Customer reviews do quiet work for a small online store. They answer questions a product description cannot and reassure first-time buyers. Because reviews carry that much weight, they have also attracted a long history of shortcuts: paid praise, reviews written by staff, and negative comments that mysteriously disappear.

As of this fall, many of those shortcuts carry a much clearer legal risk in the United States. This guide walks through what the Federal Trade Commission’s new rule covers, what it leaves alone, and how a store owner can build a review process that is both effective and fair. It is practical guidance for planning, not legal advice, so talk with an attorney about your specific situation.

What the new rule is

On August 22, 2024, the Federal Register published the FTC’s final rule on consumer reviews. The rule took effect on October 21, 2024. In the agency’s own summary, it prohibits selling or purchasing fake consumer reviews, buying positive or negative reviews, certain insiders creating reviews without clearly disclosing their relationships, a company-controlled review website that falsely claims to be independent, certain review suppression practices, and selling or purchasing fake indicators of social media influence.

None of these ideas is entirely new, but a specific rule makes enforcement more direct. For a store owner, the takeaway is simple: the review section on your product pages deserves the same care as your prices and your return terms.

The guidance that came first

The rule builds on the FTC’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements, revised and published in the Federal Register on July 26, 2023. That update added a section addressing advertisers who procure, suppress, boost, organize, publish, upvote, downvote, report or edit consumer reviews in a way that distorts or otherwise misrepresents what consumers think of their products.

The guides include an example of an online retailer that suppresses negative reviews on its website, explaining that the resulting product pages would be misleading. They also address incentivized reviews, stating that a review that fails to clearly and conspicuously disclose an incentive given to the reviewer is likely deceptive. Even when each incentivized review carries a disclosure, the guides note that the practice could still be deceptive if those reviews feed an average star rating and materially raise it.

Read together, the 2023 guidance and the 2024 rule describe one idea. The reviews a shopper sees should reflect what real customers actually think.

Platforms are watching too

Regulators are not the only ones looking for manipulated reviews. In a February 13, 2024 post, How machine learning keeps contributed content helpful, Google described receiving around 20 million contributions to Maps every day in 2023. The company said a new machine learning algorithm, which looks for questionable patterns such as the same review left on several businesses or a sudden spike in one-star or five-star reviews, helped it take down 45 percent more fake reviews than the year before. Google reported blocking or removing more than 170 million policy-violating reviews in 2023 and more than 12 million fake business profiles.

Those numbers describe Google’s systems, not your store, but they show that an unnatural review campaign can be filtered out long before a regulator notices it. A steady stream of genuine reviews holds up better than a burst of suspicious ones.

What you clearly cannot do

The rule lists specific practices. A few are worth spelling out because they show up in ordinary small-business advice.

Writing or buying fake reviews. The rule targets reviews that misrepresent that they come from a real person or misrepresent the reviewer’s experience with the product. Paying a service to post glowing comments, or posting them yourself under invented names, falls squarely here.

Paying for a particular opinion. The rule says a business may not provide compensation or other incentives in exchange for, or conditioned on, reviews expressing a particular sentiment, whether positive or negative. The definition of something of value is broad: money, gift certificates, products, services, discounts, coupons, contest entries or another review all count.

Hiding insider reviews. A review written by an officer or manager of the business needs a clear and conspicuous disclosure of that relationship. The rule also reaches undisclosed endorsements from employees or agents that the business shares, and certain requests for reviews from staff or their immediate relatives.

Running a fake independent site. A seller-controlled site posing as a neutral review source is prohibited.

Silencing critics. The rule addresses unfounded legal threats, intimidation and false accusations used to prevent or remove a negative review. It also covers displaying reviews in a way that misrepresents that they are most or all of the reviews received, when some were suppressed based on their rating or negative sentiment.

What you can still do

The rule does not ask stores to stop collecting reviews. It leaves room for normal, honest practices.

You can ask every customer for a review. The rule excludes generalized solicitations, so a follow-up email that invites all buyers to share their experience is fine, as long as the request does not ask only for good reviews and the reward, if any, does not depend on what the customer writes.

You can moderate. The rule lists reasons a business may withhold a review, applied equally to positive and negative reviews: content that is defamatory, harassing, abusive, obscene or discriminatory; content that contains personal information; content that is clearly false; reviews you reasonably believe are fake; and reviews wholly unrelated to the products or services offered. The key is that your criteria are written down and used the same way regardless of the star rating.

You can respond. A calm public reply to a critical review often reassures future shoppers.

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Building a fair review request

This structure works well for most small stores.

Time it to the experience. Ask after the customer has had a chance to use the product. For a coffee grinder, that may be two weeks after delivery. For a gift card, it may be a few days. Asking before the box arrives invites complaints about shipping rather than the product.

Ask everyone the same way. Send the same request to every buyer. Avoid filtering who receives it based on how happy they seemed in a support chat, because that turns a generalized request into a selective one.

Keep the wording neutral. “Tell us how your order worked out” invites honest feedback. “Love it? Leave us five stars!” pushes a specific sentiment. If you offer a small thank-you, such as entry into a monthly drawing, make it available regardless of rating and say so plainly.

Make it easy. Link straight to the review form for the product purchased and keep it short: a rating, a few sentences and an optional photo.

Disclose free products. If you send samples to reviewers, the reviews they write should say they received the product free. Your platform may support a badge for this. If it does not, ask reviewers to state it in their text and check that they do.

Displaying reviews honestly on your site

How reviews appear on your product pages matters as much as how you collect them.

Show negative reviews alongside positive ones. A product with a few three-star reviews often seems more believable than one with only perfect scores, and sorting by recent, highest or lowest rating lets shoppers choose.

Keep the average honest. If incentivized or sample-based reviews are included, make sure they are labeled. Consider whether they belong in the average at all, given the guides’ caution that they can distort it.

Label staff reviews. If an employee loves a product and wants to say so, that is fine with a clear label such as “Store employee.” The same goes for family members of the owner.

WooCommerce includes review tools, and extensions add requests, photos and verified-buyer badges. Our WooCommerce design work often includes setting these up so that reviews look consistent with the rest of the store and the verified-buyer label is accurate.

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Write a moderation policy

A short written policy protects you and gives your staff a clear guide. It should cover:

  • Which content you remove and why, based on the reasons the rule allows.
  • Who reviews flagged content and how quickly.
  • How you handle a review you believe is fake, including what evidence you look for.
  • How you respond to critical reviews, including tone and timeline.
  • How you record each removal, so you can show your criteria were applied evenly.

Publish a short version near the review form.

Check your existing reviews

If your store has been collecting reviews for a while, take an afternoon to audit them.

Look for unlabeled reviews from staff, friends or family, reviews tied to a past incentive for positive ratings, and reviews hidden simply because they were negative. Ask any third-party review service how it sources reviews. If you find problems, fix them going forward and consider getting legal advice about older content.

Also look at the tools that send review requests. Some apps offer a feature that sends happy customers to a public review site and unhappy ones to a private feedback form. That kind of routing deserves a careful look under the new rule, because it can produce a public picture that does not reflect what customers actually think.

A fictional example

Imagine a small online tea shop with about two hundred product reviews. During an audit, the owner finds that a former review app only invited customers who had rated their experience four stars or higher in a quick survey, and that a dozen early reviews were written by the owner’s friends without any label.

The owner switches to a request that goes to every customer fourteen days after delivery, with neutral wording. The friends’ reviews are labeled. A short moderation policy is published. Over the next few months the average dips from 4.9 to 4.6, while more reviews mention specifics such as steeping times and packaging.

This example is fictional and offered only to illustrate the process. Your results will depend on your products and customers.

Bringing it together

Reviews work because shoppers believe they come from other shoppers. The FTC’s rule turns that expectation into a clearer legal standard, and platforms are getting better at spotting reviews that do not fit it. For a small store, the honest path is also the practical one: ask every customer, reward participation rather than praise, label relationships, moderate by written criteria and show the full picture.

If you are planning broader changes to your store, our ecommerce strategy guidance can help you decide where reviews fit alongside pricing, product pages and follow-up emails. And when it is time to rebuild the review experience itself, our ecommerce development team can help you set up fair requests, clear labels and a moderation workflow that holds up over time.