9 ms·

Amazon makes good on its promise to delete “incentivized” reviews

267 points by TheAntiEgo 10y ago

tyingq 10y ago
Amazon is now at 50% of sales being third party listings. Aside from the review mess, the quality level of the 3rd party listing themselves, customer service, shipping speed, and products...is really hurting them. And, of course, separately, the issue of counterfeit products. My non-techie friends are taking notice. Amazon really needs to deep dive into this before they hurt their brand in a way that's hard to recover.
- nkuttler 10y ago
  I recently ordered a cheap product from a vendor in china. As I found out later this vendor has 99% negative reviews that all say the same: money taken, product not delivered, and this has been going on for months. At least I got my money back after a comlaint. I find it unbelievable that you can scam for months and still be a vendor on amazon.
  - setq 10y ago
    Well they have your cash during the time between the purchase and the refund and may have a 20% no complaint rate so it might still pay to let them sell nothing.
    - tyingq 10y ago
      They also get a monthly fee from the seller, even if the seller sells zero products.
      - dangrossman 10y ago
        The monthly subscription is optional. You can pay $0.99 per sale instead and nothing monthly. https://services.amazon.com/selling/pricing.htm https://services.amazon.com/selling/pricing.htm
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - ethbro 10y ago
    The design of listing supposedly identical products by multiple vendors under the same entry needs to be revisited. It's great for competition and price pressure, but completely fails when dealing with generic items and vendors aren't held to account for outright fraud.
  - philliphaydon 10y ago
    Not sure why you single China out. It can be any vendor. I bought an intervalometer for my camera for $30 2 weeks ago. Took 8 days. Works great. Done the job. Chinese brand and shipped from china. Bought some clothes from UK. Never arrived. Amazon refunded. Amazon is great. But any vendor can be as dodgy as any eBay seller.
    - adrianN 10y ago
      Maybe they single out China because they're relaying their personal experience with a seller who happens to be from China.
      - taeric 10y ago
        I think the point is that the "from China" is actually unneeded information. Worse, it can help build xenophobia. Consider, the story is just as powerful with "I ordered from a vendor who had a ton of negative reviews for not delivering products." Even better, that instructs to start paying attention to reviews, and not origin of vendor. :)
        kbenson 10y ago
        It's rather amazing how when you call out people's preconception they hold strongly, you'll easily get downvoted here, regardless of how well founded or supported that preconception is. If the original comment had mentioned how the purchase was from a black vendor, or a gay vendor, people would be up in arms about what that unjustly implies, and how without any sort of data to back that it's just stereotyping (at best). Do it for China, where people already have a strong preconception of the types of vendors present, and all that rational separation of anecdote and data and needing to justify your statements goes right out the window. This isn't to say you can't call out vendors from China if you suspect they are a problem in higher proportions than other vendors. The original comment could have included "I suspect this may be a problem exhibited more often from vendors from China, but don't have data to back that up" or more strong statements with some data, but did not. Instead we have a statement that only adds to the comment when combined with your own preconceptions, since it adds nothing to the circumstances of the described situation without your own preconceptions.
  - lol768 10y ago
    I had almost a completely identical experience. Ordered, waited a month and nothing. Went to look at the seller's reviews .. and they were all 1/5 negative saying the product was never delivered. The A-Z guarantee got me my money back but I wasn't impressed the seller was allowed to continue doing this for so long. After I complained, the seller appeared to have all their items removed from Amazon. As an aside, you can generally trust the FBA items from 3rd party sellers.
  - Semaphor 10y ago
    We are showing self-made (because the widgets amazon offers are crap) widgets for the products our articles talk about. Luckily we have the prices from other merchants to compare the amazon prices to, and could implement a filter for unreasonable prices (way over uvp or way below what other merchants ask for). Amazon is full of scammers.
- intrasight 10y ago
  As long as I can filter those out, I am good.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    How are you doing that? There are some things you can filter on, like brand, that come close, but not specifically "no third parties". Edit: Answered my own question. You can find a place to restrict seller to "amazon.com". It's not 100% useful for all searches though, as you filter out sellers like "Apple", or "Bose". Would be nice if you could filter seller down to "Manufacturer or Amazon.com" in some easy way.
  - patall 10y ago
    But you can only do that when you have time. I was recently investigating a product with very good reviews. They looked quite good. Then I noticed that most of them used very broken german which, when you compared them showed a pattern and looking into the users showed clearly that they were faked. But I can not trust that they are always that easy to spot, so the only possibility for me to check remains to check several low star reviews and look whether they complain about valid problems or just nonsense. The problem I see is that those fake stories are getting better and at some point will be indistiguishable from real reviews. And you will certainly not notice it when you are just quick checking several products or sellers in 30 seconds each.
    - srathi 10y ago
      I recommend checking the review analysis on [1] before making a purchase on Amazon. [1] www.fakespot.com
  - rhizome 10y ago
    TweetDeck for Amazon: I See A Great Need.
- hackcasual 10y ago
  Finally cancelled my prime membership after 7 years. I just don't feel like Amazon is delivering the same level of service quality they used to
  - dawnerd 10y ago
    I've been on th fence on cancelling too. Only thing keeping me subscribed is prime now. I've found it immensely helpful and the restaurant delivery far better than the other delivery companies.
  - 31reasons 10y ago
    So which better alternative did you move to?
    - gshakir 10y ago
      I recently bought Olive oil and a Nintendo wii game via Target with prices cheaper than Amazon. The web experience with Target has vastly improved. I am not sure what's Walmart experience is like.
      - hga 10y ago
        WalMart.com is very good. Same prices as in stores and for what I buy from it, staples so far, those have been quite a bit cheaper than Amazon/Amazon Pantry, reasonably quick free shipping for orders > $50 (several days but less than a week as I recall), double layer corrugated boxes (!), adequate packing in the two shipments I've received so far (albeit don't buy dry laundry detergent since they won't bag it and some will get on the surfaces of everything, although that's just annoying), and 3% off if you use one of their cards. You'll pay local sales tax since they have stores everywhere. Wish I'd started using them when I recently bought a case of Sapporo Ichiban Miso Ramen, Amazon, which I think had a slightly lower price, was out, so I went with a 3rd party which a high rating, which had the brilliant idea of unpacking the case and stuffing it into a Medium size Priority Mail box, which can comfortably only hold half as many. As long as none of the soup base packets were punctured by this stunt I'll come out OK, but....
- AJ007 10y ago
  I definitely wrote things making fun of Jet.com, but now I order household goods from there rather than Amazon. I even see a strong appeal of physically going to Target now verse trying to buy sheets from Amazon. On Amazon, for every item you add to your cart you have to consider: - What is the likelihood this description matches the product being sold? - Are the reviews real? - Is this item safe? - Is the price double what it is from other retailers? Perhaps Amazon is having a similar moment Google did when Demand Media just obliterated the quality of their search results. It really is going to take a multi-pronged approach to clean things up. Depending on where their cashflow is coming from, this could be a very punishing task.
  - ikeboy 10y ago
    > Is the price double what it is from other retailers? How does physically going to Target help with this?
    - Practicality 10y ago
      If it's the same price as Target, then you know it is double the price of other retailers. Simple really.
      - sk5t 10y ago
        Hmm? AFAIK Target sets prices and shopper experience just a smidgen or two higher than Walmart. Although perhaps there may be some localized differences, I have never known it to be the Whole Foods of big-box general merchandise.
        Practicality 10y ago
        Probably a local phenomena. I've done some comparison shopping in my town and the price of most identical items at the Target here is +50% over the Walmart. Not 100%, but plenty overpriced. It's probably just because the locals don't want to be seen as "rednecks" for shopping at Walmart. (Of course there are plenty who don't mind, and I guess, better deal for them)
- ikeboy 10y ago
  I've said this a few times here, but applying a simple filter of 98% feedback or so and at least 25 feedbacks will avoid 99% of the issues. You can also look at the expected shipping speed. There are plenty of good, large sellers, and they didn't get that way by skimping on quality. You don't need to take a chance on smaller sellers if you don't want to. (Also, many sellers use FBA which avoids most of the issues, the only concern there is really product quality, which again is something you don't need to worry too much about if it's an experienced seller. Commingling can cause problems, but it's very rare, if Amazon saw a significant number of problems from it they'd have stopped the program.)
- mrfusion 10y ago
  I'm curious why they want to turn into eBay basically. Is there profit in that?
  - Practicality 10y ago
    For what it's worth eBay does turn a profit most years: http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/ebay/financials http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/ebay/financials
  - colechristensen 10y ago
    They really want to turn into a logistics company. Amazon packs, warehouses, and delivers your package acting as payment manager, and customer service while hosting your IT infrastructure. They want to sell pickaxes and do laundry for gold miners. The part where Amazon isn't packing and shipping your product is a weak link – killing fake reviews helps this though.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    There's a lot more profit in being a platform than a retailer. Amazon is letting other parties use their platform to do the high-capital, low-margin, race-to-the-bottom retail side and taking a massive chunk out of each sale. This is much more lucrative than sourcing, building, buying, and storing items directly.
- bambax 10y ago
  Yes, but the problem is they are still actively encouraging so-called "private label" items. I became a seller on Amazon two months ago, because I'm developing new (unique) products and I thought it would be simpler to have them distributed by Amazon. But making said products is taking much longer than anticipated, so in the meantime, and as a learning process, I started selling one product in "private label" mode (ie, a product that I buy "as is" from a Chinese factory, with my brand printed on it). It's kind of selling, although the competition makes it hard/impossible to turn any profit (since all products are virtually identical, competition is on price and maybe listing quality/exhaustivity). But what is amazing to me is that a service called "Amazon coach" regularly sends emails to encourage me to sell more PL products. Today, Amazon coach recommends selling a meat tenderizer on amazon.de: there are already over 350 different listings for meat tenderizers on amazon.de, how many more do they need??? Some time ago I used to regard the "ships from Amazon" or "Prime" logo as markers for quality, because I figured, somehow, that Amazon did some kind of vetting before accepting a product for shipping. That's completely wrong. The sign only means that the product is stored in their warehouse (and will therefore probably be delivered on time); but it has no meaning whatsoever regarding the quality of the product. There is zero curation. Selling on Amazon is teaching me to trust Amazon less. And of course, the ocean of similar products makes shopping much harder; meat tenderizers are not the worst case by far: if you're looking for a corkscrew in the Home & Kitchen category, you're looking at 2,500+ options on amazon.de alone... and 16,000+ on amazon.com!! Crazy.
  - flippyhead 10y ago
    This has been very enlightening. I buy a ton of stuff on Amazon and have had the same incorrect assumptions.
  - mbrookes 10y ago
    > I used to regard the "ships from Amazon" or "Prime" logo as markers for quality You need to look for (or limit your search to ) "Sold by Amazon". Not so say that Amazon doesn't sell some duff products, and they have some "private label" products of their own (Amazon Basics), but all of those will have had some degree of vetting.
- yellow_postit 10y ago
  The seller followup emails are one of the more annoying day to day things I've noticed needing to deal with more with the shift to third party listings. I completely understand why they send them, because it is the best way to encourage reviews, but on a given eclectic order I may end up with 5 emails from different sellers.
- jknoepfler 10y ago
  You should provide numbers, not anecdotes. As the number of third party vendors grows, the long tail of bad vendors will fill itself out. That is not evidence that the mean/median experience has gotten worse.
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
  Hear, hear. The thing that messes me up most is probably the category spam (also frequently seen with third-party sellers on Newegg). Just as an example, go into Home & Kitchen:Vacuums & Floor Care:Vacuums:Upright Vacuums. Think you'll find the cheapest upright vacuum cleaners if you sort this category by Lowest Price? Ha ha ha ha. No. First you'll need to go through at least 3 pages of miscellaneous parts, fuses, extension cords, and shop vacs before you even get to the first actual upright vacuum cleaner. Amazon's pagination system makes you do this one page at a time (at least on my browser). This is one of the better categories. Most categories related to cell phones are such fucking disasters that it's hard to even gauge how bad the problem is.
- velodrome 10y ago
  This has always been their strategy. Do you know how hard it is to make any margin selling a TV or any electronics product? The sellers take most of the risk. Amazon collects their cut (which is substantial) without lifting a finger so to speak. Personally, I avoid buying any electronics or valuables from Amazon due to counterfeit risk. They have the ability to curtail this activity but they choose not to. Also, the fake reviews damage the integrity of the marketplace. It really shows how much they care for their customers.
- CamperBob2 10y ago
  +1. It's almost as if we're going to need "buyer's agents" before too long, the way Amazon is going. Independent curators for hire who can wade through all the crap listings for us.
- manyxcxi 10y ago
  It's gotten bad enough that there are entire product categories I completely avoid on Amazon due to the likelihood of counterfeit. If I'm looking for a specific brand of electronics (say, Anker or Apple) I'll buy it off Newegg or direct from a brick and mortar. If I can't be bothered or it's not at the store, I'll order it from that store or manufacturer's website (Home Depot, Fry's, etc.). For a lot of other things, the price is so close or the exact same, I'll just buy it from the store. I do a lot of woodworking, so I buy a fair amount of stuff from a number of brands that people aren't really counterfeiting (yet)- for those I'll buy using prime, unless it's at one of the woodworking/hardware stores in the area. Then I'll just go get it myself, the prices are always within a small percentage of each other. It feels like, for me, I do my window shopping at Amazon and execute my purchase locally, just because Amazon has gone downhill for me. I would be interested to know if other people are slowly coming to the behaviors I have. Pretty much I get random small electronics components that don't need a great level of quality and just random other things that I don't care all that much about quality or origin. They've become my Alibaba in a way.
  - massysett 10y ago
    Acutally I trust Anker an Amazon because Anker is running the store, so their reputation is on the line. I still shop Amazon for many categories, but my guard is always up. But for some categories like apparel, the Amazon experience is so horrible that I don't even think to look there.
    - crooked-v 10y ago
      The problem is that Amazon commingles stock, so an Anker-brand X could actually be supplied by company Y and come from counterfeit manufacturer Z.
      - hga 10y ago
        I just checked a couple of their items, and they say "Sold by AnkerDirect and Fulfilled by Amazon", and it's very much Anker's option to not commingle their inventory, and I would expect they've chosen that option, they have a brand to protect.
- strathmeyer 10y ago
  Conterfeit products? There are brand owners who will have any resellers of their products removed. They threaten to shut down my store. Meanwhile it's easy to find a counterfeit iPod. Nobody seems to care.
- paulmd 10y ago
  This would be less of a problem if the Amazon search weren't so terrible. You should just be able to choose "sold by Amazon" and all those problems go away. "Prime shipping" gets you closer but nowadays a lot of junk is prime shipped too. At the root, the problem is that Amazon's stock is not discoverable. Their search engine is terrible, I've had situations where I knew the exact listing I wanted and wanted to see if anyone else was listing it cheaper, I searched a few keywords and had the listing I knew about plus a sea of other listings, then I added more words from the listing's title and suddenly the listing no longer appeared in the search results. What in the actual fuck is going on there? To be honest nowadays I just google search "[item] amazon" because the Amazon search is such utter trash. If it doesn't pop up in the best sellers list and you can't manage to filter down by "prime" and "ratings" it might as well not be there according to Amazon's search, it's just lost in a sea of junk listings. The terrible search is one of the major reasons why nobody buys low-rating items, and that's why people bought ratings in the first place, so really it all comes back to the terrible search. For starters the results need to be weighted by number of items sold though that listing. The brand new listing from a brand new seller yesterday gets the same weight as the item that's been a #1 bestseller for years. But other stuff, like items going away when you try to narrow down to them... I don't even know what's going on there.
  - throwbsidbdk 10y ago
    Amazon has long had a reputation for high engineer turnover and brutal office climate. I wonder if a constant talent bleed is finally manifesting in the quality of their product. It's pretty bad that some third party startups are offering products to determine if Amazon reviews are likely fake and Amazon with all of their resources doesn't seem to be doing it themselves. This feels like MySpace all over again. It's clearly possible to build a superior product, in contrast to something like Google who have constantly reinvented themselves to stay on the top of the curve... it doesn't look good..
    - hga 10y ago
      Yeah, the horrible state of their search, which in many cases is clearly costing them serious money, tells me something is wrong with that part of the company, and since it's so critical, it says nothing good about the company as a whole. Perhaps it's a bad thing they started with books, where counterfeits certainly exist, but aren't quite at the same level of problem, shouldn't be any problem when they were sourcing from that big wholesaler of boos, and ... how long did it take them to enter the used book market with third parties? And, again, that was a well developed market before they entered....
- awqrre 10y ago
  I don't know if it is new but lately I have seen more brand-new-sellers advertising low priced products on Amazon that never ship... You don't usually need to do anything to get a refund, but it wastes people's time and is especially bad if you miss out on a good deal on black Friday because of it...
- izacus 10y ago
  Yes, this! Also (being from the smaller EU country), half of those listings on amazon.de now greet me with "This doesn't ship to your country.". Of course, no filters to what does ship to me. One year ago that somehow wasn't even an issue. It seems that Amazon is turning into same crappy service as Ebay :(
dman 10y ago
The days when I thought of ordering from amazon as a hassle free experience are long over. I now largely think of Amazon as a more expensive AliExpress. a. Their search is broken. b. Same item is listed by different sellers as different SKUs. c. You cannot rely on reviews anymore. d. You cannot filter by merchant and rely on receiving an item that is genuine since Amazon will comingle inventory from multiple merchants for the same SKU. Ie buying a product from Amazon has no guarantee that it is actually an item stocked by Amazon. e. Their price competetiveness appears to have eroded. Best Buy etc no longer feel like a complete rip off in comparision. f. Other retailers (Macys etc) have much more hassle free return policies. Prime is the single thing that Amazon gets right in the whole selling experience - which is why I now think of Amazon as more of a logistics company than I do as a retailer.
- deanCommie 10y ago
  All your problems can be addressed by filtering by items that are sold by amazon, and not buying from 3rd party sellers. I can buy the complaints about Search (though really it's a problem of having too much selection). However, I've had universally positive return experiences, so I have no idea what you're on about there.
  - dman 10y ago
    Please see point d. Specifying Amazon as the seller merchant does not mean what you think it means. Let me give an example in the form of a question / answer a. If Amazon sells a 64 GB Sandisk card b. Merchants A and B also sell the same card c. Merchants A and B have opted into the fulfilled by Amazon program. Question: You purchase the 64 GB Sandisk card and pick Amazon as the seller. Whose inventory did the card come from? Answer: Undefined. For semantic purposes we can think of the following mental model - For a given SKU Amazon takes the memory cards from its own inventory and inventory from all other resellers who have opted into the "Fulfilled by Amazon" program (in our example A and B) and puts it together in a giant heap in its warehouse. When a order comes in a card is picked at random from the heap and shipped out to you.
    - 10y ago
gshakir 10y ago
Good move, but the damage has been done. My recent product search have 'incentivized' reviews and it has been very hard to make any decisions, so I have been double checking the reviews from other sources. Due to this, I also found that Amazon prices are no longer competitive and my recent purchases have been via Target with either free shipping or local store pickup with cheaper prices.
_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
Amazon has lost a lot o appeal lately. Since they moved to Amazon Logistics from DHL here in Berlin, I had several lost or non delivered items, items were delivered at 8pm to a business address or on Saturday - this all being a Prime customer. Working with customer support was a pain. Several people I know - including me - wish for a real Amazon alternative, and I've been a customer right from the beginning spending 90% of my online money at Amazon.
- brobinson 10y ago
  Sounds a lot like the OnTrac carrier in the Bay Area. One time they left a package for me at the Subway next to my building. I stopped using Amazon same-day shipping (even when offered for free!) because it almost always used OnTrac and I would have about a 50/50 shot of actually getting the item the same day.
  - terinjokes 10y ago
    I've stopped getting any expiedated deliveries from Amazon via OnTrac sometime in the last year in SF proper. I think they've shifted it to in-house logistics (I think via Prime Now ICs or via Prime Fresh trucks).
  - drdeadringer 10y ago
    UPS in the Bay Area has "pick up points" for packages. One was a gas station down the road from me. I had ordered a $500 product so I was glad it wasn't on my patio until 7pm (got to the gas station at 730p), but it was unclear where the clerk was storing packages besides under the counter.
  - bsharitt 10y ago
    They use LSO around here for same day and it's been pretty unreliable. On the bright side I've gotten a few months of prime and about $100 in credit back.
- lima 10y ago
  Try to have them deliver to a PackStation. Only DHL can ship to those :-)
KKKKkkkk1 10y ago
After many years of turning no profit, Amazon has finally found its business model. Would not be surprised if they moved out of retail altogether.
jrcii 10y ago
Hey Scott@HN go suck a dick liberal asshole!
user5994461 10y ago
IMO. Amazon.com has became a poor ebay. On Ebay, it's clear that you're only buying from a 3rd party seller and you can see who it is and what's his reputation.
- tyingq 10y ago
  That's a good point. On amazon, you have to know to click on the seller link to drill down to reputation. EBay has that information front and center on the listing.
ClayFerguson 10y ago
Amazon needs to also stop disallowing bad reviews. I put up a bad review once, with no profanity or anything obviously worthy of rejecting other than a bad review of a product, and they refused to post it citing something "against their policy". All I can think of is the fact that i accused the product of being a fake/counterfeit which was most certainly true. Of course the real moral of that story is never buy anything made of any kind of fabric from a China seller. You'll get something 2 sizes too small and only roughly similar to what you saw in the picture, and in my experiences anything you think you're getting from China which is a "name brand" will indeed be a knock off (fake) one.
- jrcii 10y ago
  I got banned from HN for saying "oriental isn't an offensive word" which is based on the unanimous opinion of every asian person I've ever discussed it with -- i.e. I've been persecuted for my political beliefs because I'm not a social justice warrior from San Fransisco like Scott the HN admin. That's a lot worse.
- philliphaydon 10y ago
  I've had bad reviews rejected because they mentioned things unrelated to the product. If I do a negative 1 star review on the product, never had the review rejected.
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kpozin 10y ago
In the past couple of weeks, I've searched for several categories of items on Amazon: umbrellas, paint brushes, and acrylic paint. Almost every product's page was dominated by five-star incentivized reviews.
WaltPurvis 10y ago
Two thoughts: (1) It's always been standard practice in the publishing industry to provide free Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs) to reviewers, and I've noticed that many independent ebook authors on Amazon have adopted this practice. Am I to understand that Amazon will now disallow providing ARCs to book reviewers? Because that would fly in the face of standard industry practice -- a practice that I think very few people have ever complained about over the years. (2) Isn't this exactly what the Amazon Vine program does? I.e., provide free products to people so they can review them? Are they stopping Vine? (Maybe they already did.) Are they admitting that the Vine program led to inflated reviews?
- throwawaylalala 10y ago
  Amazon seller here- Amazon Vine costs something like 4k per SKU. That makes it dead to most sellers.
i-think 10y ago
In order to make this claim, Amazon, TechCrunch, and the researcher they cite must be able to accurately identify the population of incentivized reviews. How is that possible? Incentivized reviews, if I'm using the term correctly, are designed to be indistinguishable from 'real' reviews. The reviewers aren't going to reveal which ones are incentivized. If you think you can identify them, what you mean is that you can identify the ones that you identify; it's literally that much of a tautology. You have no idea of your accuracy, how many true and false positives and how many true/false negatives. What Amazon is done is the same; they remove reviews that meet certain criteria. Amazon claims the criteria are an accurate proxy for incentivized reviews but I doubt they can confirm that. At best they are raising the bar so that only better written incentivized reviews remain, and incentivized reviewers will adjust to the new standard. Users, no longer seeing incentivized reviews that they can identify, will assume the situation has improved. Really, they are still being conned but now don't know it.
Steeeve 10y ago
This thread has given me a big lack of confidence in Amazon as a retail outlet. I see a lot of "you're problem is solved by doing X", and maybe that's fine for me if I care to remember the advice but I'm not the big spender in my family, and I certainly don't care to put in the effort to keep up-to-date on how not to get screwed by shopping at a particular website. From what I can tell, there's are issues with fake reviews, fake vendors, and counterfeit products being commingled with genuine products. Why would I put myself in a situation where I know any of these are potential problems? Add to that when I have had problems with Amazon, the support channels have historically been unclear and they have an extraordinarily poor reputation for how they treat their employees. What is the logical path that would make me want to spend my money with this particular vendor?
brilliantcode 10y ago
I bought a bunch of crap on Amazon based on these reviews. I feel lied to and it will definitely make me rethink next I recklessly binge purchase items based on the star ratings.
grkvlt 10y ago
One of my hobbies when bored is to look at (unusually) expensive items on Amazon (say, a GBP 40K Hasselblad camera) and all their reviews. 99% of the reviews are jokes, all of the same predictable form: 'I spent my life savings on this, now I live in the box it came in'; 'Such good value I bought ten'; or attributing ridiculous properties to the product. [1] I then flag each review as inappropriate, and mark them as unhelpful. I know this is not going to fix the problem, unfortunately. I just find these puerile attempts at humour rather sad and don't understand why they are tolerated; both by Amazon and even other site users, who mark the reviews as helpful, and comment approvingly. Amazingly, some of the approving comments are even voted as helpful. I guess that everyone who can afford to spend GBP 20K on a TV are probab;y not influenced by reviews. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2DQ4KXJL8RIJR/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00N8V3RS0 https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2DQ4KXJL8RIJR/ref=cm_cr_rdp...
rampage101 10y ago
It's funny how whenever the topic of machine learning comes up Amazon is mentioned as a world class leader. However, their search is quite poor as many have mentioned. It still seems like "search" is a technically hard problem to get right.
SwellJoe 10y ago
While I like the sentiment, and have seen my trust of Amazon and reviews at Amazon plummet in recent years, I suspect this will just push the practice underground. Unscrupulous vendors will continue to utilize their network of "reviewers", but will no longer instruct them to include a disclaimer about the reviewers being given free products in exchange for (almost always positive) reviews.
- mimimimi 10y ago
  With the effect that it will just screw amazon further. Because of this problem I've started buying products directly from the brand stores or walmart/costco/target. I completely stopped buying from ebay years ago because of similar problems.
  - SwellJoe 10y ago
    I guess curation (of products, content, reviews, vendors, everything) remains one of the big problems of the internet age, where there's a million of everything and it's hard to know who to trust.
eruditely 10y ago
For stuff like this, Millesime imperial for men, I cannot be sure I am buying the real thing or a counterfeit. This is totally the opposite of what I expected amazon to represent, i'm not quite sure when this decline started to happen. https://www.amazon.com/Creed-Millesime-Imperial-Spray-4-0/dp/B00152S1IK/ref=sr_1_1_a_it?ie=UTF8&qid=1480128263&sr=8-1&keywords=creed+millesime+imperial+for+men https://www.amazon.com/Creed-Millesime-Imperial-Spray-4-0/dp...
- hga 10y ago
  There are a bunch of domains where you should just avoid buying anything on Amazon that's sold by a third party, and this strikes me as one of them. And if it's sold by Amazon itself, hope it's either in one of the categories where they don't commingle, like food, or that you luck out. I'd hope anything you ingest or put on your skin like this would be in a "No Commingling!" category....
Kunix 10y ago
Naive question - Does anybody know how the Amazon reviews datasets available online have been generated? Is it web scraping? (on millions of reviews?!) Or partnership with academics? Or something else? Looking at https://snap.stanford.edu/data/web-Amazon.html https://snap.stanford.edu/data/web-Amazon.html and http://jmcauley.ucsd.edu/data/amazon/ http://jmcauley.ucsd.edu/data/amazon/, I can't find any mention on what process they used to generated these datasets.
freyr 10y ago
If I'm purchasing a physical item where quality matters and I don't want to end up with a shoddy product or cheap knockoff, I don't buy from Amazon. Exceptions are books and the occasional AmazonBasics cable. It's a shame, because they had a great service, and their delivery infrastructure remains great. But I don't need same day delivery if you're delivering junk.
tmptmp 10y ago
Are there sufficient number of good engineers left with Amazon yet? I wonder. Look at their search quality. Terrible even at its best. I searched for laptop and wanted to see the cheapest so selected "sort by Price low to high", lo and behold, I was flooded with a never ending list of wired and wireless mice, keyboards, usb cables, and what not. I had to click on multiple pages before I could get to the first laptop entry. This is ridiculous or do they prevent their engineers for experiencing this pain? They are better off outsourcing their search problem to Google, just as Apple learnt to outsource the maps problem to Google. No offense intended.

267 points by TheAntiEgo 10y ago

Amazon is now at 50% of sales being third party listings. Aside from the review mess, the quality level of the 3rd party listing themselves, customer service, shipping speed, and products...is really hurting them. And, of course, separately, the issue of counterfeit products. My non-techie friends are taking notice. Amazon really needs to deep dive into this before they hurt their brand in a way that's hard to recover.

nkuttler 10y ago
I recently ordered a cheap product from a vendor in china. As I found out later this vendor has 99% negative reviews that all say the same: money taken, product not delivered, and this has been going on for months. At least I got my money back after a comlaint. I find it unbelievable that you can scam for months and still be a vendor on amazon.
- setq 10y ago
  Well they have your cash during the time between the purchase and the refund and may have a 20% no complaint rate so it might still pay to let them sell nothing.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    They also get a monthly fee from the seller, even if the seller sells zero products.
    - dangrossman 10y ago
      The monthly subscription is optional. You can pay $0.99 per sale instead and nothing monthly. https://services.amazon.com/selling/pricing.htm https://services.amazon.com/selling/pricing.htm
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- ethbro 10y ago
  The design of listing supposedly identical products by multiple vendors under the same entry needs to be revisited. It's great for competition and price pressure, but completely fails when dealing with generic items and vendors aren't held to account for outright fraud.
- philliphaydon 10y ago
  Not sure why you single China out. It can be any vendor. I bought an intervalometer for my camera for $30 2 weeks ago. Took 8 days. Works great. Done the job. Chinese brand and shipped from china. Bought some clothes from UK. Never arrived. Amazon refunded. Amazon is great. But any vendor can be as dodgy as any eBay seller.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    Maybe they single out China because they're relaying their personal experience with a seller who happens to be from China.
    - taeric 10y ago
      I think the point is that the "from China" is actually unneeded information. Worse, it can help build xenophobia. Consider, the story is just as powerful with "I ordered from a vendor who had a ton of negative reviews for not delivering products." Even better, that instructs to start paying attention to reviews, and not origin of vendor. :)
      - kbenson 10y ago
        It's rather amazing how when you call out people's preconception they hold strongly, you'll easily get downvoted here, regardless of how well founded or supported that preconception is. If the original comment had mentioned how the purchase was from a black vendor, or a gay vendor, people would be up in arms about what that unjustly implies, and how without any sort of data to back that it's just stereotyping (at best). Do it for China, where people already have a strong preconception of the types of vendors present, and all that rational separation of anecdote and data and needing to justify your statements goes right out the window. This isn't to say you can't call out vendors from China if you suspect they are a problem in higher proportions than other vendors. The original comment could have included "I suspect this may be a problem exhibited more often from vendors from China, but don't have data to back that up" or more strong statements with some data, but did not. Instead we have a statement that only adds to the comment when combined with your own preconceptions, since it adds nothing to the circumstances of the described situation without your own preconceptions.
- lol768 10y ago
  I had almost a completely identical experience. Ordered, waited a month and nothing. Went to look at the seller's reviews .. and they were all 1/5 negative saying the product was never delivered. The A-Z guarantee got me my money back but I wasn't impressed the seller was allowed to continue doing this for so long. After I complained, the seller appeared to have all their items removed from Amazon. As an aside, you can generally trust the FBA items from 3rd party sellers.
- Semaphor 10y ago
  We are showing self-made (because the widgets amazon offers are crap) widgets for the products our articles talk about. Luckily we have the prices from other merchants to compare the amazon prices to, and could implement a filter for unreasonable prices (way over uvp or way below what other merchants ask for). Amazon is full of scammers.
intrasight 10y ago
As long as I can filter those out, I am good.
- tyingq 10y ago
  How are you doing that? There are some things you can filter on, like brand, that come close, but not specifically "no third parties". Edit: Answered my own question. You can find a place to restrict seller to "amazon.com". It's not 100% useful for all searches though, as you filter out sellers like "Apple", or "Bose". Would be nice if you could filter seller down to "Manufacturer or Amazon.com" in some easy way.
- patall 10y ago
  But you can only do that when you have time. I was recently investigating a product with very good reviews. They looked quite good. Then I noticed that most of them used very broken german which, when you compared them showed a pattern and looking into the users showed clearly that they were faked. But I can not trust that they are always that easy to spot, so the only possibility for me to check remains to check several low star reviews and look whether they complain about valid problems or just nonsense. The problem I see is that those fake stories are getting better and at some point will be indistiguishable from real reviews. And you will certainly not notice it when you are just quick checking several products or sellers in 30 seconds each.
  - srathi 10y ago
    I recommend checking the review analysis on [1] before making a purchase on Amazon. [1] www.fakespot.com
- rhizome 10y ago
  TweetDeck for Amazon: I See A Great Need.
hackcasual 10y ago
Finally cancelled my prime membership after 7 years. I just don't feel like Amazon is delivering the same level of service quality they used to
- dawnerd 10y ago
  I've been on th fence on cancelling too. Only thing keeping me subscribed is prime now. I've found it immensely helpful and the restaurant delivery far better than the other delivery companies.
- 31reasons 10y ago
  So which better alternative did you move to?
  - gshakir 10y ago
    I recently bought Olive oil and a Nintendo wii game via Target with prices cheaper than Amazon. The web experience with Target has vastly improved. I am not sure what's Walmart experience is like.
    - hga 10y ago
      WalMart.com is very good. Same prices as in stores and for what I buy from it, staples so far, those have been quite a bit cheaper than Amazon/Amazon Pantry, reasonably quick free shipping for orders > $50 (several days but less than a week as I recall), double layer corrugated boxes (!), adequate packing in the two shipments I've received so far (albeit don't buy dry laundry detergent since they won't bag it and some will get on the surfaces of everything, although that's just annoying), and 3% off if you use one of their cards. You'll pay local sales tax since they have stores everywhere. Wish I'd started using them when I recently bought a case of Sapporo Ichiban Miso Ramen, Amazon, which I think had a slightly lower price, was out, so I went with a 3rd party which a high rating, which had the brilliant idea of unpacking the case and stuffing it into a Medium size Priority Mail box, which can comfortably only hold half as many. As long as none of the soup base packets were punctured by this stunt I'll come out OK, but....
AJ007 10y ago
I definitely wrote things making fun of Jet.com, but now I order household goods from there rather than Amazon. I even see a strong appeal of physically going to Target now verse trying to buy sheets from Amazon. On Amazon, for every item you add to your cart you have to consider: - What is the likelihood this description matches the product being sold? - Are the reviews real? - Is this item safe? - Is the price double what it is from other retailers? Perhaps Amazon is having a similar moment Google did when Demand Media just obliterated the quality of their search results. It really is going to take a multi-pronged approach to clean things up. Depending on where their cashflow is coming from, this could be a very punishing task.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  > Is the price double what it is from other retailers? How does physically going to Target help with this?
  - Practicality 10y ago
    If it's the same price as Target, then you know it is double the price of other retailers. Simple really.
    - sk5t 10y ago
      Hmm? AFAIK Target sets prices and shopper experience just a smidgen or two higher than Walmart. Although perhaps there may be some localized differences, I have never known it to be the Whole Foods of big-box general merchandise.
      - Practicality 10y ago
        Probably a local phenomena. I've done some comparison shopping in my town and the price of most identical items at the Target here is +50% over the Walmart. Not 100%, but plenty overpriced. It's probably just because the locals don't want to be seen as "rednecks" for shopping at Walmart. (Of course there are plenty who don't mind, and I guess, better deal for them)
ikeboy 10y ago
I've said this a few times here, but applying a simple filter of 98% feedback or so and at least 25 feedbacks will avoid 99% of the issues. You can also look at the expected shipping speed. There are plenty of good, large sellers, and they didn't get that way by skimping on quality. You don't need to take a chance on smaller sellers if you don't want to. (Also, many sellers use FBA which avoids most of the issues, the only concern there is really product quality, which again is something you don't need to worry too much about if it's an experienced seller. Commingling can cause problems, but it's very rare, if Amazon saw a significant number of problems from it they'd have stopped the program.)
mrfusion 10y ago
I'm curious why they want to turn into eBay basically. Is there profit in that?
- Practicality 10y ago
  For what it's worth eBay does turn a profit most years: http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/ebay/financials http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/ebay/financials
- colechristensen 10y ago
  They really want to turn into a logistics company. Amazon packs, warehouses, and delivers your package acting as payment manager, and customer service while hosting your IT infrastructure. They want to sell pickaxes and do laundry for gold miners. The part where Amazon isn't packing and shipping your product is a weak link – killing fake reviews helps this though.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  There's a lot more profit in being a platform than a retailer. Amazon is letting other parties use their platform to do the high-capital, low-margin, race-to-the-bottom retail side and taking a massive chunk out of each sale. This is much more lucrative than sourcing, building, buying, and storing items directly.
bambax 10y ago
Yes, but the problem is they are still actively encouraging so-called "private label" items. I became a seller on Amazon two months ago, because I'm developing new (unique) products and I thought it would be simpler to have them distributed by Amazon. But making said products is taking much longer than anticipated, so in the meantime, and as a learning process, I started selling one product in "private label" mode (ie, a product that I buy "as is" from a Chinese factory, with my brand printed on it). It's kind of selling, although the competition makes it hard/impossible to turn any profit (since all products are virtually identical, competition is on price and maybe listing quality/exhaustivity). But what is amazing to me is that a service called "Amazon coach" regularly sends emails to encourage me to sell more PL products. Today, Amazon coach recommends selling a meat tenderizer on amazon.de: there are already over 350 different listings for meat tenderizers on amazon.de, how many more do they need??? Some time ago I used to regard the "ships from Amazon" or "Prime" logo as markers for quality, because I figured, somehow, that Amazon did some kind of vetting before accepting a product for shipping. That's completely wrong. The sign only means that the product is stored in their warehouse (and will therefore probably be delivered on time); but it has no meaning whatsoever regarding the quality of the product. There is zero curation. Selling on Amazon is teaching me to trust Amazon less. And of course, the ocean of similar products makes shopping much harder; meat tenderizers are not the worst case by far: if you're looking for a corkscrew in the Home & Kitchen category, you're looking at 2,500+ options on amazon.de alone... and 16,000+ on amazon.com!! Crazy.
- flippyhead 10y ago
  This has been very enlightening. I buy a ton of stuff on Amazon and have had the same incorrect assumptions.
- mbrookes 10y ago
  > I used to regard the "ships from Amazon" or "Prime" logo as markers for quality You need to look for (or limit your search to ) "Sold by Amazon". Not so say that Amazon doesn't sell some duff products, and they have some "private label" products of their own (Amazon Basics), but all of those will have had some degree of vetting.
yellow_postit 10y ago
The seller followup emails are one of the more annoying day to day things I've noticed needing to deal with more with the shift to third party listings. I completely understand why they send them, because it is the best way to encourage reviews, but on a given eclectic order I may end up with 5 emails from different sellers.
jknoepfler 10y ago
You should provide numbers, not anecdotes. As the number of third party vendors grows, the long tail of bad vendors will fill itself out. That is not evidence that the mean/median experience has gotten worse.
0xcde4c3db 10y ago
Hear, hear. The thing that messes me up most is probably the category spam (also frequently seen with third-party sellers on Newegg). Just as an example, go into Home & Kitchen:Vacuums & Floor Care:Vacuums:Upright Vacuums. Think you'll find the cheapest upright vacuum cleaners if you sort this category by Lowest Price? Ha ha ha ha. No. First you'll need to go through at least 3 pages of miscellaneous parts, fuses, extension cords, and shop vacs before you even get to the first actual upright vacuum cleaner. Amazon's pagination system makes you do this one page at a time (at least on my browser). This is one of the better categories. Most categories related to cell phones are such fucking disasters that it's hard to even gauge how bad the problem is.
velodrome 10y ago
This has always been their strategy. Do you know how hard it is to make any margin selling a TV or any electronics product? The sellers take most of the risk. Amazon collects their cut (which is substantial) without lifting a finger so to speak. Personally, I avoid buying any electronics or valuables from Amazon due to counterfeit risk. They have the ability to curtail this activity but they choose not to. Also, the fake reviews damage the integrity of the marketplace. It really shows how much they care for their customers.
CamperBob2 10y ago
+1. It's almost as if we're going to need "buyer's agents" before too long, the way Amazon is going. Independent curators for hire who can wade through all the crap listings for us.
manyxcxi 10y ago
It's gotten bad enough that there are entire product categories I completely avoid on Amazon due to the likelihood of counterfeit. If I'm looking for a specific brand of electronics (say, Anker or Apple) I'll buy it off Newegg or direct from a brick and mortar. If I can't be bothered or it's not at the store, I'll order it from that store or manufacturer's website (Home Depot, Fry's, etc.). For a lot of other things, the price is so close or the exact same, I'll just buy it from the store. I do a lot of woodworking, so I buy a fair amount of stuff from a number of brands that people aren't really counterfeiting (yet)- for those I'll buy using prime, unless it's at one of the woodworking/hardware stores in the area. Then I'll just go get it myself, the prices are always within a small percentage of each other. It feels like, for me, I do my window shopping at Amazon and execute my purchase locally, just because Amazon has gone downhill for me. I would be interested to know if other people are slowly coming to the behaviors I have. Pretty much I get random small electronics components that don't need a great level of quality and just random other things that I don't care all that much about quality or origin. They've become my Alibaba in a way.
- massysett 10y ago
  Acutally I trust Anker an Amazon because Anker is running the store, so their reputation is on the line. I still shop Amazon for many categories, but my guard is always up. But for some categories like apparel, the Amazon experience is so horrible that I don't even think to look there.
  - crooked-v 10y ago
    The problem is that Amazon commingles stock, so an Anker-brand X could actually be supplied by company Y and come from counterfeit manufacturer Z.
    - hga 10y ago
      I just checked a couple of their items, and they say "Sold by AnkerDirect and Fulfilled by Amazon", and it's very much Anker's option to not commingle their inventory, and I would expect they've chosen that option, they have a brand to protect.
strathmeyer 10y ago
Conterfeit products? There are brand owners who will have any resellers of their products removed. They threaten to shut down my store. Meanwhile it's easy to find a counterfeit iPod. Nobody seems to care.
paulmd 10y ago
This would be less of a problem if the Amazon search weren't so terrible. You should just be able to choose "sold by Amazon" and all those problems go away. "Prime shipping" gets you closer but nowadays a lot of junk is prime shipped too. At the root, the problem is that Amazon's stock is not discoverable. Their search engine is terrible, I've had situations where I knew the exact listing I wanted and wanted to see if anyone else was listing it cheaper, I searched a few keywords and had the listing I knew about plus a sea of other listings, then I added more words from the listing's title and suddenly the listing no longer appeared in the search results. What in the actual fuck is going on there? To be honest nowadays I just google search "[item] amazon" because the Amazon search is such utter trash. If it doesn't pop up in the best sellers list and you can't manage to filter down by "prime" and "ratings" it might as well not be there according to Amazon's search, it's just lost in a sea of junk listings. The terrible search is one of the major reasons why nobody buys low-rating items, and that's why people bought ratings in the first place, so really it all comes back to the terrible search. For starters the results need to be weighted by number of items sold though that listing. The brand new listing from a brand new seller yesterday gets the same weight as the item that's been a #1 bestseller for years. But other stuff, like items going away when you try to narrow down to them... I don't even know what's going on there.
- throwbsidbdk 10y ago
  Amazon has long had a reputation for high engineer turnover and brutal office climate. I wonder if a constant talent bleed is finally manifesting in the quality of their product. It's pretty bad that some third party startups are offering products to determine if Amazon reviews are likely fake and Amazon with all of their resources doesn't seem to be doing it themselves. This feels like MySpace all over again. It's clearly possible to build a superior product, in contrast to something like Google who have constantly reinvented themselves to stay on the top of the curve... it doesn't look good..
  - hga 10y ago
    Yeah, the horrible state of their search, which in many cases is clearly costing them serious money, tells me something is wrong with that part of the company, and since it's so critical, it says nothing good about the company as a whole. Perhaps it's a bad thing they started with books, where counterfeits certainly exist, but aren't quite at the same level of problem, shouldn't be any problem when they were sourcing from that big wholesaler of boos, and ... how long did it take them to enter the used book market with third parties? And, again, that was a well developed market before they entered....
awqrre 10y ago
I don't know if it is new but lately I have seen more brand-new-sellers advertising low priced products on Amazon that never ship... You don't usually need to do anything to get a refund, but it wastes people's time and is especially bad if you miss out on a good deal on black Friday because of it...
izacus 10y ago
Yes, this! Also (being from the smaller EU country), half of those listings on amazon.de now greet me with "This doesn't ship to your country.". Of course, no filters to what does ship to me. One year ago that somehow wasn't even an issue. It seems that Amazon is turning into same crappy service as Ebay :(

dman 10y ago

The days when I thought of ordering from amazon as a hassle free experience are long over. I now largely think of Amazon as a more expensive AliExpress. a. Their search is broken. b. Same item is listed by different sellers as different SKUs. c. You cannot rely on reviews anymore. d. You cannot filter by merchant and rely on receiving an item that is genuine since Amazon will comingle inventory from multiple merchants for the same SKU. Ie buying a product from Amazon has no guarantee that it is actually an item stocked by Amazon. e. Their price competetiveness appears to have eroded. Best Buy etc no longer feel like a complete rip off in comparision. f. Other retailers (Macys etc) have much more hassle free return policies. Prime is the single thing that Amazon gets right in the whole selling experience - which is why I now think of Amazon as more of a logistics company than I do as a retailer.

deanCommie 10y ago
All your problems can be addressed by filtering by items that are sold by amazon, and not buying from 3rd party sellers. I can buy the complaints about Search (though really it's a problem of having too much selection). However, I've had universally positive return experiences, so I have no idea what you're on about there.
- dman 10y ago
  Please see point d. Specifying Amazon as the seller merchant does not mean what you think it means. Let me give an example in the form of a question / answer a. If Amazon sells a 64 GB Sandisk card b. Merchants A and B also sell the same card c. Merchants A and B have opted into the fulfilled by Amazon program. Question: You purchase the 64 GB Sandisk card and pick Amazon as the seller. Whose inventory did the card come from? Answer: Undefined. For semantic purposes we can think of the following mental model - For a given SKU Amazon takes the memory cards from its own inventory and inventory from all other resellers who have opted into the "Fulfilled by Amazon" program (in our example A and B) and puts it together in a giant heap in its warehouse. When a order comes in a card is picked at random from the heap and shipped out to you.
  - 10y ago

gshakir 10y ago

Good move, but the damage has been done. My recent product search have 'incentivized' reviews and it has been very hard to make any decisions, so I have been double checking the reviews from other sources. Due to this, I also found that Amazon prices are no longer competitive and my recent purchases have been via Target with either free shipping or local store pickup with cheaper prices.

_Codemonkeyism 10y ago

Amazon has lost a lot o appeal lately. Since they moved to Amazon Logistics from DHL here in Berlin, I had several lost or non delivered items, items were delivered at 8pm to a business address or on Saturday - this all being a Prime customer. Working with customer support was a pain. Several people I know - including me - wish for a real Amazon alternative, and I've been a customer right from the beginning spending 90% of my online money at Amazon.

brobinson 10y ago
Sounds a lot like the OnTrac carrier in the Bay Area. One time they left a package for me at the Subway next to my building. I stopped using Amazon same-day shipping (even when offered for free!) because it almost always used OnTrac and I would have about a 50/50 shot of actually getting the item the same day.
- terinjokes 10y ago
  I've stopped getting any expiedated deliveries from Amazon via OnTrac sometime in the last year in SF proper. I think they've shifted it to in-house logistics (I think via Prime Now ICs or via Prime Fresh trucks).
- drdeadringer 10y ago
  UPS in the Bay Area has "pick up points" for packages. One was a gas station down the road from me. I had ordered a $500 product so I was glad it wasn't on my patio until 7pm (got to the gas station at 730p), but it was unclear where the clerk was storing packages besides under the counter.
- bsharitt 10y ago
  They use LSO around here for same day and it's been pretty unreliable. On the bright side I've gotten a few months of prime and about $100 in credit back.
lima 10y ago
Try to have them deliver to a PackStation. Only DHL can ship to those :-)

KKKKkkkk1 10y ago

After many years of turning no profit, Amazon has finally found its business model. Would not be surprised if they moved out of retail altogether.

jrcii 10y ago

Hey Scott@HN go suck a dick liberal asshole!

user5994461 10y ago

IMO. Amazon.com has became a poor ebay. On Ebay, it's clear that you're only buying from a 3rd party seller and you can see who it is and what's his reputation.

tyingq 10y ago
That's a good point. On amazon, you have to know to click on the seller link to drill down to reputation. EBay has that information front and center on the listing.

ClayFerguson 10y ago

Amazon needs to also stop disallowing bad reviews. I put up a bad review once, with no profanity or anything obviously worthy of rejecting other than a bad review of a product, and they refused to post it citing something "against their policy". All I can think of is the fact that i accused the product of being a fake/counterfeit which was most certainly true. Of course the real moral of that story is never buy anything made of any kind of fabric from a China seller. You'll get something 2 sizes too small and only roughly similar to what you saw in the picture, and in my experiences anything you think you're getting from China which is a "name brand" will indeed be a knock off (fake) one.

jrcii 10y ago
I got banned from HN for saying "oriental isn't an offensive word" which is based on the unanimous opinion of every asian person I've ever discussed it with -- i.e. I've been persecuted for my political beliefs because I'm not a social justice warrior from San Fransisco like Scott the HN admin. That's a lot worse.
philliphaydon 10y ago
I've had bad reviews rejected because they mentioned things unrelated to the product. If I do a negative 1 star review on the product, never had the review rejected.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

kpozin 10y ago

In the past couple of weeks, I've searched for several categories of items on Amazon: umbrellas, paint brushes, and acrylic paint. Almost every product's page was dominated by five-star incentivized reviews.

WaltPurvis 10y ago

Two thoughts: (1) It's always been standard practice in the publishing industry to provide free Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs) to reviewers, and I've noticed that many independent ebook authors on Amazon have adopted this practice. Am I to understand that Amazon will now disallow providing ARCs to book reviewers? Because that would fly in the face of standard industry practice -- a practice that I think very few people have ever complained about over the years. (2) Isn't this exactly what the Amazon Vine program does? I.e., provide free products to people so they can review them? Are they stopping Vine? (Maybe they already did.) Are they admitting that the Vine program led to inflated reviews?

throwawaylalala 10y ago
Amazon seller here- Amazon Vine costs something like 4k per SKU. That makes it dead to most sellers.

i-think 10y ago

In order to make this claim, Amazon, TechCrunch, and the researcher they cite must be able to accurately identify the population of incentivized reviews. How is that possible? Incentivized reviews, if I'm using the term correctly, are designed to be indistinguishable from 'real' reviews. The reviewers aren't going to reveal which ones are incentivized. If you think you can identify them, what you mean is that you can identify the ones that you identify; it's literally that much of a tautology. You have no idea of your accuracy, how many true and false positives and how many true/false negatives. What Amazon is done is the same; they remove reviews that meet certain criteria. Amazon claims the criteria are an accurate proxy for incentivized reviews but I doubt they can confirm that. At best they are raising the bar so that only better written incentivized reviews remain, and incentivized reviewers will adjust to the new standard. Users, no longer seeing incentivized reviews that they can identify, will assume the situation has improved. Really, they are still being conned but now don't know it.

Steeeve 10y ago

This thread has given me a big lack of confidence in Amazon as a retail outlet. I see a lot of "you're problem is solved by doing X", and maybe that's fine for me if I care to remember the advice but I'm not the big spender in my family, and I certainly don't care to put in the effort to keep up-to-date on how not to get screwed by shopping at a particular website. From what I can tell, there's are issues with fake reviews, fake vendors, and counterfeit products being commingled with genuine products. Why would I put myself in a situation where I know any of these are potential problems? Add to that when I have had problems with Amazon, the support channels have historically been unclear and they have an extraordinarily poor reputation for how they treat their employees. What is the logical path that would make me want to spend my money with this particular vendor?

brilliantcode 10y ago

I bought a bunch of crap on Amazon based on these reviews. I feel lied to and it will definitely make me rethink next I recklessly binge purchase items based on the star ratings.

grkvlt 10y ago

One of my hobbies when bored is to look at (unusually) expensive items on Amazon (say, a GBP 40K Hasselblad camera) and all their reviews. 99% of the reviews are jokes, all of the same predictable form: 'I spent my life savings on this, now I live in the box it came in'; 'Such good value I bought ten'; or attributing ridiculous properties to the product. [1] I then flag each review as inappropriate, and mark them as unhelpful. I know this is not going to fix the problem, unfortunately. I just find these puerile attempts at humour rather sad and don't understand why they are tolerated; both by Amazon and even other site users, who mark the reviews as helpful, and comment approvingly. Amazingly, some of the approving comments are even voted as helpful. I guess that everyone who can afford to spend GBP 20K on a TV are probab;y not influenced by reviews. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2DQ4KXJL8RIJR/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00N8V3RS0 https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2DQ4KXJL8RIJR/ref=cm_cr_rdp...

rampage101 10y ago

It's funny how whenever the topic of machine learning comes up Amazon is mentioned as a world class leader. However, their search is quite poor as many have mentioned. It still seems like "search" is a technically hard problem to get right.

SwellJoe 10y ago

While I like the sentiment, and have seen my trust of Amazon and reviews at Amazon plummet in recent years, I suspect this will just push the practice underground. Unscrupulous vendors will continue to utilize their network of "reviewers", but will no longer instruct them to include a disclaimer about the reviewers being given free products in exchange for (almost always positive) reviews.

mimimimi 10y ago
With the effect that it will just screw amazon further. Because of this problem I've started buying products directly from the brand stores or walmart/costco/target. I completely stopped buying from ebay years ago because of similar problems.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  I guess curation (of products, content, reviews, vendors, everything) remains one of the big problems of the internet age, where there's a million of everything and it's hard to know who to trust.

eruditely 10y ago

For stuff like this, Millesime imperial for men, I cannot be sure I am buying the real thing or a counterfeit. This is totally the opposite of what I expected amazon to represent, i'm not quite sure when this decline started to happen. https://www.amazon.com/Creed-Millesime-Imperial-Spray-4-0/dp/B00152S1IK/ref=sr_1_1_a_it?ie=UTF8&qid=1480128263&sr=8-1&keywords=creed+millesime+imperial+for+men https://www.amazon.com/Creed-Millesime-Imperial-Spray-4-0/dp...

hga 10y ago
There are a bunch of domains where you should just avoid buying anything on Amazon that's sold by a third party, and this strikes me as one of them. And if it's sold by Amazon itself, hope it's either in one of the categories where they don't commingle, like food, or that you luck out. I'd hope anything you ingest or put on your skin like this would be in a "No Commingling!" category....

Kunix 10y ago

Naive question - Does anybody know how the Amazon reviews datasets available online have been generated? Is it web scraping? (on millions of reviews?!) Or partnership with academics? Or something else? Looking at https://snap.stanford.edu/data/web-Amazon.html https://snap.stanford.edu/data/web-Amazon.html and http://jmcauley.ucsd.edu/data/amazon/ http://jmcauley.ucsd.edu/data/amazon/, I can't find any mention on what process they used to generated these datasets.

freyr 10y ago

If I'm purchasing a physical item where quality matters and I don't want to end up with a shoddy product or cheap knockoff, I don't buy from Amazon. Exceptions are books and the occasional AmazonBasics cable. It's a shame, because they had a great service, and their delivery infrastructure remains great. But I don't need same day delivery if you're delivering junk.

tmptmp 10y ago

Are there sufficient number of good engineers left with Amazon yet? I wonder. Look at their search quality. Terrible even at its best. I searched for laptop and wanted to see the cheapest so selected "sort by Price low to high", lo and behold, I was flooded with a never ending list of wired and wireless mice, keyboards, usb cables, and what not. I had to click on multiple pages before I could get to the first laptop entry. This is ridiculous or do they prevent their engineers for experiencing this pain? They are better off outsourcing their search problem to Google, just as Apple learnt to outsource the maps problem to Google. No offense intended.