Understanding Customer Reviews and Ratings
Customer reviews, including product star ratings, are shown to help customers learn more about Sony products and decide if the product is right for them.
How Sony Customer reviews work
Each review is verified as authentic by our review partner, Bazaarvoice
We only publish reviews from customers who have purchased or registered the item.
Verified Reviews
Customers are invited by Sony to write a review of their product following purchase or product registration.
Incentivised Reviews
Selected Sony community members are incentivised to write a product review in exchange for discounted or free product(s).
Other Retailer Reviews
These are reviews collected by Bazaarvoice from retailers who sell Sony products, the retailer is clearly shown where the review was originally submitted with a link to the retailers’ product page.
To ensure only genuine customers post reviews, we have submission requirements.
Only customers who have purchased or registered a product with Sony can submit ratings and reviews.
Before posting a review, we check if it meets our guidelines. That includes our rules against creating, editing, and removing reviews in exchange for compensation.
We check if the reviewer bought the item from Sony directly or through one of its approved retail partners and paid a price available to most shoppers for Sony products. If we confirm both, we label the review with ‘Verified Purchase’.
Our automated and human checks stop many suspicious reviews. For more details, go to our Anti-Manipulation Policy for Customer Reviews.
We listen to our customers. If you think a review violates our guidelines, or someone offers you compensation to create, edit, or remove a review, tell us. Visit the How to report violations section in our Guidelines.
To help you decide if products are right for you, we have created the Sony ‘Insiders’ program.
We invite customers who have earned trust in the Sony community for their insightful reviews to serve as Voices. Voices request products they want to review and try them out free of charge, they maybe gifted the product or able to purchase at a discount. Then, they can share their honest, unbiased opinions in a review. Sony or any partner acting on behalf of Sony, doesn’t edit their reviews.
Sony has partnered with bazaarvoice to collect, verfiy and publish customer reviews
Trust in the authenticity of reviews has always been essential to Bazaarvoice. As a pioneer, Bazaarvoice introduced the "Authentic Reviews Trust Mark" back in 2013 to strengthen consumer trust in the authenticity of reviews and to give companies the opportunity to signal to consumers that the reviews are authentic.
The Bazaarvoice Authenticity Policy defines requirements for authentic reviews. All Bazaarvoice customers are subject to the Authenticity Policy. The Authenticity Policy is intended to ensure that consumers can trust the authenticity of reviews on Bazaarvoice.
Bazaarvoice also provides customers with a review mechanism which comprises of three stages:
• Bazaarvoice uses industry-leading automated fake review detection technology that, based on device and IP address data, among other things, allows it to analyze the origin of a review and weed out obvious fakes;
• In a further screening step, an artificial intelligence identifies suspicious content and reports it to the analyst team;
• Analysts then manually check reviews classified as suspicious for authenticity.
Transparency Regarding the Authenticity of Reviews
Bazaarvoice, places great importance on the authenticity of reviews and on full transparency regarding the background of each review.
For this purpose, Bazaarvoice has introduced various badges that can be used to mark reviews.
Reviews from verified buyers, based on a post-interaction email sent after purchase, can be transparently marked as verified in the Customer’s authenticity policy.
Accordingly, reviews that have been incentivized or that are based on the provision of a free product are also marked as such and in these cases the incentivized review will be badged.
Detailed information on how to mark reviews with badges can be found here.
Sony calculates a product's star rating using machine-learned models instead of a simple average.
These models consider factors such as how recent the rating or review is, and verified purchase status. They use multiple criteria that establish the authenticity of the feedback. The system continues to learn and improve over time.
We do not consider customer ratings without an Sony-Verified Purchase status in a product's overall star rating until a customer adds more details in the form of text, image, or video.