Online Customer Reviews on Restaurant Using Blockchain

Abstract

Modern day businesses are largely dependent on digital technologies. People prefer viewing the reviews before making any decisions. It applies to all consumables like buying Electronic items, Clothing, Travel, Guest-House, Restaurant, Rental, Housing, Automobile, Cosmetics, Jewellery, Movies, etc. Online services like Mantra, Yelp, Amazon, Facebook, Google My Business, Trip Advisor offer great services to the customer. However, drawbacks of these systems are fake reviews, negative reviews and sometimes even tampering of the reviews given by the customers, which has a huge impact on the business leading to huge financial losses. Sometimes a competitor in the business might also influence the ratings being provided. The centralized storage of these reviews also leads to problems like tampering or manipulation of the data being stored. In this paper we propose an application in the restaurant industry that solves all these drawbacks by making use of the Ethereum blockchain. The food reviews given by the customers are stored as smart contracts in the blockchain, which can't be altered, thus guaranteeing the authenticity of the reviews. Validity of the reviews is ensured because it is difficult for the restaurants to delete or create new accounts to wipe away the bad reviews given. Blockchain is immutable so we ensure that the reviews are genuine and the system is trustable.