all of that, the account grew: sales up 98%, ACoS down 14%, profitability up 11%.
The review pattern did not stop the product. Investigating it kept the team from panicking, misdiagnosing the account, and rebuilding campaigns that were not the source of the problem.