Reviews,
and the
rules.

Start with what is clearly allowed

The permitted version is broad and it is the one worth building a habit around. The Federal Trade Commission’s guidance: “it’s okay to invite all of your customers to post honest reviews, positive or negative, after they’ve actually used your products or services.”

Three details matter: invite all customers, ask for an honest review whether positive or negative, and wait until they have actually used the product or service. Asking everyone once, after the work is done, follows that guidance.

The one almost everybody does

Asking only the customers you expect to be pleased feels like common sense rather than a tactic. It is the default behaviour of every business owner who has ever sent a review request, and it is the practice described directly above.

The reasoning is about the sample rather than about any individual review. Every review collected that way can be genuine, unpaid and accurate, and the overall picture still misrepresents the business, because the selection, not the content, is what has been manipulated. That is also why the fix is not more disclosure. It is asking everyone.

Incentives: allowed, conditioned, disclosed

Offering something is not forbidden outright. What is forbidden is attaching it to the verdict: you “can’t condition an incentive, for example, a discount, on a review being positive.”

And the incentive has to be visible to whoever reads the review. The FTC states that “the recipients of your discount codes need to disclose that they received a discount to encourage their reviews”, which means the obligation lands on the customer, and therefore on you to tell them. A review request offering a discount and saying nothing about disclosure has set up the person doing you a favour to be the one in breach.

There is a further warning for anyone buying review services: “If these services materially inflate your product’s average star rating, you might still be engaging in a deceptive practice despite the disclosures.” Disclosure is not a universal cure.

Staff and family

Small businesses are staffed by people who know the owner, and early reviews often come from that circle. They may post, but the connection must be visible. An employee endorsing an employer “should disclose your relationship to the company”, and more generally, where an endorser “is a relative or employee of the marketer, the ad is misleading unless the connection is made clear.”

Set a clear policy before you start asking for reviews, because undisclosed connections are easiest to prevent at the beginning.

And the ones you did not want

The handling of negative reviews is covered too, and the bar is lower than people assume: “delaying the posting only of negative reviews, even just by a few days, could create a biased picture of a product.” Not deleting. Delaying. By days.

Which leaves responding, and that is the move worth making anyway. A measured public reply to a bad review is read by every future customer who finds it, and it is the only part of this entire area where the incentives of the regulator and of the business point the same direction.

The practice that is both compliant and effective

Ask every customer once, after the work is finished, without offering an incentive. Make it a regular habit instead of a short campaign. This approach follows the guidance above and steadily produces fresh reviews, which are often more useful than a large collection of old ones.

Avoid offering anything in exchange for a review or asking only the people who seemed pleased. Both practices cost more than they return.