Incentivized Review
An incentivized review is one a customer writes after being offered a reward (a discount, loyalty points, a free sample, or an entry to a draw), where the reward must be given regardless of what the review says and must be clearly disclosed, never conditioned on the review being positive.
Stores use incentives because the hardest part of reviews is volume: most happy buyers never write anything, and a small reward nudges a slice of them to. Done within the rules, this is legitimate and common. The reward is for the act of leaving a review, not for a particular star rating, and the shopper is told an incentive was involved.
The FTC line is specific and worth stating plainly: the incentive cannot be conditioned on sentiment. Offering points only for five-star reviews, or asking unhappy customers to come to support instead of leaving a public review, crosses into review gating and deceptive practice. Incentivized reviews also have to be disclosed, so a reader knows the writer received something, and the store should not edit or suppress the negative ones that come back.
The honest nuance is that incentives skew the sample even when you follow every rule: people who accept a reward to review are not a random draw, and the lift in volume can come with a mild lift in positivity. Treat incentivized reviews as a supplement to organic ones, not a replacement, and keep the disclosure visible so the corroboration stays credible. Getting those existing reviews readable, corroborated, and cited by search and AI is the gap BetterReviews closes.