2024.07.23. The Fair Economy — The Korea Consumer Agency said on the 23rd that a survey of the review operations and consumer perceptions of three major delivery platforms found that current review systems need improvement, including insufficient guidance on precautions when writing reviews and distortion of restaurant ratings due to review events.
Consumer complaints regarding reviews on delivery platforms received by the Fair Trade Commission over the past three years (2021 to 2023) totaled 411 cases, showing a trend of increasing annually.
When examining the types of complaints, "terms of service complaints"—where delivery platforms block reviews or accounts—accounted for 58.6% (241 cases), the highest share, followed by "verbal abuse or threats from business operators" via phone, text, comments, or visits at 19.5% (80 cases), and "requests to delete reviews" at 8.0% (33 cases), among others.
The three delivery platforms are taking temporary measures on consumer reviews based on the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection, which stipulates that information and communications service providers must delete or temporarily block posts if a party claiming rights infringement substantiates the fact and requests deletion.
The temporary measures under the Information and Communications Network Act are a system that temporarily blocks access when it is difficult for a service provider to determine whether a rights infringement has occurred or when disputes among stakeholders are anticipated, due to the nature of rights infringement information. While this can prevent harm to platform merchants from malicious reviews, there are concerns that honest assessments of food quality (taste) or delivery that do not violate review writing principles may also be blocked.
If handling reviews unrelated to rights infringement, such as making them private, constitutes deceptive practices, it may violate Article 21 of the 'Act on Consumer Protection in Electronic Commerce, etc. (Electronic Commerce Act)'.
The survey found that the three delivery platforms either do not provide guidance on precautions on the review writing screen (Yogiyo, Coupang Eats) or place it at the bottom of the screen (Baedal Minjok).
All three companies state review writing principles in their terms of service, prohibiting expressions that infringe on others' rights or specific words. However, since not all consumers read the terms before writing reviews, it is more effective to provide the precautions at the top of the review writing screen.
Meanwhile, it was also confirmed that one delivery platform (Yogiyo) states in its terms that reviews can be edited, but in practice they cannot be edited.
Delivery platforms have made improvements by specifying criteria for deleting or temporarily restricting malicious reviews in their terms, adopting consumer review policies that reflect the international standard (ISO 20488), and other measures under the self-regulation framework. However, consumer complaints about review blocking continue to arise, indicating that further enhancements are needed.
According to a recent survey of 1,000 consumers who used delivery platforms within the past year, 73.4% (734 respondents) said they heavily rely on reviews when selecting restaurants or menu items. Additionally, 77.3% (773 respondents) who ordered food via delivery platforms wrote reviews, and among them, 65.2% (504 respondents) cited "participation in review events" as the reason for writing reviews.
The survey found that 67.1% (161 restaurants) of establishments listed on the three delivery platforms were promoting review events, and in the consumer survey, 62.5% (625 respondents) indicated that the restaurant they recently ordered from was conducting a review event.
Among the 504 consumers who wrote reviews after participating in review events, 79.6% (401 respondents) said that the event influenced their restaurant star rating assessments, and the majority (98.3%, 394 respondents) rated higher than their actual satisfaction. However, only four restaurants had reviews that disclosed participation in the review event.
Fair and accurate reviews can provide consumers with information about products and enable platform merchants (small businesses) to manage quality and reputation, benefiting all platform users.
In the consumer survey, 63.0% (630 respondents) said the current "star rating-based review system"—which allows restaurants to be evaluated and searched using star ratings—needs improvement. The most frequently suggested improvement was a "reorder rate-based review system" that displays reorder rates as information for restaurant selection (48.9%, 308 respondents).
Based on the survey results, the Korea Consumer Agency plans to recommend that the surveyed businesses improve the star rating-based review system, disclose participation in review events for reviews written after such participation, and allow users to edit their own reviews.
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