Exclusive: Flipkart Made up 5-Star Ratings for The Xiaomi Mi TV 4 'Reviews' It Lifted From Others

Earlier this week, Xiaomi launched the Mi Goggle box 4 in India to huge hype. Nosotros cannot remember the last fourth dimension a Goggle box created so much buzz effectually social media; this fervor is usually reserved for Xiaomi's phones.

Only curiously, despite the hype, nosotros came across some misleading reviews on Flipkart's page for the Tv set, afterward a Reddit mail service highlighted them. The reviews were from well-known Indian publications and all of them had 5 Stars. In improver, they besides had a misleading 'Certified Buyer' tag, which was subsequently removed by Flipkart, after it was highlighted.

In their response, Xiaomi's in-house PR team told Beebom on Th, February 22, that placing the reviews was Flipkart's call. Even so, that didn't end the story. The Reddit post that showed u.s. these reviews first asked in the title, "Can you trust these reviews?". The answer is possibly, non.

The side by side day i.e Friday, Feb 23, Sameer Mitha, Assistant Editor of Digit.in, one of the publications whose review was used, contacted Beebom. Mitha told us Flipkart had not acquired written permission earlier using the text and content from Digit. He further added that the content in question came from a 'First Impressions' slice on the Mi Boob tube, which tin be seen hither. As is evident, even though the original piece has no review score, Flipkart had mentioned it every bit a 5-Star review as shown in this screenshot from Feb 22.

He further added that Flipkart refused to use the final review, which had a score of lxxx / 100, and was also not a v-Star review. That's when Digit.in urged the visitor to remove their domain name and the copyrighted content that Flipkart had used. It must be noted that the list no longer has the offending reviews.

While using minor bits of content without permission and credit (albeit a passing mention) is acceptable, Flipkart had not linked back to the original article. The fact that Flipkart added its own v-Star rating clearly proves these reviews were fabricated, and scores made upwardly. In addition, other products on Flipkart also have such misleading reviews.

When contacted for a response to Digit'southward statement, Flipkart told us the following.

The review exercise was initiated past Xiaomi. Flipkart was given few reviews to be posted on the product page.

These are not paid/sponsored reviews, therefore.

We have taken down the review from our website as nosotros realise it was merely first impression of the product and not a thorough review.

We hold the review should have non gone nether a Certified Buyer Tag only a Tech Skilful Tag which was not bachelor on Flipkart.

The first line of the response definitely complicates matters for Xiaomi, who had claimed to united states of america on February 22, the launch day, that it was Flipkart's decision to put the reviews up. Of grade, this doesn't immediately mean that Xiaomi's PR team had misinformed us in their statement – the conclusion to collude for fake reviews could have been taken at a college-level outside the PR team. However, it does telephone call into question some ethics surrounding Xiaomi'due south launches.

Despite numerous attempts to reach Xiaomi'due south PR team on Friday, there was no response till today forenoon. We are still awaiting their statement nigh Flipkart's comments, and will be updating the article equally presently as we get information technology.

The worrisome fleck is Flipkart has such reviews on other listings as well. Acer's Predator Helios 300 laptop is 1 such product, as seen below:

More suspect or fake reviews on Flipkart — More suspect reviews on Flipkart

Editor's Annotation: The Flipkart spokesperson stressed that the argument was for clarification only and cannot be attributed to Flipkart, though no off-the-tape agreement had been reached past both parties before the conversation began. In low-cal of this, we decided to publish the in a higher place reply verbatim from the email conversation with Flipkart spokesperson.