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Amazon bans incentivized reviews tied to free or discounted products

452 points by kjhughes 10y ago

hippich 10y ago
For me personally it will mean way harder to launch new products on Amazon, i.e. to get that initial visibility. This is since their search algo is based on sales of product and reviews of the product, so any new product will be lost in their search results. (Vine they mentioned is invite only program for large corporate sellers)
- stonogo 10y ago
  This is the outcome I desire. The number of times I've been looking for a specific product, only to find all the reviews are from people who clearly only have the product because of these programs, is bordering on infuriating. Reviews like "I don't really understand how to use this but it seems well-made" are completely useless. Even for institutional purchasing I made the decision years ago not to conduct business with any seller who behaves like this.
  - Steeeve 10y ago
    When I got my S7, I went to amazon looking for a case and screen overlay. I ALMOST pulled the trigger on the most reviewed and almost 5 star average product when one of the negative reviews caught my eye. The screen overlay didn't fit. Then I went digging and almost all of the negative reviews pointed out that the product didn't actually fit. Hundreds of 5 star reviews for something that would not work at all. On occasion, the reviews are helpful, but that is becoming less and less frequent and frankly I've soured on Amazon as a supplier as a result. Prime isn't the deal it once was, and pricing isn't particularly competitive for a lot of products when I shop around. I remember this happening with Ebay a number of years back and I rarely look to ebay for anything these days. Amazon is a little stronger because they are still the go-to resource for books and cloud compute resources.
    - hippich 10y ago
      Keep in mind that amazon has listings per product (vs eBay with listing per product and seller) It is quite likely that original product was fine, that's why all the reviews, but then it got out of stock and new seller brought new product, which was different (by mistake or on purpose) and that one was people complaining about.
- shostack 10y ago
  Not saying you did this, but on the balance I'm glad that this tool is taken away from sellers. The shopping experience on Amazon has turned to crap ever since these sorts of reviews flooded the scene. They were clearly overwhelmingly positive and I've seen many people burned by them. Maybe Amazon needs a program like Steam Greenlight where people can sign up to try new products. Honestly if these sorts of reviews were easily marked and filtered out it would solve half the problem.
  - generj 10y ago
    Amazon does have an equivalent to Steam Greenlight called Amazon Exclusives, but it's not as inclusive as Steam Greenlight.
- hyperbovine 10y ago
  In other words, it will be just like selling any other non-online product. At least you get a search algorithm...
c3534l 10y ago
I think reviews tied to discounted products should be be given a weight reduced by the amount proportional to the discount received. So a product with a 75% discount should be given a 25% weight in the weighted-average review score.
- teej 10y ago
  Sellers will just game this by paying someone to buy the product at full price for a good review.
  - bambax 10y ago
    Maybe, but how? I mean, how does it scale? You can call a few friends for your first product (maybe) but at some point you run out of friends and you need to recruit people you don't know.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  It's easy to circumvent this by offering 4x as many discounted items at the discounted price to get the reviews (I bet it still makes sense for the manufacturers to take even this loss up front if they can top the search rankings).
- c3534l 10y ago
  That was meant to be a bit of a joke, btw. Ratings lose their value to customers when they're too opaque to fully understand.
iplaw 10y ago
How in the world will this new policy be enforced? I see only one possible outcome: The reviewers who used to begin their review with "I received this product at a discount in exchange for a fair and honest review" will now begin their review with "I totally paid full price for this product and am a legit reviewer without paid-for bias."
- osi 10y ago
  Amazon already annotates reviews to indicate if the reviewer has purchased the product on Amazon.
  - smt88 10y ago
    The scheme discussed here involves buying the product, so Amazon can't identify these reviews as being incentivized (unless they track use of discount codes)
    - bambax 10y ago
      Of course they can, and have for some time: the "verified purchase" badge does not show up on reviews that come from an incentivized purchase.
- hippich 10y ago
  first of all it is illegal to lie like that. so most reviewers will not do that. also, amazon employs statistic engine (i am afraid to call it ai yet) and also a lot of humans who constantly monitor content (results of which goes back into stats engine) so yes - they can enforce it on a global scale.
  - smt88 10y ago
    It certainly is not illegal to lie like that, or astroturfing would be illegal. Sometimes lawsuits arise from astroturfing, but the practice itself is legal.
    - 10y ago
vinhboy 10y ago
FINALLY!!! You can't buy a single tech accessory on Amazon without these fake reviews. Next they need to get rid of grouping reviews for different product versions. They also need to ban merchants from hounding me to review their products. One of them even called me on my phone. I don't know how they got my number.
- sokoloff 10y ago
  Some shipping carriers require a phone number, so I believe that Amazon transmits your ship-to phone number with the explicit requirement to use it only for logistics purposes. I'd complain to Amazon for a seller who used the number for any other purpose and certainly for one who called me for a review.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    I'm in England. I'd be calling the Information Commissioner as well.
  - Alupis 10y ago
    Amazon provides the phone number for all orders. It's whatever phone number you have listed on your account, or saved on one of your delivery addresses. Sellers are supposed to use them to fix order-related problems, and can be helpful for the case when a customer does not respond to emails (such as when you've provided an invalid delivery address).
    - losteverything 10y ago
      Your phone number is on Amazon shipping label too
      - Alupis 10y ago
        > Your phone number is on Amazon shipping label too Probably for shipments shipped from an Amazon warehouse (sold by Amazon, or Fulfilled-by-Amazon/FBA). For our own labels, we print our company phone number, and that's fairly common for many ecommerce companies (although certainly not all). It protects the customer's privacy, and in the event there's an issue with delivery, it's best the carrier contact the shipper (us) anyway.
corysama 10y ago
This came up recently: Article summarizing the embedded video "Data Proves Amazon Reviews with 'Free or Discounted Disclaimer' are Extremely Biased" http://lifehacker.com/why-amazons-incentivized-reviews-are-biased-even-if-1786840382 http://lifehacker.com/why-amazons-incentivized-reviews-are-b...
- andrewstuart2 10y ago
  On that note, I'm sure this announcement will make for an interesting day over at ReviewMeta.
  - MicroBerto 10y ago
    Searched to see if anyone here mentioned ReviewMeta. If anything, this will make their service even more important because the beauty seems to be in tying all the fake reviews together, not necessarily using these keywords.
    - andrewstuart2 10y ago
      Hmm. They actually may have a really good pitch to make to Amazon if they're even interested in being bought. If they have some really good models for detecting fake reviews (which presumably they do beyond disclaimer string matching), that might be a good investment for Amazon to make for enforcing their new guidelines.
      - MicroBerto 10y ago
        True. I'm close to Tommy at ReviewMeta because we're "competitors" in the supplement space (he's a great guy), but I'm not sure what his end game is. What's infuriating is that you know that Amazon has the talent and data to stop all the fake reviews. Makes you wonder why they allow it..........
      - nikcub 10y ago
        I ended up installing the plugin after their video went viral, although I haven't used it yet to make a purchasing decision. They could pivot to filtering reviews based on web of trust - users could be able to provide a set of reviewers they trust, or it finds reviewers a user has a lot in common with.
Hydraulix989 10y ago
This sucks. I worked REALLY hard to become a top reviewer (ranked ~10,000th) so that I could get free and discounted stuff, and just these past few months, I've finally gotten to the point where I get 1-3 offers per day now.
- BoorishBears 10y ago
  How often do you give free products negative reviews?
  - Hydraulix989 10y ago
    Not a whole lot, even before when I _was_ giving unbiased reviews. I found that many people "downvoted" my negative reviews as unhelpful (maybe they were friends of the seller?), despite the fact that they were critical, yet not inflammatory, reviews (and what most people would consider to be very helpful) -- -- Much like how some HN users downvote similarly-constructive posts that they disagree with.
    - 1_listerine_pls 10y ago
      Incentivized reviews do skew the score distribution. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a reason to ban them.
      - Hydraulix989 10y ago
        I agree. I didn't even include the "unbiased discount" footnote/disclaimer in my "unbiased" reviews because I didn't want it to hurt my own personal credibility as a reviewer. My partners-in-crime actually really appreciated that omission.
        rconti 10y ago
        I read this a few times and couldn't quite parse it. Are your unbiased reviews the ones for which you weren't offered the product (eg, paid full price)? Or are you saying even your discount/freebie reviews are unbiased? Who are your partners in crime? The sellers?
vermontdevil 10y ago
About time. I hate these "free reviews". I had to start looking at verified purchases and read a few of these with 5, 3 and 1 star ratings to get a sense if the product is worth buying for. Was becoming too much of a hassle.
- Kadin 10y ago
  One of the few of those silly "life hack" tips that I've seen floating around that was really useful was a suggestion to look at the 3-star reviews on Amazon, if you aren't sure about something. They generally aren't especially biased (people who are biased for or against the product are going to leave 5 or 1-star reviews) and tend to have the most useful weighing of pros and cons. That's not to say there aren't valid 5 star and 1 star reviews -- including my own, because I tend not to review products unless they stick out for some reason -- but a lot of the 2/3/4 star reviews are the most diagnostically useful.
  - nicklaf 10y ago
    Among products whose review distribution is heavily skewed toward 5-stars, the 1-star reviews are often the most useful, since this is where you might learn that reviewers are being offered compensation in return for removing their negative review (either by stating it directly, or as evidenced by an aggressive comment left by the seller in response to the unhappy customer).
    - jerkstate 10y ago
      Understanding the rate and nature of bad reviews provides much better signal than high-star reviews. You will get a lot of garbage in 1-star reviews but I find you also find information about expected uses of the product that don't work, or other types of important feedback (for example, I was looking for a "bluetooth splitter" a while back and lots of 5-star reviews said that the product worked as advertise, but some percentage of 1-star reviews stated that several of the products added a few hundred milliseconds of latency to the audio). I also use the percentage of low-star reviews between similar frequently reviewed items (for example, coffee makers with hundreds of reviews each) to approximate design defects, manufacturing defect rate and/or ease of use issues.
smegel 10y ago
> However, it has allowed businesses to offer products to customers in exchange for their “honest” review. Seems like a pretty bizarre exception to begin with.
- clifanatic 10y ago
  I've been in the Vine program that they mention in the article for several years - I can tell you that, seriously, honestly, no kidding, there are no repercussions for posting a negative review of a free Vine product. I've posted scathing reviews of terrible (but free) products, wondering if I'd be mysteriously "removed" from the Vine program for doing so, and never gotten so much as a question about them.
grandalf 10y ago
This is long overdue! I'd like the option of a partial refund on all the items I've purchased that had these sorts of reviews.
omonra 10y ago
Why doesn't Amazon have a simple 'verified purchaser' flag that users can filter by? They know who actually *paid* for the item (since they collect payments).
- falcolas 10y ago
  Manu could easily provide a GC with the exact cost of the item post-review.
- delecti 10y ago
  They do. Note the "&reviewerType=avp_only_reviews" flag in this set of reviews: https://smile.amazon.com/Marvels-Captain-America-Civil-Blu-ray/product-reviews/B01D9EUNB4/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewopt_rvwer?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=avp_only_reviews&pageNumber=1 https://smile.amazon.com/Marvels-Captain-America-Civil-Blu-r...
ghaff 10y ago
For all those complaining about reviews based on free products, I'd just point out that most non-crowdsourced reviews have been based on free products (which may or may not be returned after the review is written) for pretty much forever. Some exceptions like Consumer Reports of course. Arguably, Amazon reviews are different--because you theoretically expect the reviews to be coming from regular buyers. But I strongly disagree, as a general principle, with the view that if you're given a free copy of a product/book/etc. to review, you're going to simply give a positive review no matter what. Frankly, discounts feel much more like an implied quid pro quo. I don't do a lot of reviewing (and I do reviews on my own blog, not Amazon) but I give an honest assessment and I clearly disclose if I've been sent product to review.
- subsection1h 10y ago
  You don't seem to fully understand the issue. Companies aren't giving out free products to random people in the hope that their products will receive positive reviews; instead, companies are using services like Amazon Review Trader[1] and Review Kick[2] to find reviewers who only write positive reviews and who accept free products and discounts in exchange for reviews. For more information, visit the ProductTesting subreddit[3] where these reviewers chat about their favorite freebies and discounts. [1] https://www.amzreviewtrader.com/ https://www.amzreviewtrader.com/ [2] https://www.reviewkick.com/ https://www.reviewkick.com/ [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductTesting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductTesting/
  - ghaff 10y ago
    I do get the systematic issues with respect to Amazon reviews specifically and agree that they're an problem. (Systems that become especially important tend to encourage gaming.) I just react negatively when some people make this into a general statement with review-ware along the lines of financial motivations throw ethics out the window.
  - hippich 10y ago
    They do not leave only positive reviews. This is not encouraged by group owners, nor reality I experienced first hand.
falcolas 10y ago
Eh, I'd treat them as ads. The person is paid to review them, the manufacturer can pay to have that review displayed on Amazon, clearly marked as "Sponsored Content". Amazon's already showing ads, so there's precedent.
- bananabill 10y ago
  but then I feel like the point of an ad that looks like a review is to intentionally mislead. Even if it's labeled sponsored content, the idea that it looking like an ad would be better than a normal ad admits a level of knowing that it's misleading. ads should look like ads, and reviews should be left to real humans.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    I agree; that was my intention with the 'clearly marked as "Sponsored Content"' bit. At a bare minimum, if it's clearly marked it can be flat out ignored or even filtered out.
baccheion 10y ago
If Amazon doesn't realize its reviews are one of its main selling points, then it's stupid. I'm surprised they don't meticulously curate/maintain reviews to ensure high quality/accuracy.
Hydraulix989 10y ago
As a top reviewer, I got sent a link to a secret Chinese Amazon with 31 pages of free and discounted products to review (some show lingerie in this screenshot so careful if you're at work): http://imgur.com/a/LfO82 http://imgur.com/a/LfO82
rconti 10y ago
It's probably worse than the spread between 4.74 average rating (product discount) vs 4.36 average (paid full price). If you paid full price, you probably did at least a little bit of research and made a semi-informed decision, so it would stand to reason that you should be pleased. For a generic product being used by someone with no particular vested interest in that product or category, you'd expect a much lower rating. (on the other hand, I suppose you could argue that the high expectations of the 'desired' product might tend to bring down satisfaction a bit)
- gnopgnip 10y ago
  Most people who are happy with a product will never leave a review. Everyone who receives a discounted product is required to leave a review.
  - rcthompson 10y ago
    Interesting, I hadn't thought of this, and this effect could actually explain the difference without any bias from incentives.
bambax 10y ago
Amazon is in a weird position on this. On one hand, they want more and more sellers and try very hard to grow FBA, because 1. having outside sellers trying to market new products offsets the cost of market research and development to those sellers (instead of doing the work in house) 2. competition between sellers drives the prices down, which drives prices up On the other hand, they need to police sellers and try to keep reviews honest, or they risk losing customers' confidence. My guess is, the first objective (many sellers) is more important than the second one (honest reviews), so they will probably not enforce this new policy very aggressively.
- themodelplumber 10y ago
  > so they will probably not enforce this new policy very aggressively. I don't know about that. I left one of those "in exchange for my honest review" reviews without using _that_ exact language, and they refused to post it. I had to re-submit with the right phrase pasted in. The language I used in the original review was even more upfront about receiving the product for free and my review procedure. So I'd guess that they will enforce something broadly across the board and then be kind of tone deaf about the way they enforce it. I think a big part of the problem with reviews is, when you're looking for something to buy, _and_ you're a savvy buyer, you generally want the product to fulfill conditions X, Y, and Z. If you receive it for review, you are generally only looking to fulfill condition X, and _maybe_ Y. For example, you'd probably never think, "oh, I should test this bluetooth transmitter from the back seat of my carpooling minivan" if you work from home all day. That you didn't think of condition Z and still gave the product five stars will probably piss off somebody somewhere, but really, people with special conditions or who are aware of specific issues with that kind of product should be researching _within_ reviews, not just taking some random reviewer's five stars as a green light. They should be asking product questions. They should be contacting the manufacturer directly if they buy the product and they think it sucks. But they almost never do those things. I agree there are dishonest reviewers, but I think Amazon's goofy review system--in which 3 stars == failure, and 4 stars == "think twice," is really the perfect setup for that kind of situation.
  - bambax 10y ago
rebootthesystem 10y ago
Not far enough. They need to flush all reviews from their site and let them re-accumulate organically over time. They can do this in phases and as a percentage of sales for a product. They have the data. I am sure they can come up with an equation to determine how many reviews to flush out per week. Having all products go to zero reviews overnight would not be sensible. Good products will continue to receive good reviews. Same with bad products. It's the products with scammed/paid reviews that will suffer. Yes, some of those products might be good and, if they are, they'll receive organic reviews just as the others. The other approach, and probably fairer, is to simply age reviews. Anything more than N years old (or N months old) is deleted. Simple.
staircasebug 10y ago
About time, but I think it would be beneficial to have a way of filtering these "paid" reviews or not counting them towards the overall rating. Something for everyone ...
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TrevorJ 10y ago
I don't think I'll take this seriously until Amazon stops gaming their own review system. For instance, if you take a look at Comcast's rating on Amazon the have 4 stars, but if you click in and look at the breakdown 85% of the ratings are one star. The fact that this magically translates into a 4-star rating in Amazon's world is a huge issue.
- Someone1234 10y ago
  If others want to see what they're talking about, search for "Xfinity Internet" on Amazon. It has a four star rating, but 90% of the reviews are three stars or less. It doesn't make any mathematical sense.
- throwaway13337 10y ago
  I was in sort of disbelief so I had to look it up. https://www.amazon.com/Xfinity-Internet-Mbps-12-month-term/dp/B01B6ZHV7C/ https://www.amazon.com/Xfinity-Internet-Mbps-12-month-term/d... Yep. 4 stars with 85% one star ratings. Amazingly awful. To be fair, there are certain categories that amazon weights differently based on the average rating of those categories. Some types of things are just always rated poorly. Maybe that has something to do with it?
  - mikequinlan 10y ago
    Quoting... "Amazon calculates a product’s star ratings using a machine learned model instead of a raw data average. The machine learned model takes into account factors including: the age of a review, helpfulness votes by customers and whether the reviews are from verified purchases."
    - timv 10y ago
      But what is the machine learning to do? It sounds like it could be optimising for sales. I actually mean that quite seriously - a machine learning system needs to have some goal to optimise for, sone way to tell whether the rating it produces is "good". In Amazon's case that is quite likely to be some measure of clicks or sales. [Edited to remove typo]
Overtonwindow 10y ago
I applaud this but how about getting rid of the vine reviews too? I don't trust any Amazon review where someone has gotten something for free.
- r00fus 10y ago
  If they want to keep Vine (essentially monopolizing paid reviews), then at least give me the option of filtering them out with a checkbox or something. Still not exactly forthright.
  - envy2 10y ago
    In my experience, the Vine reviews have always been clearly marked in bold green text at the top—while you can't filter them from being displayed, it's pretty easy to ignore them if you want to.
  - Overtonwindow 10y ago
    Agreed. I would like the opportunity to filter them out. I read an article once about people who spend most of their day reviewing products, even products they never purchased. I sense these are the types that get invited to Vine.
- xenadu02 10y ago
  Vine reviews seem legit. Amazon picks the customers so the vendor can't select for positive reviewers. The vendor also can't retaliate by withholding future free products if you give something 1 star (a common thing with game reviews).
  - criddell 10y ago
    Vine reviewers are still people subject to feeling like they owe something for getting the free product. It's one of the big lessons in Cialdini's book Influence.
- chaostheory 10y ago
  Vine reviewers no longer get it for free. The cost of the item they receive now counts as taxable income.
bobwaycott 10y ago
It's about time. I can't believe they ever allowed it in the first place.
flavor8 10y ago
I sell a niche music accessory on FBA. I didn't have many reviews, and it was hard to gain traction as a result. I found a very relevant subreddit and offered to send a sample to anybody who was willing to leave an honest review, up to 10 total. I got very enthusiastic responses, and sent out the samples. Every review that I received from this group was five stars. I at no time asked for five stars, and was very explicit about asking them to be honest. Maybe my product is just that good, but I suspect there's at least a little bias there. More to the point, every organic review I've received since has been five stars, which leads me to think there's a crowd effect going on. I think what I did was a good deal less scummy that what ReviewKick et al do, since they explicitly find "good" reviewers for you, and the reviewers aren't necessarily knowledgeable about the product or niche. That said, even my targeted approach yielded a lot of bias. For what it's worth, this exercise doubled my sales. I now effectively earn the equivalent of a full time minimum wage job through one tiny niche product, and an hour's work every couple of months.
- Alupis 10y ago
  > Every review that I received from this group was five stars There is a certain bias effect to consider. When you purchase something, your criteria for it to meet your expectations is a bit higher (subconsciously) than if it was given to you for free.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    Also I suspect that people who leave positive reviews for products that they get receive more products to review.
    - flavor8 10y ago
      In the review kick model, yes. For the folks interested in my product, not so much... They were niche enthusiasts.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  Out of curiosity, what do you sell that takes you half an hour per month to manufacture but sells for enough to make a living?
uptown 10y ago
Good. My highest up-voted comment ever on HN was specifically about this problem. Clearly something that resonates as a problem with their customers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12033964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12033964
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HelloMcFly 10y ago
I buy almost nothing on Amazon without using fakespot.com these days.
shraken 10y ago
Amazon Vine requires you provide tax identification number as to declare FMV on your income tax. That's a real non-starter for a lot of reviewers.
perseusprime11 10y ago
Can they please go back and clean up all the existing reviews? I never understood the 'honest review in exchange of the product' thing because it was always 5 stars and rarely honest.
sr3d 10y ago
About time! The paid reviews were getting really annoying and I started to feel that Amazon's amazing review system was going down in terms of quality. It's a bold move for Amazon and it sends the right message: high quality, trust-worthy reviews are much better than high quantity, biased reviews.
jrockway 10y ago
I have a lot of respect for Amazon here. Having every product have a 5 star review is great for Amazon in the short term, it lets you "do your research" and hit that one-click ordering button without hesitation. Making the scores go down will probably reduce sales (of items that would make people unhappy anyway, but reduced sales are reduced sales). Long term, if nobody trusts Amazon reviews, then they'll turn elsewhere to do that research. And elsewhere probably links to a retailer other than Amazon, that you might click on because you happen to be there. It is weird that I have to be happy about the right long-term business decision, but I guess that's the world we live in. Every day I think Amazon is going to grow complacent and slowly cease to exist. That day is not today ;)
jsinkwitz 10y ago
Keep in mind that this is more of a monopolistic move than a quality move; Amazon was already scrubbing for a while. 1. Amazon Vine reviews are still live and will still go live -- there's no more editorial quality to them than some of the other services. 2. This policy doesn't impact book reviews, where fake reviews, incentivized reviews, and review trading is most rampant. 3. The easiest way around the policy will be for vendors to get shadier and not offer upfront discounting. Instead, you'll see non-disclosed reviews where the reviewer is compensated for the product costs afterwards. If done properly, that'd be hard to catch. As disclosure, I'm CEO of Intellifluence, which is essentially a marketplace for reviews (one supported platform of which is Amazon). We emphasize honest reviews and have been trying to fight some of the shadier players, but this policy move isn't going to fix things...it just is a move to push Amazon's own program.
- shostack 10y ago
  Can you share any stats on the distribution of your review scores? I'd be shocked if it didn't skew positive to highly positive since presumably those who don't rate positively would find nobody wanted them to review or would stop using your service.
awqrre 10y ago
This video[1] posted Sept. 19th 2016 got more then 500k views, I wonder if it has anything to do with Amazon's decision... 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdLI62JKpCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdLI62JKpCk
taurath 10y ago
Its about TIME. I emailed amazon support about a month about this (many items I was looking for were 80-90% "incentivized" reviews), and they responding by saying they would forward it to a team to look for "fraud", but gave no indication it was a problem. Their response afterwards was: > "The vast majority of the millions of reviews on Amazon are authentic, but we will continue to protect the integrity of customer reviews by taking action against those who abuse them." which left a bit of a bitter taste. I suppose I didn't expect them to say anything about a change in policy but I wish they had admitted that it was even a problem.
ninv 10y ago
"Set up an Amazon Giveaway" They promoted it to boost the sale.
hippich 10y ago
http://imgur.com/a/QQ4bk http://imgur.com/a/QQ4bk
- CodeWriter23 10y ago
  If you're "Me" in that chat, you have this chat record to fall back on. My mom is an Amazon Seller (got the top 25% Holiday Seller Award twice) and her experience when asking about policy matters is the SellerCentral Associates tend to shoot from the hip and give whatever they think the answer is. So note to other sellers, ask first and save the record of the conversation, instead of relying on the something you found on Imgur. Seller Performance (the legal team) will always give you a pass for bad information from Amazon Reps when considering the death penalty. No such leniency is granted for "the other guys were doing it" or "a third party told me something that directly conflicts with the Amazon Business Services Agreement".
fma 10y ago
I like the move, however small sellers will have a hard time gaining traction now. It would be nice if they limited the number of reviews, or there's a tag where if you leave a review you say you were incentivized. Those reviews are hidden by default and does not contribute. Or Amazon shows two reviews, one incentivized and one not. Even their vine program reviewers can have bias, so really it's about more control for Amazon. Full disclosure: I was given a chance to read the article for free in return for my unbiased and honest comment.
rlucas 10y ago
Finally. Reviews, especially on highly contested catgories, had turned into a cesspool over the last couple years. The varieties of gamesmanship will doubtless continue but this is at least one of the hydra's heads.
GirlsCanCode 10y ago
This is most reviews these days. Of course, this just means people will stop mentioning that it's a paid review.
markdown 10y ago
I suppose that would also work against the reverse (paying for 1 star reviews). This charity pays for one-star reviews of "culturally appropriative" halloween costumes. http://heatst.com/culture-wars/this-charity-will-pay-you-to-give-one-star-amazon-reviews-to-culturally-appropriative-halloween-costumes/ http://heatst.com/culture-wars/this-charity-will-pay-you-to-...
modzu 10y ago
... except their own
ashnyc 10y ago
This is our story, We have been selling on Amazon since 2011 and about 5 months ago, some hijacker took over our listing and started selling smilar item but of lower quality. It took us 3 months for amazon to take action and got the seller kicked out of amazon. Basically he used of of those review services to upload over 1000 reviews with images to make it seem like they are the owner of the listing. We have been trying to clean up all this mess and we are getting no help from amazon.com . Here is a sample review of counterfeit product. https://www.amazon.com/review/R2X5VE3JT02KCU/ https://www.amazon.com/review/R2X5VE3JT02KCU/ if you look at the listing, our product is totally diffrent.
- joering2 10y ago
  Very interesting but I think there is something more at play here. Look at the person who left you that review: SpilledInk788 She is "Stay at home mom" but she reviews over 30 products DAILY - some not cheap at all. I suspect this is some sort of paid troll who writes positive/negative reviews (depending on the order/assignment) and post it online to whether boost someone's company rating or lower them. No wonder she never replied to you.
arjie 10y ago
I don't know. The phrase "free and unbiased review" were a strong negative signal.
Hasz 10y ago
Is this a move to consolidate paid reviews into the vine program?
Fej 10y ago
Is this retroactive? Really should be.
good4something 10y ago
Sure these trumped up reviews are not arms' length from the vendor, but they often give details of the product that are not in the official specifications. That's been useful to me on more than one occasion when deciding between two similar options.
Spikeysash 10y ago
Reactions to Amazons new customer review policy banning incentivized reviews https://youtu.be/u4gN58pHmrQ https://youtu.be/u4gN58pHmrQ
w3designer 10y ago
As both a buyer on Amazon and a seller, I have mixed feelings regarding this. On the buying side, I've seen how hard it is to wade through the reviews to buy simple products. Though I would say that it's mostly recently about product quality rather than review quality. On the seller side, the issue is that when you launch a product and have no reviews, you won't get sales. Without reviews and sales, your product slides down into the depths of Amazon. Without the ability to give away products for reviews, we are only left with waiting for reviews to come in naturally or paying a lot for Amazon PPC to continuously force the product to the top of the stack hoping to generate some sales and then ultimately reviews. There has to be some sort of middle ground for this sort of thing. I would think there has to be a way to launch on Amazon that can get products out to real reviewers, and still somehow weed out the "fake" reviews. It's telling that they didn't remove it for book sales as pre-release reviews are so entrenched that they didn't dare mess with it. If it's working for books, in theory, it should work for other categories. Of course, Amazon does have a way to do this legitimately through their mysterious Vine program that you need to be invited to. Though it doesn't seem they really have a direction or know how to handle the issue themselves. For the time being, I can only assume that this will drive the review sites underground.
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fuqted 10y ago
There are plenty of budding entrepreneurs that will be unable to move new products because everyone is going to be afraid to buy without reviews
victorantos 10y ago
I know someone who spends a good part of day looking to get these discounted products, although the reviews he writes are honest, biased - I am not liking the addiction he has got, buying cheap unnecessary stuff non-stop. Everyday he has to buy something, this might not be sane on a long run, happy it will end soon.
ceyhunkazel 10y ago
Meanwhile here few tips for fake reviews: Select "Show only Verified Purchases" to get rid of most of fake reviews according to this 96% of "Incentivized Reviews" are not verified purchases http://reviewmeta.com/blog/what-can-we-do-about-the-problem-of-incentivized-reviews/ http://reviewmeta.com/blog/what-can-we-do-about-the-problem-... Another tip is finding products with most reviews so you get more overall rating even it has some paid/sponsor reviews. "Most reviews" sort option is hidden in most of the categories but there is a way to do it. Here is my detailed writing about this. Disclosure: I am the author of medium story and http://www.jeviz.com http://www.jeviz.com which provides more sort options including "most reviews" to Amazon searches. https://medium.com/@ceyhunkazel/amazon-search-hack-eliminate-amazon-products-that-have-4-or-5-starts-but-only-few-reviews-f485d35d5969#.84yeyaffk https://medium.com/@ceyhunkazel/amazon-search-hack-eliminate...
cauterized 10y ago
This is actually a terrible idea, IMO. Currently people announce when their review was of a freebie. Now people will still do it, they just won't disclose it.

452 points by kjhughes 10y ago

For me personally it will mean way harder to launch new products on Amazon, i.e. to get that initial visibility. This is since their search algo is based on sales of product and reviews of the product, so any new product will be lost in their search results. (Vine they mentioned is invite only program for large corporate sellers)

stonogo 10y ago
This is the outcome I desire. The number of times I've been looking for a specific product, only to find all the reviews are from people who clearly only have the product because of these programs, is bordering on infuriating. Reviews like "I don't really understand how to use this but it seems well-made" are completely useless. Even for institutional purchasing I made the decision years ago not to conduct business with any seller who behaves like this.
- Steeeve 10y ago
  When I got my S7, I went to amazon looking for a case and screen overlay. I ALMOST pulled the trigger on the most reviewed and almost 5 star average product when one of the negative reviews caught my eye. The screen overlay didn't fit. Then I went digging and almost all of the negative reviews pointed out that the product didn't actually fit. Hundreds of 5 star reviews for something that would not work at all. On occasion, the reviews are helpful, but that is becoming less and less frequent and frankly I've soured on Amazon as a supplier as a result. Prime isn't the deal it once was, and pricing isn't particularly competitive for a lot of products when I shop around. I remember this happening with Ebay a number of years back and I rarely look to ebay for anything these days. Amazon is a little stronger because they are still the go-to resource for books and cloud compute resources.
  - hippich 10y ago
    Keep in mind that amazon has listings per product (vs eBay with listing per product and seller) It is quite likely that original product was fine, that's why all the reviews, but then it got out of stock and new seller brought new product, which was different (by mistake or on purpose) and that one was people complaining about.
shostack 10y ago
Not saying you did this, but on the balance I'm glad that this tool is taken away from sellers. The shopping experience on Amazon has turned to crap ever since these sorts of reviews flooded the scene. They were clearly overwhelmingly positive and I've seen many people burned by them. Maybe Amazon needs a program like Steam Greenlight where people can sign up to try new products. Honestly if these sorts of reviews were easily marked and filtered out it would solve half the problem.
- generj 10y ago
  Amazon does have an equivalent to Steam Greenlight called Amazon Exclusives, but it's not as inclusive as Steam Greenlight.
hyperbovine 10y ago
In other words, it will be just like selling any other non-online product. At least you get a search algorithm...

c3534l 10y ago

I think reviews tied to discounted products should be be given a weight reduced by the amount proportional to the discount received. So a product with a 75% discount should be given a 25% weight in the weighted-average review score.

teej 10y ago
Sellers will just game this by paying someone to buy the product at full price for a good review.
- bambax 10y ago
  Maybe, but how? I mean, how does it scale? You can call a few friends for your first product (maybe) but at some point you run out of friends and you need to recruit people you don't know.
Hydraulix989 10y ago
It's easy to circumvent this by offering 4x as many discounted items at the discounted price to get the reviews (I bet it still makes sense for the manufacturers to take even this loss up front if they can top the search rankings).
c3534l 10y ago
That was meant to be a bit of a joke, btw. Ratings lose their value to customers when they're too opaque to fully understand.

iplaw 10y ago

How in the world will this new policy be enforced? I see only one possible outcome: The reviewers who used to begin their review with "I received this product at a discount in exchange for a fair and honest review" will now begin their review with "I totally paid full price for this product and am a legit reviewer without paid-for bias."

osi 10y ago
Amazon already annotates reviews to indicate if the reviewer has purchased the product on Amazon.
- smt88 10y ago
  The scheme discussed here involves buying the product, so Amazon can't identify these reviews as being incentivized (unless they track use of discount codes)
  - bambax 10y ago
    Of course they can, and have for some time: the "verified purchase" badge does not show up on reviews that come from an incentivized purchase.
hippich 10y ago
first of all it is illegal to lie like that. so most reviewers will not do that. also, amazon employs statistic engine (i am afraid to call it ai yet) and also a lot of humans who constantly monitor content (results of which goes back into stats engine) so yes - they can enforce it on a global scale.
- smt88 10y ago
  It certainly is not illegal to lie like that, or astroturfing would be illegal. Sometimes lawsuits arise from astroturfing, but the practice itself is legal.
  - 10y ago

vinhboy 10y ago

FINALLY!!! You can't buy a single tech accessory on Amazon without these fake reviews. Next they need to get rid of grouping reviews for different product versions. They also need to ban merchants from hounding me to review their products. One of them even called me on my phone. I don't know how they got my number.

sokoloff 10y ago
Some shipping carriers require a phone number, so I believe that Amazon transmits your ship-to phone number with the explicit requirement to use it only for logistics purposes. I'd complain to Amazon for a seller who used the number for any other purpose and certainly for one who called me for a review.
- DanBC 10y ago
  I'm in England. I'd be calling the Information Commissioner as well.
- Alupis 10y ago
  Amazon provides the phone number for all orders. It's whatever phone number you have listed on your account, or saved on one of your delivery addresses. Sellers are supposed to use them to fix order-related problems, and can be helpful for the case when a customer does not respond to emails (such as when you've provided an invalid delivery address).
  - losteverything 10y ago
    Your phone number is on Amazon shipping label too
    - Alupis 10y ago
      > Your phone number is on Amazon shipping label too Probably for shipments shipped from an Amazon warehouse (sold by Amazon, or Fulfilled-by-Amazon/FBA). For our own labels, we print our company phone number, and that's fairly common for many ecommerce companies (although certainly not all). It protects the customer's privacy, and in the event there's an issue with delivery, it's best the carrier contact the shipper (us) anyway.

corysama 10y ago

This came up recently: Article summarizing the embedded video "Data Proves Amazon Reviews with 'Free or Discounted Disclaimer' are Extremely Biased" http://lifehacker.com/why-amazons-incentivized-reviews-are-biased-even-if-1786840382 http://lifehacker.com/why-amazons-incentivized-reviews-are-b...

andrewstuart2 10y ago
On that note, I'm sure this announcement will make for an interesting day over at ReviewMeta.
- MicroBerto 10y ago
  Searched to see if anyone here mentioned ReviewMeta. If anything, this will make their service even more important because the beauty seems to be in tying all the fake reviews together, not necessarily using these keywords.
  - andrewstuart2 10y ago
    Hmm. They actually may have a really good pitch to make to Amazon if they're even interested in being bought. If they have some really good models for detecting fake reviews (which presumably they do beyond disclaimer string matching), that might be a good investment for Amazon to make for enforcing their new guidelines.
    - MicroBerto 10y ago
      True. I'm close to Tommy at ReviewMeta because we're "competitors" in the supplement space (he's a great guy), but I'm not sure what his end game is. What's infuriating is that you know that Amazon has the talent and data to stop all the fake reviews. Makes you wonder why they allow it..........
    - nikcub 10y ago
      I ended up installing the plugin after their video went viral, although I haven't used it yet to make a purchasing decision. They could pivot to filtering reviews based on web of trust - users could be able to provide a set of reviewers they trust, or it finds reviewers a user has a lot in common with.

Hydraulix989 10y ago

This sucks. I worked REALLY hard to become a top reviewer (ranked ~10,000th) so that I could get free and discounted stuff, and just these past few months, I've finally gotten to the point where I get 1-3 offers per day now.

BoorishBears 10y ago
How often do you give free products negative reviews?
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  Not a whole lot, even before when I _was_ giving unbiased reviews. I found that many people "downvoted" my negative reviews as unhelpful (maybe they were friends of the seller?), despite the fact that they were critical, yet not inflammatory, reviews (and what most people would consider to be very helpful) -- -- Much like how some HN users downvote similarly-constructive posts that they disagree with.
  - 1_listerine_pls 10y ago
    Incentivized reviews do skew the score distribution. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a reason to ban them.
    - Hydraulix989 10y ago
      I agree. I didn't even include the "unbiased discount" footnote/disclaimer in my "unbiased" reviews because I didn't want it to hurt my own personal credibility as a reviewer. My partners-in-crime actually really appreciated that omission.
      - rconti 10y ago
        I read this a few times and couldn't quite parse it. Are your unbiased reviews the ones for which you weren't offered the product (eg, paid full price)? Or are you saying even your discount/freebie reviews are unbiased? Who are your partners in crime? The sellers?

vermontdevil 10y ago

About time. I hate these "free reviews". I had to start looking at verified purchases and read a few of these with 5, 3 and 1 star ratings to get a sense if the product is worth buying for. Was becoming too much of a hassle.

Kadin 10y ago
One of the few of those silly "life hack" tips that I've seen floating around that was really useful was a suggestion to look at the 3-star reviews on Amazon, if you aren't sure about something. They generally aren't especially biased (people who are biased for or against the product are going to leave 5 or 1-star reviews) and tend to have the most useful weighing of pros and cons. That's not to say there aren't valid 5 star and 1 star reviews -- including my own, because I tend not to review products unless they stick out for some reason -- but a lot of the 2/3/4 star reviews are the most diagnostically useful.
- nicklaf 10y ago
  Among products whose review distribution is heavily skewed toward 5-stars, the 1-star reviews are often the most useful, since this is where you might learn that reviewers are being offered compensation in return for removing their negative review (either by stating it directly, or as evidenced by an aggressive comment left by the seller in response to the unhappy customer).
  - jerkstate 10y ago
    Understanding the rate and nature of bad reviews provides much better signal than high-star reviews. You will get a lot of garbage in 1-star reviews but I find you also find information about expected uses of the product that don't work, or other types of important feedback (for example, I was looking for a "bluetooth splitter" a while back and lots of 5-star reviews said that the product worked as advertise, but some percentage of 1-star reviews stated that several of the products added a few hundred milliseconds of latency to the audio). I also use the percentage of low-star reviews between similar frequently reviewed items (for example, coffee makers with hundreds of reviews each) to approximate design defects, manufacturing defect rate and/or ease of use issues.

smegel 10y ago

> However, it has allowed businesses to offer products to customers in exchange for their “honest” review. Seems like a pretty bizarre exception to begin with.

clifanatic 10y ago
I've been in the Vine program that they mention in the article for several years - I can tell you that, seriously, honestly, no kidding, there are no repercussions for posting a negative review of a free Vine product. I've posted scathing reviews of terrible (but free) products, wondering if I'd be mysteriously "removed" from the Vine program for doing so, and never gotten so much as a question about them.

grandalf 10y ago

This is long overdue! I'd like the option of a partial refund on all the items I've purchased that had these sorts of reviews.

omonra 10y ago

Why doesn't Amazon have a simple 'verified purchaser' flag that users can filter by? They know who actually *paid* for the item (since they collect payments).

falcolas 10y ago
Manu could easily provide a GC with the exact cost of the item post-review.
delecti 10y ago
They do. Note the "&reviewerType=avp_only_reviews" flag in this set of reviews: https://smile.amazon.com/Marvels-Captain-America-Civil-Blu-ray/product-reviews/B01D9EUNB4/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewopt_rvwer?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=avp_only_reviews&pageNumber=1 https://smile.amazon.com/Marvels-Captain-America-Civil-Blu-r...

ghaff 10y ago

For all those complaining about reviews based on free products, I'd just point out that most non-crowdsourced reviews have been based on free products (which may or may not be returned after the review is written) for pretty much forever. Some exceptions like Consumer Reports of course. Arguably, Amazon reviews are different--because you theoretically expect the reviews to be coming from regular buyers. But I strongly disagree, as a general principle, with the view that if you're given a free copy of a product/book/etc. to review, you're going to simply give a positive review no matter what. Frankly, discounts feel much more like an implied quid pro quo. I don't do a lot of reviewing (and I do reviews on my own blog, not Amazon) but I give an honest assessment and I clearly disclose if I've been sent product to review.

subsection1h 10y ago
You don't seem to fully understand the issue. Companies aren't giving out free products to random people in the hope that their products will receive positive reviews; instead, companies are using services like Amazon Review Trader[1] and Review Kick[2] to find reviewers who only write positive reviews and who accept free products and discounts in exchange for reviews. For more information, visit the ProductTesting subreddit[3] where these reviewers chat about their favorite freebies and discounts. [1] https://www.amzreviewtrader.com/ https://www.amzreviewtrader.com/ [2] https://www.reviewkick.com/ https://www.reviewkick.com/ [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductTesting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductTesting/
- ghaff 10y ago
  I do get the systematic issues with respect to Amazon reviews specifically and agree that they're an problem. (Systems that become especially important tend to encourage gaming.) I just react negatively when some people make this into a general statement with review-ware along the lines of financial motivations throw ethics out the window.
- hippich 10y ago
  They do not leave only positive reviews. This is not encouraged by group owners, nor reality I experienced first hand.

falcolas 10y ago

Eh, I'd treat them as ads. The person is paid to review them, the manufacturer can pay to have that review displayed on Amazon, clearly marked as "Sponsored Content". Amazon's already showing ads, so there's precedent.

bananabill 10y ago
but then I feel like the point of an ad that looks like a review is to intentionally mislead. Even if it's labeled sponsored content, the idea that it looking like an ad would be better than a normal ad admits a level of knowing that it's misleading. ads should look like ads, and reviews should be left to real humans.
- falcolas 10y ago
  I agree; that was my intention with the 'clearly marked as "Sponsored Content"' bit. At a bare minimum, if it's clearly marked it can be flat out ignored or even filtered out.

baccheion 10y ago

If Amazon doesn't realize its reviews are one of its main selling points, then it's stupid. I'm surprised they don't meticulously curate/maintain reviews to ensure high quality/accuracy.

Hydraulix989 10y ago

As a top reviewer, I got sent a link to a secret Chinese Amazon with 31 pages of free and discounted products to review (some show lingerie in this screenshot so careful if you're at work): http://imgur.com/a/LfO82 http://imgur.com/a/LfO82

rconti 10y ago

It's probably worse than the spread between 4.74 average rating (product discount) vs 4.36 average (paid full price). If you paid full price, you probably did at least a little bit of research and made a semi-informed decision, so it would stand to reason that you should be pleased. For a generic product being used by someone with no particular vested interest in that product or category, you'd expect a much lower rating. (on the other hand, I suppose you could argue that the high expectations of the 'desired' product might tend to bring down satisfaction a bit)

gnopgnip 10y ago
Most people who are happy with a product will never leave a review. Everyone who receives a discounted product is required to leave a review.
- rcthompson 10y ago
  Interesting, I hadn't thought of this, and this effect could actually explain the difference without any bias from incentives.

bambax 10y ago

Amazon is in a weird position on this. On one hand, they want more and more sellers and try very hard to grow FBA, because 1. having outside sellers trying to market new products offsets the cost of market research and development to those sellers (instead of doing the work in house) 2. competition between sellers drives the prices down, which drives prices up On the other hand, they need to police sellers and try to keep reviews honest, or they risk losing customers' confidence. My guess is, the first objective (many sellers) is more important than the second one (honest reviews), so they will probably not enforce this new policy very aggressively.

themodelplumber 10y ago
> so they will probably not enforce this new policy very aggressively. I don't know about that. I left one of those "in exchange for my honest review" reviews without using _that_ exact language, and they refused to post it. I had to re-submit with the right phrase pasted in. The language I used in the original review was even more upfront about receiving the product for free and my review procedure. So I'd guess that they will enforce something broadly across the board and then be kind of tone deaf about the way they enforce it. I think a big part of the problem with reviews is, when you're looking for something to buy, _and_ you're a savvy buyer, you generally want the product to fulfill conditions X, Y, and Z. If you receive it for review, you are generally only looking to fulfill condition X, and _maybe_ Y. For example, you'd probably never think, "oh, I should test this bluetooth transmitter from the back seat of my carpooling minivan" if you work from home all day. That you didn't think of condition Z and still gave the product five stars will probably piss off somebody somewhere, but really, people with special conditions or who are aware of specific issues with that kind of product should be researching _within_ reviews, not just taking some random reviewer's five stars as a green light. They should be asking product questions. They should be contacting the manufacturer directly if they buy the product and they think it sucks. But they almost never do those things. I agree there are dishonest reviewers, but I think Amazon's goofy review system--in which 3 stars == failure, and 4 stars == "think twice," is really the perfect setup for that kind of situation.
- bambax 10y ago

rebootthesystem 10y ago

Not far enough. They need to flush all reviews from their site and let them re-accumulate organically over time. They can do this in phases and as a percentage of sales for a product. They have the data. I am sure they can come up with an equation to determine how many reviews to flush out per week. Having all products go to zero reviews overnight would not be sensible. Good products will continue to receive good reviews. Same with bad products. It's the products with scammed/paid reviews that will suffer. Yes, some of those products might be good and, if they are, they'll receive organic reviews just as the others. The other approach, and probably fairer, is to simply age reviews. Anything more than N years old (or N months old) is deleted. Simple.

staircasebug 10y ago

About time, but I think it would be beneficial to have a way of filtering these "paid" reviews or not counting them towards the overall rating. Something for everyone ...

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TrevorJ 10y ago

I don't think I'll take this seriously until Amazon stops gaming their own review system. For instance, if you take a look at Comcast's rating on Amazon the have 4 stars, but if you click in and look at the breakdown 85% of the ratings are one star. The fact that this magically translates into a 4-star rating in Amazon's world is a huge issue.

Someone1234 10y ago
If others want to see what they're talking about, search for "Xfinity Internet" on Amazon. It has a four star rating, but 90% of the reviews are three stars or less. It doesn't make any mathematical sense.
throwaway13337 10y ago
I was in sort of disbelief so I had to look it up. https://www.amazon.com/Xfinity-Internet-Mbps-12-month-term/dp/B01B6ZHV7C/ https://www.amazon.com/Xfinity-Internet-Mbps-12-month-term/d... Yep. 4 stars with 85% one star ratings. Amazingly awful. To be fair, there are certain categories that amazon weights differently based on the average rating of those categories. Some types of things are just always rated poorly. Maybe that has something to do with it?
- mikequinlan 10y ago
  Quoting... "Amazon calculates a product’s star ratings using a machine learned model instead of a raw data average. The machine learned model takes into account factors including: the age of a review, helpfulness votes by customers and whether the reviews are from verified purchases."
  - timv 10y ago
    But what is the machine learning to do? It sounds like it could be optimising for sales. I actually mean that quite seriously - a machine learning system needs to have some goal to optimise for, sone way to tell whether the rating it produces is "good". In Amazon's case that is quite likely to be some measure of clicks or sales. [Edited to remove typo]

Overtonwindow 10y ago

I applaud this but how about getting rid of the vine reviews too? I don't trust any Amazon review where someone has gotten something for free.

r00fus 10y ago
If they want to keep Vine (essentially monopolizing paid reviews), then at least give me the option of filtering them out with a checkbox or something. Still not exactly forthright.
- envy2 10y ago
  In my experience, the Vine reviews have always been clearly marked in bold green text at the top—while you can't filter them from being displayed, it's pretty easy to ignore them if you want to.
- Overtonwindow 10y ago
  Agreed. I would like the opportunity to filter them out. I read an article once about people who spend most of their day reviewing products, even products they never purchased. I sense these are the types that get invited to Vine.
xenadu02 10y ago
Vine reviews seem legit. Amazon picks the customers so the vendor can't select for positive reviewers. The vendor also can't retaliate by withholding future free products if you give something 1 star (a common thing with game reviews).
- criddell 10y ago
  Vine reviewers are still people subject to feeling like they owe something for getting the free product. It's one of the big lessons in Cialdini's book Influence.
chaostheory 10y ago
Vine reviewers no longer get it for free. The cost of the item they receive now counts as taxable income.

bobwaycott 10y ago

It's about time. I can't believe they ever allowed it in the first place.

flavor8 10y ago

I sell a niche music accessory on FBA. I didn't have many reviews, and it was hard to gain traction as a result. I found a very relevant subreddit and offered to send a sample to anybody who was willing to leave an honest review, up to 10 total. I got very enthusiastic responses, and sent out the samples. Every review that I received from this group was five stars. I at no time asked for five stars, and was very explicit about asking them to be honest. Maybe my product is just that good, but I suspect there's at least a little bias there. More to the point, every organic review I've received since has been five stars, which leads me to think there's a crowd effect going on. I think what I did was a good deal less scummy that what ReviewKick et al do, since they explicitly find "good" reviewers for you, and the reviewers aren't necessarily knowledgeable about the product or niche. That said, even my targeted approach yielded a lot of bias. For what it's worth, this exercise doubled my sales. I now effectively earn the equivalent of a full time minimum wage job through one tiny niche product, and an hour's work every couple of months.

Alupis 10y ago
> Every review that I received from this group was five stars There is a certain bias effect to consider. When you purchase something, your criteria for it to meet your expectations is a bit higher (subconsciously) than if it was given to you for free.
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  Also I suspect that people who leave positive reviews for products that they get receive more products to review.
  - flavor8 10y ago
    In the review kick model, yes. For the folks interested in my product, not so much... They were niche enthusiasts.
pavel_lishin 10y ago
Out of curiosity, what do you sell that takes you half an hour per month to manufacture but sells for enough to make a living?

uptown 10y ago

Good. My highest up-voted comment ever on HN was specifically about this problem. Clearly something that resonates as a problem with their customers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12033964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12033964

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HelloMcFly 10y ago

I buy almost nothing on Amazon without using fakespot.com these days.

shraken 10y ago

Amazon Vine requires you provide tax identification number as to declare FMV on your income tax. That's a real non-starter for a lot of reviewers.

perseusprime11 10y ago

Can they please go back and clean up all the existing reviews? I never understood the 'honest review in exchange of the product' thing because it was always 5 stars and rarely honest.

sr3d 10y ago

About time! The paid reviews were getting really annoying and I started to feel that Amazon's amazing review system was going down in terms of quality. It's a bold move for Amazon and it sends the right message: high quality, trust-worthy reviews are much better than high quantity, biased reviews.

jrockway 10y ago

I have a lot of respect for Amazon here. Having every product have a 5 star review is great for Amazon in the short term, it lets you "do your research" and hit that one-click ordering button without hesitation. Making the scores go down will probably reduce sales (of items that would make people unhappy anyway, but reduced sales are reduced sales). Long term, if nobody trusts Amazon reviews, then they'll turn elsewhere to do that research. And elsewhere probably links to a retailer other than Amazon, that you might click on because you happen to be there. It is weird that I have to be happy about the right long-term business decision, but I guess that's the world we live in. Every day I think Amazon is going to grow complacent and slowly cease to exist. That day is not today ;)

jsinkwitz 10y ago

Keep in mind that this is more of a monopolistic move than a quality move; Amazon was already scrubbing for a while. 1. Amazon Vine reviews are still live and will still go live -- there's no more editorial quality to them than some of the other services. 2. This policy doesn't impact book reviews, where fake reviews, incentivized reviews, and review trading is most rampant. 3. The easiest way around the policy will be for vendors to get shadier and not offer upfront discounting. Instead, you'll see non-disclosed reviews where the reviewer is compensated for the product costs afterwards. If done properly, that'd be hard to catch. As disclosure, I'm CEO of Intellifluence, which is essentially a marketplace for reviews (one supported platform of which is Amazon). We emphasize honest reviews and have been trying to fight some of the shadier players, but this policy move isn't going to fix things...it just is a move to push Amazon's own program.

shostack 10y ago
Can you share any stats on the distribution of your review scores? I'd be shocked if it didn't skew positive to highly positive since presumably those who don't rate positively would find nobody wanted them to review or would stop using your service.

awqrre 10y ago

This video[1] posted Sept. 19th 2016 got more then 500k views, I wonder if it has anything to do with Amazon's decision... 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdLI62JKpCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdLI62JKpCk

taurath 10y ago

Its about TIME. I emailed amazon support about a month about this (many items I was looking for were 80-90% "incentivized" reviews), and they responding by saying they would forward it to a team to look for "fraud", but gave no indication it was a problem. Their response afterwards was: > "The vast majority of the millions of reviews on Amazon are authentic, but we will continue to protect the integrity of customer reviews by taking action against those who abuse them." which left a bit of a bitter taste. I suppose I didn't expect them to say anything about a change in policy but I wish they had admitted that it was even a problem.

ninv 10y ago

"Set up an Amazon Giveaway" They promoted it to boost the sale.

hippich 10y ago

http://imgur.com/a/QQ4bk http://imgur.com/a/QQ4bk

CodeWriter23 10y ago
If you're "Me" in that chat, you have this chat record to fall back on. My mom is an Amazon Seller (got the top 25% Holiday Seller Award twice) and her experience when asking about policy matters is the SellerCentral Associates tend to shoot from the hip and give whatever they think the answer is. So note to other sellers, ask first and save the record of the conversation, instead of relying on the something you found on Imgur. Seller Performance (the legal team) will always give you a pass for bad information from Amazon Reps when considering the death penalty. No such leniency is granted for "the other guys were doing it" or "a third party told me something that directly conflicts with the Amazon Business Services Agreement".

fma 10y ago

I like the move, however small sellers will have a hard time gaining traction now. It would be nice if they limited the number of reviews, or there's a tag where if you leave a review you say you were incentivized. Those reviews are hidden by default and does not contribute. Or Amazon shows two reviews, one incentivized and one not. Even their vine program reviewers can have bias, so really it's about more control for Amazon. Full disclosure: I was given a chance to read the article for free in return for my unbiased and honest comment.

rlucas 10y ago

Finally. Reviews, especially on highly contested catgories, had turned into a cesspool over the last couple years. The varieties of gamesmanship will doubtless continue but this is at least one of the hydra's heads.

GirlsCanCode 10y ago

This is most reviews these days. Of course, this just means people will stop mentioning that it's a paid review.

markdown 10y ago

I suppose that would also work against the reverse (paying for 1 star reviews). This charity pays for one-star reviews of "culturally appropriative" halloween costumes. http://heatst.com/culture-wars/this-charity-will-pay-you-to-give-one-star-amazon-reviews-to-culturally-appropriative-halloween-costumes/ http://heatst.com/culture-wars/this-charity-will-pay-you-to-...

modzu 10y ago

... except their own

ashnyc 10y ago

This is our story, We have been selling on Amazon since 2011 and about 5 months ago, some hijacker took over our listing and started selling smilar item but of lower quality. It took us 3 months for amazon to take action and got the seller kicked out of amazon. Basically he used of of those review services to upload over 1000 reviews with images to make it seem like they are the owner of the listing. We have been trying to clean up all this mess and we are getting no help from amazon.com . Here is a sample review of counterfeit product. https://www.amazon.com/review/R2X5VE3JT02KCU/ https://www.amazon.com/review/R2X5VE3JT02KCU/ if you look at the listing, our product is totally diffrent.

joering2 10y ago
Very interesting but I think there is something more at play here. Look at the person who left you that review: SpilledInk788 She is "Stay at home mom" but she reviews over 30 products DAILY - some not cheap at all. I suspect this is some sort of paid troll who writes positive/negative reviews (depending on the order/assignment) and post it online to whether boost someone's company rating or lower them. No wonder she never replied to you.

arjie 10y ago

I don't know. The phrase "free and unbiased review" were a strong negative signal.

Hasz 10y ago

Is this a move to consolidate paid reviews into the vine program?

Fej 10y ago

Is this retroactive? Really should be.

good4something 10y ago

Sure these trumped up reviews are not arms' length from the vendor, but they often give details of the product that are not in the official specifications. That's been useful to me on more than one occasion when deciding between two similar options.

Spikeysash 10y ago

Reactions to Amazons new customer review policy banning incentivized reviews https://youtu.be/u4gN58pHmrQ https://youtu.be/u4gN58pHmrQ

w3designer 10y ago

As both a buyer on Amazon and a seller, I have mixed feelings regarding this. On the buying side, I've seen how hard it is to wade through the reviews to buy simple products. Though I would say that it's mostly recently about product quality rather than review quality. On the seller side, the issue is that when you launch a product and have no reviews, you won't get sales. Without reviews and sales, your product slides down into the depths of Amazon. Without the ability to give away products for reviews, we are only left with waiting for reviews to come in naturally or paying a lot for Amazon PPC to continuously force the product to the top of the stack hoping to generate some sales and then ultimately reviews. There has to be some sort of middle ground for this sort of thing. I would think there has to be a way to launch on Amazon that can get products out to real reviewers, and still somehow weed out the "fake" reviews. It's telling that they didn't remove it for book sales as pre-release reviews are so entrenched that they didn't dare mess with it. If it's working for books, in theory, it should work for other categories. Of course, Amazon does have a way to do this legitimately through their mysterious Vine program that you need to be invited to. Though it doesn't seem they really have a direction or know how to handle the issue themselves. For the time being, I can only assume that this will drive the review sites underground.

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fuqted 10y ago

There are plenty of budding entrepreneurs that will be unable to move new products because everyone is going to be afraid to buy without reviews

victorantos 10y ago

I know someone who spends a good part of day looking to get these discounted products, although the reviews he writes are honest, biased - I am not liking the addiction he has got, buying cheap unnecessary stuff non-stop. Everyday he has to buy something, this might not be sane on a long run, happy it will end soon.

ceyhunkazel 10y ago

Meanwhile here few tips for fake reviews: Select "Show only Verified Purchases" to get rid of most of fake reviews according to this 96% of "Incentivized Reviews" are not verified purchases http://reviewmeta.com/blog/what-can-we-do-about-the-problem-of-incentivized-reviews/ http://reviewmeta.com/blog/what-can-we-do-about-the-problem-... Another tip is finding products with most reviews so you get more overall rating even it has some paid/sponsor reviews. "Most reviews" sort option is hidden in most of the categories but there is a way to do it. Here is my detailed writing about this. Disclosure: I am the author of medium story and http://www.jeviz.com http://www.jeviz.com which provides more sort options including "most reviews" to Amazon searches. https://medium.com/@ceyhunkazel/amazon-search-hack-eliminate-amazon-products-that-have-4-or-5-starts-but-only-few-reviews-f485d35d5969#.84yeyaffk https://medium.com/@ceyhunkazel/amazon-search-hack-eliminate...

cauterized 10y ago

This is actually a terrible idea, IMO. Currently people announce when their review was of a freebie. Now people will still do it, they just won't disclose it.