How Jay El-Kaake Automated the Fight for Legitimate Reviews

November 18, 2021

Jay El-Kaake

In mid-2019, Jay made the difficult decision to switch Fera’s focus to something new: PRODUCT REVIEWS. With all the FAKE and fraudulent stories, he believed that merchants needed to help to show the world that they were legit. To support his new focus, he added automated review requests, 3rd party verification, and every other feature you’d expect in a reviews app – and then some. It took over a year to get there, and today Fera is the BEST REVIEW APPS for Shopify and BigCommerce, with nearly THREE THOUSAND 5-star reviews.

The Fight for Legitimate Reviews

The battle for your reviews has just begun. In 2019, Fera spent a lot of time dealing with scammers and con artists. They wouldn’t spend any time on the “good reviews” they promised, but they had plenty of the bad reviews.

In a blog post about Fera’s war on fake reviews, we discovered when fake reviews are floating around on the internet. It makes it so much harder for customers to buy a product with confidence!

Today, Fera is fighting back by:

  • Automating Review Requests and Verification

  • Automated Reviews on BigCommerce

  • Removing User Comments

What This Means to You

To have a thriving business, you need reviews and endorsements. But with all the fake reviews you’re getting from confused customers, reviews apps like Fera are a great way to boost legitimacy. You can even prevent fake reviews in all of your marketing and customer service.

Jay El-Kaake’s Struggle

In late 2016 Jay realized there was a problem in the market – and a BIG problem. He set out to build the solution in the spring of 2017 – that solution being Fera. When the plan was first evolving, he had been running Jay El-Kaake Art Productions and doing freelance marketing and art for clients. He was producing full-time work, creating more than 500 paintings per year and selling them in the gallery and his website, and performing marketing for other art and design clients.

The motivation to create Fera was driven by a recent business failure. On a previous job, Jay was contracted to do online marketing for an ecommerce store, where the owner neglected to run a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to promote their website.

Automating the Fight for Legitimate Reviews

Also, in late 2019, Jay’s team released a new application, HYPREP, to scan for fraudulent reviews and improve the effectiveness of paid advertising. Now, when a user visits a website for the first time, the app scans the site for hundreds of new, relevant social media profiles and automatically adds these accounts to an advertiser’s campaign. It’s the first on-site solution to take advantage of thousands of new potential human sales agents for every campaign.

Today Jay and his team passionately help merchants harness the social proof and urgency psychology of customers to increase sales. Fera is already being used by over 100,000 merchants worldwide.

Conclusion

If you’re a merchant concerned about the security of your reviews, worried that the numbers of reviews were going to be inflated, or have received false reviews – stop worrying. It’s easier than ever to create, manage, and track reviews, whether it be on Facebook or a centralized site. With Fera Review (and similar products), you can prevent the most egregious violators from being able to abuse reviews and ultimately stop the fake ones from being a detriment.

Industry guidelines and best practices (such as the FTC’s) still require 100% of reviews to be legitimate. And your company should set goals of a 5-star rating – to make it easy to distinguish between good and bad reviews. But, Fera is the perfect tool to handle reviews with the least amount of effort.