9 ms·

Amazon Merchants Continue to Find Ways to Cheat

171 points by non_sequitur 9y ago

a2tech 9y ago
The only people that should be able to leave reviews for a product are people that have purchased it from that listing. I’ve found that the only reviews worth reading are the ones that are from verified purchasers.
- ascorbic 9y ago
  The article mentions the way they're even able to abuse that: giving gift cards to users who can then buy the product and leave a fake review as a verified purchaser.
  - Shivetya 9y ago
    well the next step is to have a required number of unrelated purchase from other vendors/etc. all sorts of ways to put a brake on it. give buyers history similar to how ebay does, once you pass a number of unrelated purchases your rating actually affects the items score. another method is that before the score is counted your account has to be XXX days old.
    - pilsetnieks 9y ago
      There are review programs that act as a middleman between the buyers/reviewers and sellers that aggregate multiple items to review from many sellers. They could easily circumvent something like that (for example, if you want to participate, you get to buy 5 cheap shit items with a 90% discount from different sellers and have to leave 5-star reviews.) I think the first step would be not accepting reviews, or downranking them, similarly to unverified purchases, if the purchase was discounted with a promo code given by the seller.
- asdfologist 9y ago
  Merchants and their friends can buy their own products...
  - smelendez 9y ago
    Still helps with the problem of downvoting competitor products, which seems more insidious.
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago
  > The only people that should be able to leave reviews for a product are people that have purchased it from that listing. That might make sense for electronics and other items, though even here sellers have found ways to get around it by offering to reimburse their shills who bought the product just for a 5-star shill review. However, Amazon's introduction of the Verified Purchase tag on reviews and recent changes that make non-VP reviews difficult to view, has had a deleterious effect on reviews for books, films and music. There were a lot of great well-written and insightful reviews written by people who got the media in question from the library (or a filesharing community). For books and films, that reviewing culture lives on at Goodreads and IMDB, but both are now owned by Amazon and who knows how long those reviews might last. There is however no analogue for reviews of music (Allmusic has strict character count limits and few ever go there, Discogs reviews seem mainly meant for vinyl enthusiasts). Yes, in retrospect it was silly for fans of music, books and films to create a rather non-commercial community of enthusiasts on the basis of a site whose sole aim is to make lots of money, but I still regret what has been lost.
  - mcphage 9y ago
    > That might make sense for electronics and other items [...] Amazon's introduction of the Verified Purchase tag on reviews and recent changes that make non-VP reviews difficult to view, has had a deleterious effect on reviews for books, films and music. Surely Amazon could control this on a category-by-category level...
  - bitexploder 9y ago
    As long as there is a profit interest to game the reviews people will try. At least with Goodreads there is some, but less, interest.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    > it was silly for fans of music, books and films to create a rather non-commercial community of enthusiasts on the basis of a site whose sole aim is to make lots of money Nothing silly about it at all. I've written many such reviews and I'm well aware that I'm giving my work for free to a profit making entity. The thing is, I also benefit a lot from reviews on Amazon, even for things I'd never buy. Amazon is my go-to site for reviews on books and music. (Not so for films, I use IMDB for that.) I enjoy writing and posting the reviews, and enjoy getting "likes" on them from others that find them useful.
- stordoff 9y ago
  > I’ve found that the only reviews worth reading Losing the useful reviews in the noise is a definite problem. Even if you filter those from fake accounts, you end up with some reviews like this one, which is of basically no use to anyone (yet 3 people marked it as helpful...): > Delivery status is still pending. This laptop has decent specs but a lack of SsD really makes me sad. I will update this review when i receive the product
ikeboy 9y ago
If you poke around, you can easily find newly launched listing with hundreds of reviews ranking on the first page of popular keywords. E.g. search "earbuds". There will be a handful of results on the first page from no name brands, with all reviews within the last month, many unverified. That first page placement gets them thousands of sales before it falls off and they go launch a new product. I don't know the methods but it's more than just reviews.
libertyEQ 9y ago
As the topic has been discussed on HN over the years, I've often thought it might be cool to create a browser extension that only shows reviews from HN users with the option of specifying a minimal karma threshold. Perhaps the HN community is too small, so substitute reddit where appropriate. Anyone have thoughts on such a thing?
- jaytaylor 9y ago
  That's a neat idea, how would you confirm identity, though? Could be challenging to reach critical mass. Why tie it to only HN and/or reddit? It could be a choice for users to make, about which sites to correlate with which review sites. In any case, interesting idea, thanks for sharing!
  - def_true_false 9y ago
    Something like what keybase does with e.g. reddit should work.
  - libertyEQ 9y ago
    As def_true_false mentioned, the way keybase handles things would be what I was thinking, but the crypto doesn't have to be as strong, nor the workflow so elaborate. And for those mentioning gaming, HN does pretty well against all but the most sophisticated and motivated. Browse with 'show dead' on you can see there are plenty of attempts. A link to their profiles on HN and reddit would allow for review of their comment histories in order to determine authenticity/ how closely tastes align. Even Amazon could allow us to filter reviewers by review history, or other such criteria. Edit: You are probably right about allowing other identity providers, but the idea was to minimize the addressable market in order to study the dynamics of such a platform. Your comment definitely made me think of it as a possibly viable idea, thanks!
  - nasredin 9y ago
    >That's a neat idea, how would you confirm identity, though? I am surprised there is not a Bitcoin-inspired "solution" to the problem of fake reviews.
- 9y ago
jakelarkin 9y ago
fake/dangerous products are the bigger issue with Amazon. I have seen prenatal fish oil supplements that are supposed to retail for $50, on Amazon fulfillment for $40 and on Alibaba for $18. Who's to say 3rd party merchants aren't reselling the fake Alibaba ones on Amazon for tidy profits? Odds are the fake ones are just repackaged low quality supplements, chock full of mercury. With the breakneck pace of scams can anyone really trust Amazon fulfilled Merchants for items with very specific safety tolerances? (medication/supplements, hepa air filters, electrical components, just to name a few things) I have just started ordering more things direct from manufacturers web-stores rather than deal with the stress.
- pricechild 9y ago
  Going on previous stories I understand that you can't even trust trustworthy sellers... since Amazon will mix inventory up unless they pay extra? And you can't tell if they are paying extra?
  - j-c-hewitt 9y ago
    This is not entirely true. You can opt out of commingling. It's true that you cannot tell if they are commingling or not as a shopper. It depends on the seller's setup but commingling has lighter labeling requirements. Depending on the product type that can either be an insignificant added cost or a significant one. For higher priced products the benefits of commingling aren't worth the risks.
    - x0x0 9y ago
      Since purchasers can't tell this is basically worthless.
    - jjeaff 9y ago
      I always opt out of comingled but have still had products get comingled. Which makes me think that they are pretty loose with their processes and procedures when it comes to some products.
    - 9y ago
j-c-hewitt 9y ago
In some categories, Amazon is putting more weight onto editorial reviews. It'd be a good thing for Amazon and a good thing for product oriented media companies for those reviewers and reviews to regain some of the clout and influence that they have lost to easily manipulated user reviews. On the flip side I think media companies have to do more to deserve the trust of shoppers. More Consumer Reports style product evaluations and less clickbait trolling, more investment into respectable writers/video reviewers who have integrity and earn a real salary to make them resistant to PR bribery. I don't think most shoppers fully understand how extreme the review manipulation is on the brand and merchant side of things. One issue is that the Federal government does not enforce the laws on the books against many of the worst types of manipulation. I'm not a particularly pro-regulation type of guy, but this is one of the consequences of zero law enforcement in a particular area of business: you become a sucker if you abide by the law when none of your competitors are. The Yelps and Amazons of the world are kind of split on this because they both want to restore/retain the trust that users have in these reviews without drawing attention to how absurd the level of manipulation is. Another issue is the entirely legitimate manipulation of reviews that nonetheless confers a competitive advantage. One local car dealership that did some service on my car has earned thousands of positive five star reviews by being extremely aggressive with e-mail followup to people who show up for even minor service interactions. I gave them five stars out of bemusement and because we legitimately received good service on a free interaction paid for by the car manufacturer with a rebate. But I would have been much less generous with my five star review had I had to pay for the service, as everyone is. That's why Amazon as of last year bans that practice. I have myself counseled clients in ecommerce and written email sequence scripts to do just this kind of manipulation. But in the case of this dealership and of most people, is the dealership that is the most efficient at running an email marketing program really the best car dealership in the area by an order of magnitude? While it may be an indicator of the overall professionalism of the company and a signal of business health, it's pretty unrelated to the business of selling cars and servicing them. As a rather clueless car owner, I'm not even really qualified to give an intelligent opinion about the quality of a dealership apart from how I feel about it and whether or not I (rather clueless) think that I was ripped off or not. Why is my unqualified opinion based on that minor interaction worth more than that of someone who really knows a lot about cars, bought a car from that dealership, and has had dozens of service appointments with the mechanic? Why is my dumb 5 star rating worth the same amount as that guy's? It makes no sense.
blubb-fish 9y ago
That was one of the reasons why I decided to completely ditch Amazon. And I don't regret it.
- PenguinCoder 9y ago
  Where do you shop for things? Direct business websites, or only physical stores?
- sbuttgereit 9y ago
  I haven't had this issue with Amazon myself, but the threat of it does weigh on my mind. Nonetheless, what pushed me over the edge of not buying from them anymore is they really just don't care what happens once a package leaves the warehouse. Amazon insists on regularly using a specific carrier to get product to me which alters altogether the concept of what it means to get product to someone. There's a whole story behind this, but Amazon is a big company and clearly is shooting to satisfy the lowest common denominator. I've tried to resolve my issues with them but just get whatever script their corporate spokeshole gives to customer support to parrot. I get it, I'm not their common problem... but since I'm their edge case... I'm done with them. I will shop Amazon chiefly as a sort of search engine when necessary and buy direct or from some other seller once I know the product exists; maybe use them for price check. In fact, given the unreliability of Amazon actually getting product to me in any predictable fashion, it's usually just more convenient to drive to a B&M store and make the purchase (I do check inventory before I leave the house ;-) ).
chiefalchemist 9y ago
If Facebook is concerned about fake news, why isn't Amazon concerned about fake products?
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  They are both equally "concerned". They can see their metrics and they know when bad reputation is hurting more than increased hits/throughput is helping
- thg 9y ago
  Facebook isn't concerned about fake news, it's concerned about bad press and possibly facing regulation. Make the bad press about Facebook fake news go away and Facebook will stop caring about fake news on their platform. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/facebook-regulation-incentive.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/facebook-regulati...
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    I'm not saying FB's concern is sincere, just that it exists. They are aware there's an issue. They are aware it could hurt them. Jeff \ Amazon seem to be taking the head in the sand approach.
ben_jones 9y ago
"I'm a bit reluctant to buy this because from what I've heard, Levi makes these specifically for amazon and they are of much lesser quality. They had a similar deal a few months ago (where a certain pair was available for pre-order) and I can tell you first hand that those were much lesser quality than the other 511's I have." Recently gleaned from a user of /r/frugalmalefashion on reddit. I think it adds to this discussion quite a bit. Ironically I'm still perusing amazon hard today as part of Black Friday sales.
- lithos 9y ago
  This is normal business. Black Friday, and low price retailers are sourced from the worst bins and suppliers while having the same exterior.
- matwood 9y ago
  This is also common for outlet stores.
- kevinchen 9y ago
  direct link to source: https://www.reddit.com/r/frugalmalefashion/comments/7f779z/levis_511_for_1599_on_amazon_deal_of_the_day/dq9y1tn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/frugalmalefashion/comments/7f779z/l...
- leviathant 9y ago
  With regards to Levi's specifically, I've found that their highest quality jeans are made in Turkey. I can't speak to any "Made in the USA" Levi's, they cost more than I've been willing to pay. Made in Mexico Levi's have, in my experience, been the next tier down, and made anywhere else tends to be lower quality fabrics and workmanship. I haven't been to an outlet, but I have landed some really good deals on quality jeans on the clearance rack at the Levi's store in King Of Prussia, knowing that their online promotions are matched in-store. While you can't look at those tags online, the MSRP on the Levi's website is typically a decent indicator of the quality you're looking at. Jeans marked down to $49.98 from $69.50 are a cheaper grade (e.g. cardboard patch on the back instead of leather, lower quality fabric used in the pockets) than $49.98 jeans marked down from $89.50 or $128. All that said, stick to 12oz denim and higher and you're looking at diminishing returns going upward from an MSRP of $89.50. I've snagged some of the higher dollar stuff during the summer "Take 50% off sale prices" seasonal blowouts, and aside from one positive comment about a pair of Made & Crafted, no one else has ever noticed if I'm wearing a $20 pair or a $120 pair.
alfozan 9y ago
I use https://www.fakespot.com https://www.fakespot.com to filter out fake product reviews and I found to match my gut feelings most of the time.
siruncledrew 9y ago
It's a systemic problem with Amazon's marketplace, but their stock has been performing well, so until they start taking multi-quarter financial hits, their executives don't have a huge incentive to care about these marketplace problems. The FBA aspect of Amazon has created many of the problems, such as fake reviews, merchant scamming, and counterfeit products, but FBA sellers are also a huge money maker for Amazon, so they are in a very precarious situation of managing expectations across their customers, sellers, and themselves.
millstone 9y ago
reddit found that some Adidas Ultra Boost sneakers sold on Amazon were replicas (fake). The authentic and replica sneakers are co-mingled. It's crap shoot what you get; even some "ships from and sold by Amazon.com" sneakers were fakes. Amazon's response is to issue a refund if you receive reps. However replicas are often quite convincing, and most customers won't know how to tell the difference. The carelessness here is just astounding: it seems like they're begging for a lawsuit. 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/frugalmalefashion/comments/685wca/ultra_boosts_on_amazon_for_126/ https://www.reddit.com/r/frugalmalefashion/comments/685wca/u...
dizzystar 9y ago
One time, I was contacted by someone who wanted to open up a community forum for Amazon sellers. I told him that's about the worst idea I've ever heard. The online selling community is so cut throat and fractured that it goes well beyond healing at this point. It's a game of win at costs. This absolutely nothing new. Sellers will leave bad reviews, flag legitimate listings for fraud, sue each other, and myriad other things. To give an idea of how old this is, look at the origin story of Nast Gal clothing.
tomohawk 9y ago
Maybe they could form a partnership with Consumer Reports? Like, if you're a prime member, you could see related Consumer Reports reviews? Maybe Consumer Reports could review Amazon's practices?

171 points by non_sequitur 9y ago

The only people that should be able to leave reviews for a product are people that have purchased it from that listing. I’ve found that the only reviews worth reading are the ones that are from verified purchasers.

ascorbic 9y ago
The article mentions the way they're even able to abuse that: giving gift cards to users who can then buy the product and leave a fake review as a verified purchaser.
- Shivetya 9y ago
  well the next step is to have a required number of unrelated purchase from other vendors/etc. all sorts of ways to put a brake on it. give buyers history similar to how ebay does, once you pass a number of unrelated purchases your rating actually affects the items score. another method is that before the score is counted your account has to be XXX days old.
  - pilsetnieks 9y ago
    There are review programs that act as a middleman between the buyers/reviewers and sellers that aggregate multiple items to review from many sellers. They could easily circumvent something like that (for example, if you want to participate, you get to buy 5 cheap shit items with a 90% discount from different sellers and have to leave 5-star reviews.) I think the first step would be not accepting reviews, or downranking them, similarly to unverified purchases, if the purchase was discounted with a promo code given by the seller.
asdfologist 9y ago
Merchants and their friends can buy their own products...
- smelendez 9y ago
  Still helps with the problem of downvoting competitor products, which seems more insidious.
Mediterraneo10 9y ago
> The only people that should be able to leave reviews for a product are people that have purchased it from that listing. That might make sense for electronics and other items, though even here sellers have found ways to get around it by offering to reimburse their shills who bought the product just for a 5-star shill review. However, Amazon's introduction of the Verified Purchase tag on reviews and recent changes that make non-VP reviews difficult to view, has had a deleterious effect on reviews for books, films and music. There were a lot of great well-written and insightful reviews written by people who got the media in question from the library (or a filesharing community). For books and films, that reviewing culture lives on at Goodreads and IMDB, but both are now owned by Amazon and who knows how long those reviews might last. There is however no analogue for reviews of music (Allmusic has strict character count limits and few ever go there, Discogs reviews seem mainly meant for vinyl enthusiasts). Yes, in retrospect it was silly for fans of music, books and films to create a rather non-commercial community of enthusiasts on the basis of a site whose sole aim is to make lots of money, but I still regret what has been lost.
- mcphage 9y ago
  > That might make sense for electronics and other items [...] Amazon's introduction of the Verified Purchase tag on reviews and recent changes that make non-VP reviews difficult to view, has had a deleterious effect on reviews for books, films and music. Surely Amazon could control this on a category-by-category level...
- bitexploder 9y ago
  As long as there is a profit interest to game the reviews people will try. At least with Goodreads there is some, but less, interest.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  > it was silly for fans of music, books and films to create a rather non-commercial community of enthusiasts on the basis of a site whose sole aim is to make lots of money Nothing silly about it at all. I've written many such reviews and I'm well aware that I'm giving my work for free to a profit making entity. The thing is, I also benefit a lot from reviews on Amazon, even for things I'd never buy. Amazon is my go-to site for reviews on books and music. (Not so for films, I use IMDB for that.) I enjoy writing and posting the reviews, and enjoy getting "likes" on them from others that find them useful.
stordoff 9y ago
> I’ve found that the only reviews worth reading Losing the useful reviews in the noise is a definite problem. Even if you filter those from fake accounts, you end up with some reviews like this one, which is of basically no use to anyone (yet 3 people marked it as helpful...): > Delivery status is still pending. This laptop has decent specs but a lack of SsD really makes me sad. I will update this review when i receive the product

ikeboy 9y ago

If you poke around, you can easily find newly launched listing with hundreds of reviews ranking on the first page of popular keywords. E.g. search "earbuds". There will be a handful of results on the first page from no name brands, with all reviews within the last month, many unverified. That first page placement gets them thousands of sales before it falls off and they go launch a new product. I don't know the methods but it's more than just reviews.

libertyEQ 9y ago

As the topic has been discussed on HN over the years, I've often thought it might be cool to create a browser extension that only shows reviews from HN users with the option of specifying a minimal karma threshold. Perhaps the HN community is too small, so substitute reddit where appropriate. Anyone have thoughts on such a thing?

jaytaylor 9y ago
That's a neat idea, how would you confirm identity, though? Could be challenging to reach critical mass. Why tie it to only HN and/or reddit? It could be a choice for users to make, about which sites to correlate with which review sites. In any case, interesting idea, thanks for sharing!
- def_true_false 9y ago
  Something like what keybase does with e.g. reddit should work.
- libertyEQ 9y ago
  As def_true_false mentioned, the way keybase handles things would be what I was thinking, but the crypto doesn't have to be as strong, nor the workflow so elaborate. And for those mentioning gaming, HN does pretty well against all but the most sophisticated and motivated. Browse with 'show dead' on you can see there are plenty of attempts. A link to their profiles on HN and reddit would allow for review of their comment histories in order to determine authenticity/ how closely tastes align. Even Amazon could allow us to filter reviewers by review history, or other such criteria. Edit: You are probably right about allowing other identity providers, but the idea was to minimize the addressable market in order to study the dynamics of such a platform. Your comment definitely made me think of it as a possibly viable idea, thanks!
- nasredin 9y ago
  >That's a neat idea, how would you confirm identity, though? I am surprised there is not a Bitcoin-inspired "solution" to the problem of fake reviews.
9y ago

jakelarkin 9y ago

fake/dangerous products are the bigger issue with Amazon. I have seen prenatal fish oil supplements that are supposed to retail for $50, on Amazon fulfillment for $40 and on Alibaba for $18. Who's to say 3rd party merchants aren't reselling the fake Alibaba ones on Amazon for tidy profits? Odds are the fake ones are just repackaged low quality supplements, chock full of mercury. With the breakneck pace of scams can anyone really trust Amazon fulfilled Merchants for items with very specific safety tolerances? (medication/supplements, hepa air filters, electrical components, just to name a few things) I have just started ordering more things direct from manufacturers web-stores rather than deal with the stress.

pricechild 9y ago
Going on previous stories I understand that you can't even trust trustworthy sellers... since Amazon will mix inventory up unless they pay extra? And you can't tell if they are paying extra?
- j-c-hewitt 9y ago
  This is not entirely true. You can opt out of commingling. It's true that you cannot tell if they are commingling or not as a shopper. It depends on the seller's setup but commingling has lighter labeling requirements. Depending on the product type that can either be an insignificant added cost or a significant one. For higher priced products the benefits of commingling aren't worth the risks.
  - x0x0 9y ago
    Since purchasers can't tell this is basically worthless.
  - jjeaff 9y ago
    I always opt out of comingled but have still had products get comingled. Which makes me think that they are pretty loose with their processes and procedures when it comes to some products.
  - 9y ago

j-c-hewitt 9y ago

In some categories, Amazon is putting more weight onto editorial reviews. It'd be a good thing for Amazon and a good thing for product oriented media companies for those reviewers and reviews to regain some of the clout and influence that they have lost to easily manipulated user reviews. On the flip side I think media companies have to do more to deserve the trust of shoppers. More Consumer Reports style product evaluations and less clickbait trolling, more investment into respectable writers/video reviewers who have integrity and earn a real salary to make them resistant to PR bribery. I don't think most shoppers fully understand how extreme the review manipulation is on the brand and merchant side of things. One issue is that the Federal government does not enforce the laws on the books against many of the worst types of manipulation. I'm not a particularly pro-regulation type of guy, but this is one of the consequences of zero law enforcement in a particular area of business: you become a sucker if you abide by the law when none of your competitors are. The Yelps and Amazons of the world are kind of split on this because they both want to restore/retain the trust that users have in these reviews without drawing attention to how absurd the level of manipulation is. Another issue is the entirely legitimate manipulation of reviews that nonetheless confers a competitive advantage. One local car dealership that did some service on my car has earned thousands of positive five star reviews by being extremely aggressive with e-mail followup to people who show up for even minor service interactions. I gave them five stars out of bemusement and because we legitimately received good service on a free interaction paid for by the car manufacturer with a rebate. But I would have been much less generous with my five star review had I had to pay for the service, as everyone is. That's why Amazon as of last year bans that practice. I have myself counseled clients in ecommerce and written email sequence scripts to do just this kind of manipulation. But in the case of this dealership and of most people, is the dealership that is the most efficient at running an email marketing program really the best car dealership in the area by an order of magnitude? While it may be an indicator of the overall professionalism of the company and a signal of business health, it's pretty unrelated to the business of selling cars and servicing them. As a rather clueless car owner, I'm not even really qualified to give an intelligent opinion about the quality of a dealership apart from how I feel about it and whether or not I (rather clueless) think that I was ripped off or not. Why is my unqualified opinion based on that minor interaction worth more than that of someone who really knows a lot about cars, bought a car from that dealership, and has had dozens of service appointments with the mechanic? Why is my dumb 5 star rating worth the same amount as that guy's? It makes no sense.

blubb-fish 9y ago

That was one of the reasons why I decided to completely ditch Amazon. And I don't regret it.

PenguinCoder 9y ago
Where do you shop for things? Direct business websites, or only physical stores?
sbuttgereit 9y ago
I haven't had this issue with Amazon myself, but the threat of it does weigh on my mind. Nonetheless, what pushed me over the edge of not buying from them anymore is they really just don't care what happens once a package leaves the warehouse. Amazon insists on regularly using a specific carrier to get product to me which alters altogether the concept of what it means to get product to someone. There's a whole story behind this, but Amazon is a big company and clearly is shooting to satisfy the lowest common denominator. I've tried to resolve my issues with them but just get whatever script their corporate spokeshole gives to customer support to parrot. I get it, I'm not their common problem... but since I'm their edge case... I'm done with them. I will shop Amazon chiefly as a sort of search engine when necessary and buy direct or from some other seller once I know the product exists; maybe use them for price check. In fact, given the unreliability of Amazon actually getting product to me in any predictable fashion, it's usually just more convenient to drive to a B&M store and make the purchase (I do check inventory before I leave the house ;-) ).

chiefalchemist 9y ago

If Facebook is concerned about fake news, why isn't Amazon concerned about fake products?

fjsolwmv 9y ago
They are both equally "concerned". They can see their metrics and they know when bad reputation is hurting more than increased hits/throughput is helping
thg 9y ago
Facebook isn't concerned about fake news, it's concerned about bad press and possibly facing regulation. Make the bad press about Facebook fake news go away and Facebook will stop caring about fake news on their platform. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/facebook-regulation-incentive.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/facebook-regulati...
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  I'm not saying FB's concern is sincere, just that it exists. They are aware there's an issue. They are aware it could hurt them. Jeff \ Amazon seem to be taking the head in the sand approach.

ben_jones 9y ago

"I'm a bit reluctant to buy this because from what I've heard, Levi makes these specifically for amazon and they are of much lesser quality. They had a similar deal a few months ago (where a certain pair was available for pre-order) and I can tell you first hand that those were much lesser quality than the other 511's I have." Recently gleaned from a user of /r/frugalmalefashion on reddit. I think it adds to this discussion quite a bit. Ironically I'm still perusing amazon hard today as part of Black Friday sales.

lithos 9y ago
This is normal business. Black Friday, and low price retailers are sourced from the worst bins and suppliers while having the same exterior.
matwood 9y ago
This is also common for outlet stores.
kevinchen 9y ago
direct link to source: https://www.reddit.com/r/frugalmalefashion/comments/7f779z/levis_511_for_1599_on_amazon_deal_of_the_day/dq9y1tn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/frugalmalefashion/comments/7f779z/l...
leviathant 9y ago
With regards to Levi's specifically, I've found that their highest quality jeans are made in Turkey. I can't speak to any "Made in the USA" Levi's, they cost more than I've been willing to pay. Made in Mexico Levi's have, in my experience, been the next tier down, and made anywhere else tends to be lower quality fabrics and workmanship. I haven't been to an outlet, but I have landed some really good deals on quality jeans on the clearance rack at the Levi's store in King Of Prussia, knowing that their online promotions are matched in-store. While you can't look at those tags online, the MSRP on the Levi's website is typically a decent indicator of the quality you're looking at. Jeans marked down to $49.98 from $69.50 are a cheaper grade (e.g. cardboard patch on the back instead of leather, lower quality fabric used in the pockets) than $49.98 jeans marked down from $89.50 or $128. All that said, stick to 12oz denim and higher and you're looking at diminishing returns going upward from an MSRP of $89.50. I've snagged some of the higher dollar stuff during the summer "Take 50% off sale prices" seasonal blowouts, and aside from one positive comment about a pair of Made & Crafted, no one else has ever noticed if I'm wearing a $20 pair or a $120 pair.

alfozan 9y ago

I use https://www.fakespot.com https://www.fakespot.com to filter out fake product reviews and I found to match my gut feelings most of the time.

siruncledrew 9y ago

It's a systemic problem with Amazon's marketplace, but their stock has been performing well, so until they start taking multi-quarter financial hits, their executives don't have a huge incentive to care about these marketplace problems. The FBA aspect of Amazon has created many of the problems, such as fake reviews, merchant scamming, and counterfeit products, but FBA sellers are also a huge money maker for Amazon, so they are in a very precarious situation of managing expectations across their customers, sellers, and themselves.

millstone 9y ago

reddit found that some Adidas Ultra Boost sneakers sold on Amazon were replicas (fake). The authentic and replica sneakers are co-mingled. It's crap shoot what you get; even some "ships from and sold by Amazon.com" sneakers were fakes. Amazon's response is to issue a refund if you receive reps. However replicas are often quite convincing, and most customers won't know how to tell the difference. The carelessness here is just astounding: it seems like they're begging for a lawsuit. 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/frugalmalefashion/comments/685wca/ultra_boosts_on_amazon_for_126/ https://www.reddit.com/r/frugalmalefashion/comments/685wca/u...

dizzystar 9y ago

One time, I was contacted by someone who wanted to open up a community forum for Amazon sellers. I told him that's about the worst idea I've ever heard. The online selling community is so cut throat and fractured that it goes well beyond healing at this point. It's a game of win at costs. This absolutely nothing new. Sellers will leave bad reviews, flag legitimate listings for fraud, sue each other, and myriad other things. To give an idea of how old this is, look at the origin story of Nast Gal clothing.

tomohawk 9y ago

Maybe they could form a partnership with Consumer Reports? Like, if you're a prime member, you could see related Consumer Reports reviews? Maybe Consumer Reports could review Amazon's practices?