Incentivized Reviews and the FTC Line You Must Not Cross

Is it legal to offer a discount for a review?

Yes, with two conditions. The incentive cannot be tied to the review being favourable, and the fact that the review was incentivized has to be disclosed where a reader can see it. A loyalty point or a discount code sent to every verified buyer who leaves a review, positive or negative, is on the right side of the line. The same offer made only to people who promise five stars is not.

The distinction is sentiment. An unconditional incentive rewards the act of reviewing. A conditional incentive buys an opinion, and a bought opinion is what the rule is written to stop.

• Allowed: a discount sent to every buyer who reviews, regardless of rating.
• Allowed: a prize draw entry for any review, positive or negative.
• Banned: a reward offered only for a four or five star review.
• Banned: a reward you quietly claw back if the review is critical.

What exactly does the 2024 FTC rule ban?

The rule targets fake and deceptive reviews as a category, and it has the force of law, which means civil penalties rather than a strongly worded letter. Three prohibitions matter most for a store running a review programme: you may not buy reviews, you may not condition an incentive on the sentiment of the review, and you may not suppress genuine negative reviews to skew the overall picture.

Suppression is the one most stores stumble into without meaning to. Hiding, delaying, or selectively publishing only the flattering reviews can count as deceptive even if every individual review is real.

• No buying reviews, including from people who never used the product.
• No incentives conditioned on a positive rating.
• No suppressing or burying genuine negative reviews.
• No undisclosed insider reviews from staff or their families.

How do I disclose an incentivized review properly?

Disclosure has to be clear and close to the review, not buried in a terms page. A short, plain label on the review itself does the job: a note that the reviewer received a discount, sample, or loyalty reward in exchange for an honest review. The word honest matters, because it signals the reward was for reviewing, not for praising.

If your review platform supports an incentivized badge or a verified-buyer-with-incentive tag, use it and apply it consistently. Inconsistent labelling reads as selective disclosure, which is its own problem.

Are gated review requests a problem?

Yes, gating is the classic violation. Gating means asking buyers how they feel first, then routing only the happy ones to leave a public review while diverting unhappy ones to a private inbox. It manufactures a rating that does not reflect the real spread of experience, and under the rule that is suppression of genuine negative reviews.

The honest alternative is to invite every buyer to review on the same terms and to handle complaints through support in parallel, not instead. You can still reach out to an unhappy customer. You just cannot use that outreach to keep their review off the page.

What are the practical penalties for getting this wrong?

Because the rule carries the force of law, the exposure is civil penalties per violation, and for a store with thousands of reviews the count adds up quickly. Beyond the regulator, platforms enforce their own versions of these rules and will strip ratings or suspend accounts for incentive abuse, which can cost more in lost visibility than any fine.

The quieter cost is trust. Buyers and answer engines both lean on reviews precisely because they read as independent. A programme that games sentiment erodes the asset it was meant to build.

How do I run an incentive programme that stays compliant?

Keep the incentive unconditional, disclose it on every incentivized review, and publish the negative ones alongside the positive. Respond to the critical reviews in public rather than hiding them; a good reply does more for a buyer reading later than a missing one star ever would.

There is a second-order benefit here. Compliant reviews, the honest mix of good and bad, are also the reviews that get read and corroborated outside your store. Most review apps were built for the on-page shopper and stop there. Getting your existing reviews readable, corroborated, and cited in search and AI is the gap BetterReviews is built to close, and a clean, unfiltered review set is the raw material that makes that possible.

• Offer the same reward for every review, whatever the rating.
• Label incentivized reviews clearly, on the review itself.
• Publish negatives and reply to them in public.
• Never gate, delay, or selectively hide critical reviews.