Party Like It’s National Consumer Protection Week!

Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission hosted a little party. In the unlikely event it didn’t make in on to your calendar, National Consumer Protection Week (NCPW) is actually a thing, a time to help people understand their consumer rights and avoid frauds and scams. While I applaud their efforts at educating consumers, I’m thinking this is perhaps an initiative that needs a time span of more than just one week. In fact, I’d suggest it might best be a years long, ongoing initiative.

That aside, I hope you’ll agree that it’s a great idea to sneak a little discussion about product safety into almost every client interaction. It shows that you have both the client’s and their consumers’ best interests at heart. Mentioning NCPW could be a nice icebreaker, and it’s probably safe to assume the client probably didn’t hear about the party, either. And starting the conversation might both get a laugh and lead into a great discussion of online safety. You must of course acknowledge that your client is searching for products and pricing online — that’s a reality today. But you can take the position that the internet is a dangerous place, and you’re just the right person to help them navigate it. Remember, your clients are consumers, too, and they can use a little help from an expert like you.

Perhaps it’s time for another discussion about the dangers of counterfeit products. Counterfeits have crept into every sector of the economy. While counterfeiters used to just focus on fake luxury items, like purses, watches, or shoes, now even knockoff pharmaceuticals and batteries have become too commonly available online. And unlike a knockoff fashion accessory, these counterfeit products threaten consumers’ health and safety, with some counterfeit pharmaceuticals containing incorrect amounts of active ingredients and counterfeit batteries overheating and causing fires.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials say that between October 2020, and the end of July 2021, they made nearly 23,000 seizures — spanning a variety of counterfeit products — worth a whopping $2.5 billion. While that two-and-a-half billion seems like a large number in seizures, the reality is that it’s just a small drop in a very big bucket, with counterfeits costing the global economy an estimated $500 billion each year. While there are common sense ways to avoid a counterfeit product, like knowing that a price too good to be true probably is, and checking for altered logos or dicey product descriptions, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the CPSC publish a complete guide to recognizing counterfeits.

You can also talk to your clients about another “fake problem,” which is product and service reviews. Online reviews routinely help consumers decide what to buy, or what company or service to use. In a perfect world, we should be able to trust that these reviews reflect the honest opinions of people who actually used a product or service. Unfortunately, all too many reviews are fake, deceptive, or have been somehow manipulated, and that hurts both online shoppers and honest companies. Before you wade in too deeply here, it might be a good idea to give the online reviews for your clients’ products and services a quick glance. It might avoid an awkward moment.

For years, the Federal Trade Commission has given great advice on how best to use online reviews. The number one suggestion has been to look at a variety of sources, including well-known websites that have credible and impartial expert reviews. The FTC says that’s still a very good place to start. But there are other tips for using online reviews and deciding when to be skeptical:

• Check how recent the reviews are and watch for a burst of reviews over a short period of time. That can sometimes mean the reviews are fake.

• Check if the reviewer has written other reviews. If so, read those to get a better sense of how much to trust that reviewer. But if it seems that the reviewer has created an account just to write one review for one product, then it’s a safe bet that that review may be fake.

• Don’t assume that, just by looking, you can spot the difference between a real review and a fake one. Some reviews may look suspicious, and some may look real, but it can often be nearly impossible to tell for sure. For example, you already know to watch out for reviews that seem too positive to be real, but some fake positive reviews give less than the highest possible rating in order to seem more credible.

• Remember that fake reviews are not always positive. Sometimes, a company might post fake negative reviews to harm a competitor.

Finally, you won’t always know whether a reviewer got something, like a free product, in exchange for writing a review. While the FTC notes that on some websites there is a label or badge next to the review that tells you the reviewer got an incentive, other websites suggest a review is legit by labeling it from a “verified purchaser.”

Like so many other issues surrounding an online purchasing decision, ultimately the weight you assign to those reviews is up to you. As is how much of this advice you choose to share with your clients. Better informed is almost always better, don’t you agree?