Tradies running incentive programs around reviews are skating on thinner ice than they realise. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has been steadily clamping down on misleading review practices for over a decade, and the line between an honest thank-you and an enforceable breach of the Australian Consumer Law is narrower than most small businesses think. Court enforceable undertakings, infringement notices and Federal Court actions have all stemmed from review practices that the businesses involved thought were perfectly reasonable. Knowing where the ACCC actually draws the line is more useful than guessing.
Here’s what the ACCC’s published guidance says about review incentives, gifts and discounts in Australia, what it actually means in practice for a small tradie business, and how to stay clearly on the right side of the line.
The starting principle: don’t mislead
Section 18 of the ACL prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct. Section 29 prohibits false or misleading representations about goods and services, including reviews. The ACCC’s view, set out in its published guidance on online reviews, is that consumers reading reviews on a business’s site or on a third-party platform have a reasonable expectation that those reviews are independent. If they are not, that fact must be disclosed clearly. The principle is simple: don’t make the customer think a review is independent when it isn’t.
Paid reviews must be disclosed
If a tradie business has paid a customer for a review, in cash, gift cards, or material discounts, that arrangement must be disclosed wherever the review is presented. The disclosure should be near the review, not buried in a corner of the website. Phrases like “this customer received a discount in exchange for sharing their experience” are the kind of thing the ACCC expects. Reviews that are obtained through payment but presented as independent are exactly what the ACCC has acted on.
Conditional rewards trigger the same rule
The ACCC’s guidance is clear that a reward conditional on writing a review, or a positive review, or a review of a particular kind, falls into the same category as direct payment. Offering a $50 discount on a future booking in exchange for a five-star review is squarely in scope. Offering a free oil change in exchange for any review is also in scope. The condition is what matters, not the direction. Even neutrally worded incentives bend the review pool because customers who didn’t have a great experience tend to opt out rather than write a negative review and still claim the reward.
Cherry-picking reviews is also misleading
It is not just paid reviews that get businesses in trouble. The ACCC has flagged that selectively publishing only positive reviews on a website, while suppressing or hiding negative ones, can also amount to misleading conduct. If you choose to display reviews on your own site, the selection should be representative. If you only show the fives, you are creating a misleading impression of the overall feedback. The ACCC has called this out specifically in its review guidance.
Editing reviews is risky territory
Some businesses lightly edit reviews to “fix typos” or “tighten wording” before publishing. Even small edits can cross into misleading territory if they change the meaning or remove negative content. The safer position is to publish reviews verbatim or not at all. If a review breaches your platform’s terms (offensive language, defamation, off-topic content), refer it to the platform rather than editing it yourself. Your editing is not transparent to the reader, and even well-intentioned changes can create exposure.
Fake reviews are a separate, worse problem
The ACCC has taken enforcement action against businesses that wrote their own reviews under fake customer names. This is a clear ACL breach and can attract significant penalties. It is also straightforward to detect once a regulator looks: IP addresses, account creation patterns, and writing style all leave traces. Don’t post reviews of your own business. Don’t ask staff or family to do so. Don’t pay an offshore service to do it. The cost of getting caught is much higher than the cost of building the review base honestly.
What the ACCC considers acceptable
Asking customers for reviews is fine. Sending a polite follow-up email after the job is fine. Linking to your business’s review page from your invoice is fine. Thanking customers who have already left a review, in any way, with any score, is fine. What changes the situation is conditioning a benefit on the act of leaving a review. As long as the reward is unconditional (or non-existent), and the customer is not being steered to leave a particular kind of review, the practice generally falls within acceptable conduct.
Penalties for getting it wrong
Penalties for misleading conduct under the ACL are not theoretical. Federal Court fines can reach the greater of $50 million per breach, three times the benefit obtained, or 30 per cent of adjusted turnover. Smaller breaches are usually dealt with by infringement notices and court enforceable undertakings, but those still carry public disclosure: your business name appears on the ACCC’s enforcement register, which is visible to anyone searching. The reputational cost is often worse than the fine.
A short compliance check
Run through this list. Are any of your reviews paid for, gifted, or rewarded with a conditional benefit? Are paid reviews disclosed near where they appear? Are you displaying a representative selection on your own website, or only the positives? Are any reviews edited from their original form? Are any reviews written by you, by family, or by staff posing as customers? If the answer to any of these makes you hesitate, you have something to clean up. The fix is usually not complicated, but it has to start now, not after the regulator turns up.
The ACCC’s line on review incentives is steady and clear. Don’t pay for reviews without disclosing it. Don’t condition rewards on reviews of any kind. Don’t selectively display only the positives. Don’t edit. Don’t write your own. The path to a credible review base is slower than the shortcuts but it is the only one that doesn’t blow up later. Real reviews from real jobs, asked for politely, accumulated over time, build a record that compounds for years.