23 ms·

Amazon's Fake Review Problem

602 points by doglet 9y ago

doglet 9y ago
Should we conclude that Amazon does not have sufficient incentive to remove these fake reviews? Surely they could, when third-party sites easily detect them...
- pishpash 9y ago
  Third-party sites are not "easily" detecting them. They have no idea what the performance of their "detection" is, in either direction (false +, false -).
  - doglet 9y ago
    One problem is getting "ground truth." I think Amazon has a pretty good idea of a lot of near-certain true positives.
jseliger 9y ago
I don't care much about the reviews, but I care a lot about the fake / phony / not-as-described merchandise: http://seliger.com/2017/01/09/tools-continued-careful-buy-amazon/ http://seliger.com/2017/01/09/tools-continued-careful-buy-am... . I've actually changed behavior and tried harder to buy from the original maker, if possible.
- mjevans 9y ago
  That's the behavior that I would like to see Amazon encourage as a solution. Tracking the product back to it's actual origin of manufacturer (and showing us the consumer). Where, exactly, was the factory? The lot number and date of manufacturer? Official model and revision number? Requiring these things will give buyers better hard data to detect and exclude middle-level-marking shenanigans as well as combat 'bait and switch' (even if not intentional) changes to product configurations sold under the same general marketing moniker.
  - pwaai 9y ago
    How would you go about tracing the steps? Are there some large database of OEM factories where you can contact them in English (assuming China). I too would love to know exactly where and who made it, how many middle-men have stepped in with their own markup to finally Amazon. Because it's clear that Amazon doesn't give two shit about who and what gets sold, they just care about volume. Fixing reviews is not part of that strategy.
    - coredog64 9y ago
      Wouldn't this be a classic use case for block chain technology?
      - SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
        Of course not. It's not a distribute problem (Amazon is centralized) it doesn't require trustlessness (Amazon trusts itself), but it is something where you want an auditable ledger. Say, an append-only database.
    - mjevans 9y ago
      You require the data to be part of the listing, and you share that data with the consumer. It thus becomes a statement that can be enforced as part of advertising to a customer. Counterfeits would be one thing to go after. Lying to customers would be another. After a while 'dodgy factories' and/or sellers that lie more often than not would be able to be sorted out and removed from listings. More importantly factories and sellers could build actual solid reputations for telling the truth. Most importantly, it would make middle-level-marketing stuff much more obvious.
      - RhodesianHunter 9y ago
        I wish it we're this simple, but after working in this space I can tell you that getting that data is a Herculean task.
    - RhodesianHunter 9y ago
- JohnTHaller 9y ago
  Unfortunately all goods at Amazon are intermingled including those Amazon itself ships. The only exception is companies who specifically pay not to do so in which case you lose access to prime shipping.
  - astura 9y ago
    Amazon seller here. This is not strictly true, you can still have your orders shipped "prime" but not commingle.
kelukelugames 9y ago
I worked at Amazon as an intern in 2005 and recall a talk on fake reviews. There were groups of people who wrote fake positive reviews for each other's books. Today I have friends who sell on Amazon and they write fake reviews for each other's products.
- pishpash 9y ago
  People give fake reviews all the time in other circumstances (e.g. at work, reviewing papers). Human nature really can't be changed. You just have to keep your skepticism and read critically.
  - jonnycomputer 9y ago
    I don't know anyone who has given a fake review on a paper. Could happen. I do know that reviewing papers can be a royal time suck on people who don't really have a lot of time to spare.
Finnucane 9y ago
If they're not going to do anything about fake stuff, why should they care about fake reviews? As it is, they're trying to make it so you don't know what you're buying or who you're buying it from, or even be entirely sure what the price is going to be, or who is going to be delivering to your door, so why should they care about reviews?
- pishpash 9y ago
  You have a problem they'll shower $ on you. As long as Amazon does that, people seem to accept it.
jccooper 9y ago
Social proof via reviews (of products, restaurants, anything) is a great idea if you can assume good intent. Back in the good ol' days of the Internet this seemed plausible for some reason, but now there's real money to be made and that's out the window. Amazon and Yelp and the like may be better or worse at stemming the tide of fakery, but asking them to be better isn't going to fundamentally help. The whole idea is broken.
- mc32 9y ago
  I wonder if it will come back to a more distributed CR type of system. Also branding and maintaining the integrity of a brand. Currently you have a bevvy of brands for China sourced goods. The brands are obviously made up without much thought. Something like "Scarvast" trekking pole. "Vargus" flashlights, "Zukil" wireless speakers. "Brikor" dehumidifiers. And often times the same seller will have multiple "brands". This is what makes it unreliable and untrustworthy. It's like they live A/B test products on AMZ.
  - pogue 9y ago
    I highly recommend a 30 Day trial subscription on Consumer Reports (CR) online if you're looking to buy a big ticket item. You can put in your CC# & other details and get free 30 day access to CR testing of a lot of products. Then cancel before the 30 days are up. You may end up paying a little more for a top notch product, but you can be assured if CR reviewed it, you're getting what you pay for.
    - tomerico 9y ago
      If consumer report (or the more general, independent testing lab) is the solution, I wonder if Amazon should buy them or build their own. A trusted source of reviews has proved itself successful with the USB-C cable example and Benson from Google verifying all of them
    - doglet 9y ago
      Maybe there's a market for verified customer reviews of popular items - even ones that aren't big ticket. Consumer Reports might grow to cover additional items and perhaps develop a browser extension for subscribers who gain access to trusted reviews.
corvallis 9y ago
I am much more wary about buying from Amazon than most of my peers, who easily click and buy on a whim or out of habit. I went to buy a toy at a brick and mortar, and compared the price to Amazon while there - $12.99 in the store and $27.xx at Amazon! I think they've marketed them to be the low price leaders but that's definitely not the case. I'm also concerned about counterfeit products - I don't care as much about reviews because I'll usually have researched beforehand or already know what I want. However with brand name items, I always wonder if it's the real thing and as a result have stopped buying shoes, etc from Amazon. I also don't buy anything from Amazon that goes in my body or on my body (supplements, cosmetics/hygiene, etc). I stick with brick & mortar or the online storefront. It's unfortunate, because Amazon is fantastic as a concept, unfortunately my trust in them does not extend to most items. I'd rather pay more and be confident in the product. I think whatever they are doing is working for them and they have no incentive to change because the vast majority of customers are not so discerning.
- bootlooped 9y ago
  > $12.99 in the store and $27.xx at Amazon! Was this from a 3rd party seller? I have seen a lot of 3rd party sellers have listings for pretty outrageous prices. I think they're either trying to catch people who don't shop around / don't know what the product is worth, or they are just not managing their pricing well. On a lot of popular products you can see an example of the latter where Amazon themselves will be selling a product for a given price, and then if you look at other offers you'll see the same thing being sold by other sellers for double or triple Amazon's price.
  - corvallis 9y ago
    I don’t remember if this was the exact link as this was several weeks ago. This was the toy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00OYJNKJG/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1513458578&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=parking+garage+motor+max&dpPl=1&dpID=51q0rM-%2BYDL&ref=plSrch https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00OYJNKJG/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=...
    - 9y ago
ineedasername 9y ago
The open review system (anyone can review any item) maybe made some sense when it was just book reviews, but makes much less sense for all items. A good start would be to only allow reviews on verified purchases. At least then it would be much harder for bad actors to up stakes on a listing and clone to a new one once the authentic negative reviews piled up. Verified reviews can be faked and gamed as well, but it is harder, more costly and time consuming.
- Marazan 9y ago
  It seems insanely obvious to me that only people who have purchased the item through Amazon should get to review the product.
  - ineedasername 9y ago
    Yes. I'm trying to remember back to early amazon, circa the bubble burst... my vague recollection is that reviews were more in the vein of a platform for book reviews, not review of books as products... a fine difference, maybe one wothout distinction when it comes to books, but an either way an open platform for book reviews has very different trust and reliabilty requirements than reviews attached to products being sold.
xellisx 9y ago
I usually look at the 1 star reviews first and see if the complaints are user error, unreal expectations or really a poorly designed product.
- stri8ed 9y ago
  I don't know that this solves the problem, since competitors can just start leaving fake negative reviews on competing products.
  - xellisx 9y ago
    While that is true, if it's a low effort 1 star review, E.g. "It's crap", with no explanation of why it's crap, I ignore that. If there's a lengthy 1 star review with details, then I factor that in to "Was that one just bad, or all them are like that". I don't just look at the 1 stars, I work my way up. More details for me equal a higher weighted review. Pictures, video and stuff help too, but of course those can be faked. Lately I've been looking at audio equipment for S&Gs (Microphones, audio interfaces, phantom power injection, etc...).
maxxxxx 9y ago
Amazon is starting to feel more and more like eBay. The same product sold by multiple vendors under different names, questionable reviews, clearly fraudulent sellers and so on. I used to love Amazon but now when I look for something I dread to do so on Amazon because I don't feel I can trust anything there.
- pishpash 9y ago
  eBay product reviews (not vendor reviews) are actually pretty good. Have you looked? They report fake/defective stuff in them.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    I don't trust them because I don't think anybody at eBay is checking whether the product being sold right now is the same the review was for.
    - pishpash 9y ago
      That's a given because vendors list whatever they want. However, if they list wrong, that's a SNAD case waiting to happen.
      - maxxxxx 9y ago
        Often the item will look the same but on the inside it's different so it will be hard to file a case.
  - bduerst 9y ago
    The vendor could still be sending fakes, and you wouldn't know because the remediation process involves removing negative reviews.
- BlackjackCF 9y ago
  Same here. I used to buy everything off of Amazon, but now I have to scrape the Internet for reviews to make sure that I can trust the thing I'm buying is actually going to be of good quality.
gesman 9y ago
>> Amazon – who has some of the world’s most advanced ML – really needs to step up its review fraud detection game. It's not in the interests of Amazon to be on a crusade against fake reviews. Mass fake reviews are the driving force of revenues. AMZN will always maintain the balance between public outcry and absolute minimal effort to show that they're doing something against spammers. From my side I maintain the right to buy the product and then write "not as described" as a reason for free return for full refund with free pickup. Quite often vendor/seller will give you refund without requiring you to return merchandise. I don't feel like I been abused too much by fake reviews as long as I can "abuse back" with my free return.
- brianpan 9y ago
  I don't understand your argument. How do reviews drive revenues? If all fake reviews were taken down, wouldn't buy less stuff from Amazon.
  - maksimum 9y ago
    Many people look at # of reviews and average review as "social proof" about the quality of a product. The reason we do this is because it can be a useful short-cut to performing an intellectually rigorous evaluation. If Amazon removes a bunch of reviews they're removing incentives that users use to buy products.
    - Terretta 9y ago
      No. You’re at Amazon.com, you will make a purchase. Reviews affect which purchase. The incentive that matters is the sentiment or belief you should go to amazon.com in the first place. That’s what’s at risk.
  - picodguyo 9y ago
    Most retailers find that conversion increases alongside review count, with diminishing returns above something like 50 reviews. It's important enough that most of the largest retailers either incentivize reviews with rewards or run "seeding" programs where they send out products in exchange for reviews.
amai 9y ago
https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/ and https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ can help.
perseusprime11 9y ago
This is not just Amazon’s problem. App store ratings, Reddit comments, Twitter/FB feeds, and Net Neutrality comments are all gamed. We are living in the age of human controlled bots looking to manipulate other humans through what we read.
- mathgenius 9y ago
  Yeah, these are all "message passing" algorithms, like belief propagation. The whole financial system itself is another good example of this.
  - perseusprime11 9y ago
    I hope Hacker News will be the last bastion for fake comments. At least, I have never seen bots lurking around on Hacker News.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
m3kw9 9y ago
Generally I always go to review sites first like wire cutter to see what are the best stuff, then I would see the little details, mostly what bad reviews say about it to contradict. A lot good reviews I can sniff out as fluff with a 5 star label. The bad thing is that when I see an avg of 4.5 stars with 100+ reviews, there is a slight bias inside me for this product. Amazon could do a better job to weight the avg stars.
- slantyyz 9y ago
  Well, you even have to take the Wirecutter with a grain of salt. IIRC, there was some heated debate over whether they were pay to play from some standing desk co that didn't sell through Amazon (Wirecutter makes a portion of their revenue from amazon referral links).
ausjke 9y ago
There are groups that do both: buying the first batches of products and writing nice reviews, then the seller will pay for what they have done, it's a mature business these days: you hire a team to market you at Amazon by faking reviews after "real" purchases(will be compensated or rewarded under the counter afterwards). This is very hard to detect indeed. Maybe Amazon can have some AI algorithm, that is for any newly arrived products with non-sales yet, monitoring the activities on them closely,the fake purchase and review must have some common pattern(same address, same ID, same IP,etc). But then, why does Amazon want to do that? it will decrease its own profit. So yes, customers will be the one got screwed up no matter what.
- anthuswilliams 9y ago
  But then, why does Amazon want to do that? it will decrease its own profit. Why would policing fake reviews decrease Amazon's profits?
  - Spivak 9y ago
    Presumably because positive reviews cause people to buy products, they don't necessarily blame Amazon if they turn out to be bad, nor do they return them.
sputknick 9y ago
I tried to buy my son a remote control car on Amazon a few weeks ago. I gave up after wading through 2 pages of 5 star reviewed products where the reviews all looked the same, all had the same structure. Many referenced "my 11 year old son", or the name of the company. This seems like something that can be weeded out using ML sentiment analysis. If too many reviews have the same structure, your posting gets demoted. If I could have found one legit looking review I would have bought that car, instead I gave up and went to The hobby store.
- doglet 9y ago
  Nothing like the good old trusted hobby store. And yes, this repetition of phrase or structure should be a clear signal.
marban 9y ago
... And not speaking of all the 1-star reviews that just relate to some "horrible" delivery problems with the carrier.
- bluedino 9y ago
  Even the good reviews can be bad. "5 stars..looks great can't wait to actually use it"
billyvg 9y ago
I encountered this problem while trying to do Christmas shopping on Amazon. An example is this (parachute hammocks): https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=parachute+hammock https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias... I don't know anything about them, I'm not familiar with manufacturers, but this search result brings up very similar items from "different" companies. What's even more suspicious is that there are MULTIPLE results that have 1-2 thousand reviews and are at a perfect 5*.
- maltalex 9y ago
  Try this: https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/
  - supermdguy 9y ago
    This looks really cool.
bdz 9y ago
I really like Aliexpress even tho it's more like eBay and not Amazon (but on the other hand Amazon is starting to feel like eBay nowdays) 1. You can sort the product search page by order number (who many people bought the same product). That alone is a big help to dodge fake products. 2. People are encouraged to make reviews with photos. The seller usually gives you a coupon if you make a review with photo which feels like a grey area (am I being bribed?) but as a potential buyer it helpes me a lot to make my decision.
ratsmack 9y ago
And there are also the poison pill reviews from competing vendors. They are usually easy to spot because they are just a bunch of vitriol without any substance.
thisisit 9y ago
It seems Amazon is in a bind. While we will like to believe the extensions which can sniff out fake reviews, they don't have the burden of false positives - reviews which are genuine but marked as fake. Imagine, what happens if Amazon does incorporate a stricter review guideline and lot of the reviews get tossed. It will be Youtube demonistation debate all over again.
ad_hominem 9y ago
If Amazon starts penalizing products for fake reviews then it's probably just a matter of time until that's weaponized by competitors to tank competing products. Then I imagine Amazon will have to come out with a "disavow review" tool similar to Google's disavow backlinks (to counteract targeted negative SEO).
- degenerate 9y ago
  I've been out of the google loop for way too long... I had no idea they introduced a way to disavow backlinks. I logged in to webmaster tools for the first time in 5 years and there's a LOT of new stuff. Thanks for randomly mentioning it. Time to read up on site snippets and structured data...
- r00fus 9y ago
  What's to say that isn't happening now? Seen quite a lot of pseudo positive reviews that are simply advising reader that "another product is better"
  - j-c-hewitt 9y ago
    It is happening now in fairly large quantities.
jacek 9y ago
The fake review problem on Amazon is much bigger than people think. Here are my two anecdotes: 1. I got bluetooth headphones on amazon (~$65). They had great reviews, but were very disappointing. I returned them and gave 2 star review. Representative from the manufacturer contacted me and offered me a pair for free. After I got them, they asked for positive review. I refused. That manipulation technique wasn't enough for them though. They might have merged the listing with some other item. Even though the item was released this year, it has reviews from 2014. 2. When I need a cable or something similar, I go to a page like vipon.com . They offer huge discounts on some items on amazon (sometimes even -80%). They of course "suggest" leaving a review. The more I look at reviews, the less I trust them. I see similar patterns for most products on amazon.
- rconti 9y ago
  Huh. I've never really had an issue because I chalked it up more to people buying cheap crap and expecting it to be good. But $65 for a pair of headphones isn't exactly cheap. Was it a familiar brand but maybe a counterfeit? Or was it a brand you've never heard of, but the price is justified by very positive reviews? I'm curious.
  - catdog 9y ago
    Headphones seem to be a very strange category in general. You can get exceptional good value for money if you know what to buy and on the other hand pay a lot for utter crap.
    - DanielleMolloy 9y ago
      Listening is extremely subjective though. Headphone types can be better / worse for certain listening habits (there are people out there who don't think great bass makes great music, folks), and for different ears. Music taste itself is extremely subjective. Best thing is still to get to a trusted hifi store nearby with your own, known music in best quality and your current best headphone model and test through candidate models yourself. (Admittedly, I'd still read some reviews before investing a few hundred dollars into headphones.)
enraged_camel 9y ago
Solving the fake review problem might be possible if Amazon takes steps to make it economically unfeasible for the bad actors to do it at scale. For example, let's say that each product is shipped with a unique review_id and that review_id is tied to the product. When posting reviews about said product, you need to provide a picture of the card that contains the review_id. This would need to be verified server-side before the review is accepted. IMO this would make it too difficult for vendors to buy fake reviews at volume, since each fake review now must go through the extra step of taking a picture of the review_id card and uploading it along with the review. Since that step would take place in the analog world it would defeat most automated review posting methods.
JohnTHaller 9y ago
Amazon has a habit of removing reviews if they contain words like counterfeit. This is likely due to the issue of counterfeit items on Amazon and intermingling of goods between vendors including Amazon itself.
mnm1 9y ago
Amazon will never do something to fix this problem. Fake goods and garbage products that break almost immediately after delivery are their bread and butter. They need those fake reviews to sell a huge percentage of their merchandise. They would much rather just close accounts of the people who complain or whose shopping habits their algorithms don't like.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
zerebubuth 9y ago
This is why I subscribe to an independent review and consumer advice service / magazine. Money, even in small amounts, seems to distort reviews. Before I trust a review I want to know where the money that paid for it came from.
baxtr 9y ago
I’m starting to think that amazon might be in trouble, because of A. Fake reviews, see above B. Fake products [1] C. A growing organization, which will be slower and less like on “day 1” [2] So far, all of this has not affected their top line, but maybe will change soon. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743316 [2] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-soars-340k-employees-adding-110k-people-single-year/ https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-soars-340k-employees-ad...
LoSboccacc 9y ago
fake review is relative. the primary problem for consumers now is fake products from commingled inventory.
timtebow 9y ago
on a lot of products you will have 50 five star reviews all done in the same month and year by people with "verified purchase" with an obvious mandarin broken english style of writing, followed by a bunch of one star reviews saying not to trust all the broken english one line five star reviews... i hope it ends soon. i think amazons change where they require you to have at least $50 in prior purchases before writing a review will help.
danbower 9y ago
Well the situation does seem quite bad when you see people who leave fake reviews become brazen enough to actually advertise their services on Amazon itself [1]. I reported this review about 10 days ago and it's still up. The email address provided appears on hundreds of product listings [2]. When they can't even filter out nonsense like this I can only assume they put zero effort into tackling fake reviews. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R7J38CTD1MNT0 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R7J38CTD1MNT0 [2] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:amazon.co.uk+sohant855%40gmail.com https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:amazon.co.uk+sohant85...
- dhimes 9y ago
  Holy smokes!
- yesenadam 9y ago
  Nice investigative work there.
- Theodores 9y ago
  ...this is sad in the instance you describe because the actual seller did not request that 'advert for reviews' and it now marks their product as 'fake'. Yet the actual seller is legit and doing a great job according to 'fakespot'. Sample listing: https://www.fakespot.com/company/ketdirect https://www.fakespot.com/company/ketdirect
- yborg 9y ago
  Looks like someone at Amazon at least reads HN, it's dead now.
wybiral 9y ago
This may seem off topic but what do we do when bots catch up to our state of the art for keeping them out? Do we milk the concept of captchas until they turn into some kind of Turing test? Can we even automate a Turing test in a way that machines can't bypass? Do we basically ditch the concept of privacy and require some kind of systematic provable identity in most places? Or do we accept the fact that consensus can be faked by bots and try to mitigate the noise by removing the spam as it appears?
miles_matthias 9y ago
Here's my anecdote: my wife is an author on Amazon and personally knows most of the people who review her books. FakeSpot gave her most popular book an F grade because people were "suspiciously positive". Most people leaving reviews only leave reviews for things they absolutely love, so saying that it's "suspiciously positive" is not an indicator of it being fake. In her case, she knows these people personally and they're not fake scripts. Yet FakeSpot, who OP holds up as doing the great job that Amazon is not, is completely wrong. tldr; spotting fake reviews is harder than it seems apparently. EDIT: the other thing is that she has lost quite a bit of legitimate reviews from Amazon deleting them. Amazon is actually doing more than the end user sees about this problem. EDIT 2: Another thing Amazon completely ignores are reviewers who get an early copy of the product in exchange for an honest review. This is how a lot of people kickstart reviews on their products and Amazon completely ignores that valid use case. In fact, they hurt it because they don't mark those reviews as "Verified Purchase" since the reviewer got the product outside of the Amazon channels. They need to come up with a system for this.
- aerion1 9y ago
  I have been using Fakespot on Amazon and pay for the subscription features to simplify my online purchasing because it is needed. From what I have seen, Fakespot will detect ANY biased reviews. So if your wife had friends read and then leave a review with an affiliation as they mention in their FAQ/About.
- Someone1234 9y ago
  > my wife is an author on Amazon and personally knows most of the people who review her books. So your wife has people she knows leave positive reviews in order to bump her book's review score and you're upset that Fakespot gave it an F due to them being non-organic reviews? As a consumer it sounds like Fakespot is doing a great job, and exactly what it states on the tin. What your wife is doing is at best dishonest and I'm glad they're exposed as sham reviews. Hopefully these people are putting a disclaimer in the reviews stating the conflict but I highly doubt it. > Yet FakeSpot, who OP holds up as doing the great job that Amazon is not, is completely wrong. Except according to your own anecdote they were completely right?
awinder 9y ago
I got scammed on some hdmi cables and iPhone charging cables a few months back. They all broke within a month, which I thought was weird, definitely the worst purchases I’ve made on amazon but they were top reviewed products on the front page of a search. I just checked them on fakespot and they were both rated at 98% fake reviews. This is pretty confidence shattering for me; how do I pay $80 a year for prime if amazon is in cahoots with such obvious scams...
mikequinlan 9y ago
I mostly look at the 1 and 2 star reviews. It saves me a huge amount of money -- I will see something interesting and think I want to buy it but then I read the reviews and realize it is a bunch of crap.
- usaphp 9y ago
  The same issue applies there, a lot of competitors are buying fake negative reviews to damage competitor
- Rotareti 9y ago
  The negative reviews could be fake as well.
aSockPuppeteer 9y ago
Lately people will receive a message, email, or letter requesting a review from the vendor in exchange for a free product or heavily discounted one. It is hard to trust one thousand 5-star reviews.
- doglet 9y ago
  similar to a lot of apartments incentivizing positive reviews from their tenants
propman 9y ago
I briefly considered offering a curated review service for Amazon many years back (I know it's unethical and it was just posturing) and was not surprised to find many services already offering that. I thought Millennials had become desensitized to all 5 star over the top, big flashy sounding reviews so a service that carefully curates reviews for top items seemed like a decent idea. Sprinkle a few 1 star reviews for the wrong item sent or a fault of Amazon, a few 4 stars raving about the product but complaining about some minor aspect irrelevant to the average buyer to make it sound authentic. Many people compare a few products and when they make a purchase, they do so feeling really proud of themselves that they picked the perfect product for the best price. The "it's too good to be true" doesn't really seem to work anymore. This honestly seems to be the case for every Amazon product these days. We'll probabzky get desensitized to this soon too and something else will come up. That said, fake products are ridiculous and there are a few sites I've bookmarked that do a pretty decent job of spotting a fake product and I do admit it's becoming harder to differentiate lately but the too good to be true adage still stands.
TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
It's not perfect, but I've been using Fakespot [0] for all my Amazon purchases. It helps filter down the info a bit, which makes it easier to make decisions. Honestly, I think what we need is a Consumer Report reboot. I signed up for a subscription recently, and was very disappointed with their service, although I still like idea behind it. I'm often overwhelmed by the huge number of options, and it can be incredibly challenging to narrow the number down, even for everyday purchases. Heck, sometimes you have two options and no easy way of differentiating between em, like with generic vs brand over-the-counter medicine. Unfortunately, now-a-days trying to do any kind of research is most likely to pull up fake or questionable info from paid shills. I wonder how feasible it would be to create a decentralized chain of trust for product and service reviews. [0] https://www.fakespot.com https://www.fakespot.com
- pwaai 9y ago
  what did you find disappointing about it? First time I heard about it, what is it they do that's worth subscribing? On researching, yeah it's honestly a chore everytime because so much disinformation/misinformation. I'm not sure what decentralization would look like or even make sense. It seems like you just need some central guy like CR to vet and test out all the products. I go to Youtube for that tho.
  - TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
    Well, I'd had access to their physical catalogues when I was younger through my parents' subscription, so I had good memories of their reviews. Their site has TONS of tracking and marketing scripts, which I consider anti-user. Furthermore, if you block or disable any, the site breaks. For a service claiming to be pro-user they seem to be engaging in a lot of dark patterns. Aside from that, I found their reviews lacking in detail. For many categories they have dozens of options marked as recommended, with prices ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars, but no explanation of why one might prefer certain models. I subscribed because I wanted help narrowing down my options. I wouldn't suggest subscribing for more than a single month. They have some useful information, but not enough to justify a long-term subscription.
akshaypuradkar 9y ago
i had a friend who worked at a place whose owners had a forum board(or perhaps many) and the employees working there were supposed to 1. search shit up the internet. this could be any random stuff. electronics to politics to plain BS. 2. start a thread by logging into one of the board accounts by literally copy pasting the stuff they chose to select based on some criteria. 3. reply the question from different accounts(all taken from a pool), usually more copy pasted shit. 4. copy-paste all that into some document and submit it as a worklog to the management. i think the source of income was advertisement(what else could support such a thing?). what i found fascinating was that this cottage industry somehow managed to pay middle-class salaries to about 20 odd employees in a place like suburban mumbai by siphoning money from a burgeoning advertising industry and doing nothing of any value whatsoever. i guess this is what Friedman really meant by a free market. stupidity begets stupidity! the point being, it's become really difficult to figure what's of value in this weird weird world!
Havoc 9y ago
I don’t really bother reading the reviews anymore. They’re invariably useless promotional crap
FabHK 9y ago
Reminds me of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- irl_zebra 9y ago
  True. My team started targeting site availability since using that as a measure. Now my site uptime is four nines! About to tell them to cut it out.
- WhoIsSatoshi 9y ago
  When you see this start to happen to Bitcoin, that's when you sell and buy ethereum (or other secondary crypto!)
- CM30 9y ago
  See anything associated with SEO.
apinstein 9y ago
I am finding myself more and more suspicious of buying from Amazon. I have had issues with fake reviews, disclarity over the actual vendor/source of an item, particularly due to their mixed logistics system. It’s scary how many 1-Star reviews are clearly from people who’ve gotten a fake / different product than what’s listed. I am close to done with buying from Amazon.
GrumpyNl 9y ago
Give people power and it will be corrupted.
frabbit 9y ago
The fake-review problem was amusingly exposed for TripAdvisor by a journalist who with, the aid of five people, had his garden shed rated as five stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shed_at_Dulwich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shed_at_Dulwich At the end of the TRASHFUTURE podcast (14 Dec 2017 "The Shed Chronicles ft. Oobah Butler, ca. 36 minutes in http://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/feed/ http://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/feed/ ) people are still calling for what he describes as "frozen dinners with the sort of things that wankers like on them, like microherbs".
j-c-hewitt 9y ago
Amazon does do a lot to detect bribed reviews automatically. However, in the long run, this may be an arms race that Amazon will lose. One issue with detecting fakes with identical phrases is that many real reviewers will take phrases from the product description or from other peoples' reviews either consciously or unconsciously. This also matches up with a common bribed review technique of giving people canned phrases to repeat in their reviews or hundreds of prewritten reviews to be distributed out to people who are part of the review program. Top reviewers are also not a good brake on this process because the best way for them to profit from their reviews is to take bribes. Just going after people who only leave positive reviews also doesn't really work because smart reviewers salt their reviews with the occasional negative one (generally for people who aren't bribing them). User generated reviews emerged because many surveys across many different product categories have shown that shoppers tend to trust peer reviews more than they trust expert reviews. Part of this is because so many expert reviews have been corrupted to an even greater degree, with PR departments basically being bribery and party-throwing departments whose jobs are to manipulate journalists and place articles in supposedly unbiased publications. The issue from the seller side is that shoppers are absurd perfectionists. A product can go from a 4.24 star to a 4.26 star average and have its conversion rate double. The difference between 4 and 4.5 stars is the difference between losses on the product and profits in many competitive categories. Also many people just give 1 star reviews to products when they have minor nitpicks. That'd be fine if that 1 star review didn't tank a product average and suddenly mean the budget that was there for an employee suddenly isn't there anymore. In real terms the main difference in most categories between the reliably 4.5-5 star product and the 4 star product is that one seller spams harder than the other one. Considering that nice guys finish last in that particular competition, it rapidly becomes a triumph or the worst. Long-run what will happen is that the reaction against user reviews will be as severe as the reaction against critics has been. Part of this is also just a scale issue: with so many products and brands constantly popping up globally, there isn't enough time and editorial attention available to review everything.
- defgeneric 9y ago
  > smart reviewers salt their reviews with the occasional negative one (generally for people who aren't bribing them) This is exactly the problem with the "consumer protection" racket--companies like Consumer Affairs will curate a negative presentation of your company or product, then call you up offering a $2,500/month subscription which basically allows you to remove old negative reviews and prevent new ones from appearing on their site.
slackingoff2017 9y ago
The problem is massive. Most people haven't noticed yet but it's only a matter of time. Eventually everyone gets burned at least once and Amazon becomes the new ebay. They need to get a handle on their supply chain and stop outsourcing so much of their product listings to shady third party sellers. Shady third party sellers go hand-in-hand with fake reviews. Most reputable brands don't want to get their hands dirty with that stuff. It's guys making margin on reselling that have all the skin in the game and most of the incentive to manipulate the system. I've never gotten a fake from any brick and mortar or online merchant that sells direct. Only places I've gotten fakes and been duped by rampant fake reviews are eBay and Amazon. Once a competitor gets their shit together (I'm betting on Walmart) and has an equally convenient online store, Amazon will be the Myspace of online sales. People have loyatly to brands but not the company that sells them. If something better comes along I'll switch immediately just like I did years ago with ebay
- emh68 9y ago
  I've actually recently gotten a fake from Macys.com, so it seems to me that sites like Amazon and eBay are saturated with fakes, and the scammers are infiltrating supply chains in general. (They refused to accept the return, however, so I don't think the problem is that widespread, or maybe they're just not aware of the issue yet.) This might be brick & mortar's last laugh. How do you protect against fake merchandise? Don't worry about it, customers simply won't buy the obviously incorrect items, and you can identify and deal with them when you take inventory.
  - astura 9y ago
    What was the product, if you don't mind sharing.
    - emh68 9y ago
      Clothing item. I received a really cheap item by the same manufacturer, with a tag jammed into it identifying it as the higher-priced item.
- 9y ago
bsg75 9y ago
How much of this problem would be eliminated if Amazon only allowed reviews from accounts that purchased that item?
- slantyyz 9y ago
  Zero. Because the workaround is that reviewers are asked to buy the products with their own money and then reimbursed via Paypal. Source: I used to do incentivized reviews but stopped after the rule changes. I still get asked to do the Paypal workaround. In fact, the old system was better. At least the incentivized review disclosures let you know to take a review with a grain of salt. Now, it's even shadier.
nbrempel 9y ago
I can say from personal experience that I used to seek out reviews on Amazon even when buying goods from a brick and mortar store. Now it’s almost the opposite. I’m hesitant to trust any reviews on the site and buy goods from other vendors whenever possible. It’s unfortunate; I hope they can implement some measures to prevent fraudulent reviews.
pogue 9y ago
I left this comment on the site's comment section (apologies if others have already posted these suggestions - I didn't read through all the comments): Try using fakespot.com or reviewmeta.com. They're both sites setup to try & check the validity of Amazon comments using different methodology - such as how many times a reviewer has left a review, certain trigger keywords known to be used by bots & how many reviews Amazon has deleted from a review by request of the merchant (yes, Amazon will do this!). This will leave you with a much better sense of whether or not a product has been 'review-bombed' or if the company is up to shady practices.
- ecommerceguy 9y ago
  To be clear, Amazon will remove reviews at merchant request when the review is about FBA shipping. Generally, these are bad reviews. A merchant would not want to remove a good review when the subject is shipping. "This came really fast!" 5 Stars is not a product review, however a merchant would not want to remove it. "The box was completely damaged and destroyed the product!!" 1 Star - will be removed by request if shipped via FBA. As with anything for selling on Amazon, they are not exactly consistent with this policy.
  - pogue 9y ago
    Sorry, FBA = ?
    - j79 9y ago
      Fulfillment By Amazon
abiox 9y ago
fake reviews are an issue, but so are low-quality reviews. for example i've seen quite a few books with a modest handful of reviews have their stars tanked by some terrible bad-faith reviews by people who take an issue with the book that isn't directly about the quality or merit of the content. (this really shows up in political and philosophy areas.) this isn't the end of the world if i take the time to carefully survey reviews, but i just don't have time to give every book due process. few people really do. i really wish i had some way to ignore individual reviews as well as everything from a reviewer - 'ignore' meaning that the site discounts their contribution to scoring when rendered for me.
rdlecler1 9y ago
Amazon reviews system is broken. It seems to favor the cheapest functional product but not everyone wants to buy the cheapest thing. Sometimes they want the best quality item and it’s hard to interpolate this from the review system. Reviews really need to be weighted to the kinds of purchases people make. Someone buying the top of the line OLED TV is going to have a different set of preferences than someone who is buying a no-name 65” LCD.
- grapeshot 9y ago
  With TVs and computer parts it becomes impossible to read the reviews because they are merged with every other variation of that product from the same brand, with wildly different features and quality levels. Look up LG monitors or eVGA power supplies for instance.
diebir 9y ago
Could somebody explain the mechanism for creating "verified purchase" fake reviews? Somebody actually bothers to go through trouble of doing a purchase and creating a fake review? Anybody has any factual examples? Any pay for services that can be used? Seems like an area just waiting to be investigated by a media outlet...
- naner 9y ago
  As long as the item isn't prohibitively expensive the company paying for the review could just provide you the money to purchase the product.
  - diebir 9y ago
    Is this really practical for small time items? Does this happen at scale, or there's some other mechanism to create fake reviews? Seems like the practice is widespread, all real purchases?
z3t4 9y ago
I try to do my purchase's based on scientific research methods. There needs to be benchmarks that you can use to compare the products. That is however problematic for some products, such as books. What's even worse then fake reviews is fake bad reviews where competitors give your products a low rating. If your first review ends up bad you are screwed, unless you get 100 good reviews to compensate.
sogen 9y ago
I rated a book poorly (1-2 stars). This book only had 3 reviews after one year since it was published. Crazily enough, after my review appeared, two days later this book had over TWELVE glowing reviews, all of them Five-stars ...
asdjasldkjkljd 9y ago
This is becoming a SEVERE problem for Amazon. My wife and I have been talking about cancelling our Prime account just because unless you're getting something from an obviously known manufacturer, the site is riddled with junk and counterfeits. With clothing it's annoying, but with electronics it can be outright dangerous because there are a lot of falsely certified products. I bought a cheap outdoor LED fixture thinking at worst it would just be a bright LED in a cheap housing... it was manufactured so poorly that it didn't work out of the box, and upon investigation bare wires were exposed within and arcing. It was some of the sloppiest soldering I've ever seen.
shahbaby 9y ago
Recently I've avoided buying certain things just because I didn't want to put in the time to do my own research on it. I would rather not buy it than take the risk of getting ripped off buy a fake review. Some things are worth the money but not the time.
ashman5 9y ago
An even bigger problem they have is with the fake 2 Day shipping. Tried to order a Prime 2 Day shipping item today (Sat 12/16) and delivery was 2 day guaranteed for Thursday 12/21. And recently, I'm getting zero weekend delivery. Oddly, recent Ebay orders were delivered on Sunday.
seanwilson 9y ago
Do any companies offer you some kind of incentive to write reviews or rate all the products you bought? I would have thought some variation of this would be a good way to drown out fake reviews. Maybe this is too expensive to do well.
intopieces 9y ago
Amazon's solution to fake reviews is Amazon Basics, a "verified good" version of whatever you were looking for. Thus, they have little incentive to combat fake reviews for products not directly sold by them, since that bad experience, they hope, will cause you to run back to them for the product next time. They also get to avoid being called a monopoly by selling products of various qualities and from various sellers.
- doglet 9y ago
  Interestingly, Amazon might have a secondary payoff here: they actually get some good ground truth (honest review data) since these reviews - at least the positive ones - aren't tainted by the same incentives.
zherbert 9y ago
The key is to never buy from an FBA seller. Only buy from Amazon.com as the seller.
deleted 9y ago
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KeepTalking 9y ago
Fake reviews? I received a firkin fake Bose QC-35 II Headphone! Check out the fake product and read the reviews, and this listing is still active even after Amazon verified and refunded me the cost of the product. https://www.amazon.com/Bose-QuietComfort-headphones-Bluetooth-NFC-Black/dp/B01L92BERK#customerReviews https://www.amazon.com/Bose-QuietComfort-headphones-Bluetoot... Infact one of the reviewers did a detail comparison between the fake product and the real QC-35.
- hippich 9y ago
  This is very different issue. Amazon, unlike eBay, has single product page for product. And multiple sellers can sell under that page. Including sellers of counterfeit. This does not make original product bad (so reviews are incorrect) - but rather seller should be reported. Granted - that concept is very complicated for typical amazon shopper and that's how you end up with bunch of "fake" 1-star reviews under brand-names products...
  - emh68 9y ago
    That isn't the issue mentioned by OP.
phantom0308 9y ago
Anecdotally, on WeChat 微信, top Chinese social media app, I know some friends have received solicitations for good reviews in exchange for free goods.
megaman22 9y ago
Friend of mine hada huge problem with this recently https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-24/amazon-merchants-still-find-new-ways-to-cheat-in-shopping-frenzy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-24/amazon-me...
dheera 9y ago
For me, I only look at a review if it states at least one or two non-trivial negative aspects of the product. That alone weeds out a lot of fake reviews. Most honest reviews are never 100% positive.
- alok-g 9y ago
  Yes. Even if it mentions some "non-trivial" positive aspects, it still helps.
Nition 9y ago
The fake review problem is clearly bad, but if it's going to take some fancy machine learning algorithm to solve it, why not start with a simpler improvement to user reviews: Weighting the Top Rated scores so it doesn't show an item with a single 5-star review above an item with 5000 reviews and a 4.9 star average.
- EvilTerran 9y ago
  Amen to that. It's a solved problem in statistics, too: https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...
barking 9y ago
I was surprised to see that possibly the best vb6 book ever written, which has 96 reviews on amazon.com, is scored an F by fakespot https://www.fakespot.com/product/programming-microsoft-visual-basic-6-0-80322ea5-2da7-410c-9777-704d5f97695a https://www.fakespot.com/product/programming-microsoft-visua...
- jasonlotito 9y ago
  I searched a few more well known and popular books (ones that HN would recommend) and they all come back with nothing better than a C. This doesn't instill much confidence in me.
deleted 9y ago
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ouid 9y ago
They don't try to solve this problem at all. I was looking for a cheap macbook charger, and ran across two very different products with identical reviews, spelling mistakes and all. I'm sure this is common, even. How hard would it be to automatically detect this behavior?
jasonlotito 9y ago
Amazon allows people known to sell reviews for money or product into their special review program (I forget what it's called, but it highlights someone as a good reviewer). I know this because a family member got caught and effectively nothing happened.
intrasight 9y ago
This old phrase is still relevant today: "caveat emptor"
davidgerard 9y ago
Fakespot is not so great. It assumes anyone who doesn't have multiple reviews is a bot, which is not a great heuristic in practice.
Chattered 9y ago
It's not the same 23 word sentence. It's the same 23 word run-on. The first comma should be either a semi-colon, colon or stop.
- Chattered 9y ago
  Point being that plagiarism/copying might be easier to spot via mistakes. I understand that this is how scholars do it for ancient texts.
  - doglet 9y ago
    In other words, repetition of the same mistakes implies higher probability of copying
rebootthesystem 9y ago
Amazon has the power to fix this. They don't seem to care. Simple logic and heuristics would be enough. Amazon allows anyone to post a review. You don't even have to buy the product. That is fundamentally wrong. That's the first easy step: If you did not buy the product on Amazon you cannot post a review. Amazon allows people who receive deep discounts to post reviews. That is ripe for manipulation. And so, the second filter is simple: If someone doesn't pay at least N%, say 50%, for a product they don't get to post a review. Amazon allows people to post a review at any time, even before the product ships. You can post a review for toothpaste before you actually use it. The third filter would include a variable purchase-to-review period. The length of this period is different depending on the type of product. Maybe someone who buys a USB cable can post a review a couple of weeks after actually receiving it --but not sooner. Someone buying weight loss pills might need to wait 60 days. In other words, introduce some common sense into a process that would only allow actual retail buyers of a product to experience the product for a reasonable amount of time before allowing them to post a review, positive or negative. It goes beyond that. Negative reviews need to be routed to the vendor before they appear publicly on Amazon. Why? Amazon needs to give vendors a first shot at solving the problem. The current system is moronic. People can give a USB cable a bad review because they don't like the color. The thing might work just fine but the person wanted a different shade of green and can give the product a 1 star review. This is nonsense. In general terms, Amazon reviews, due to Amazon's own incompetence, are pretty much worthless these days.
soverance 9y ago
Fake reviews on Amazon (or internet e-commerce sites at large) is a significant problem. I have had a previous employer use my personal information to manually create and post fake reviews of his own products under my name. Nothing surprises me anymore. I only found out because I received a notification email asking me to confirm my review (which I had not written). Needless to say, I quit.

602 points by doglet 9y ago

Should we conclude that Amazon does not have sufficient incentive to remove these fake reviews? Surely they could, when third-party sites easily detect them...

pishpash 9y ago
Third-party sites are not "easily" detecting them. They have no idea what the performance of their "detection" is, in either direction (false +, false -).
- doglet 9y ago
  One problem is getting "ground truth." I think Amazon has a pretty good idea of a lot of near-certain true positives.

jseliger 9y ago

I don't care much about the reviews, but I care a lot about the fake / phony / not-as-described merchandise: http://seliger.com/2017/01/09/tools-continued-careful-buy-amazon/ http://seliger.com/2017/01/09/tools-continued-careful-buy-am... . I've actually changed behavior and tried harder to buy from the original maker, if possible.

mjevans 9y ago
That's the behavior that I would like to see Amazon encourage as a solution. Tracking the product back to it's actual origin of manufacturer (and showing us the consumer). Where, exactly, was the factory? The lot number and date of manufacturer? Official model and revision number? Requiring these things will give buyers better hard data to detect and exclude middle-level-marking shenanigans as well as combat 'bait and switch' (even if not intentional) changes to product configurations sold under the same general marketing moniker.
- pwaai 9y ago
  How would you go about tracing the steps? Are there some large database of OEM factories where you can contact them in English (assuming China). I too would love to know exactly where and who made it, how many middle-men have stepped in with their own markup to finally Amazon. Because it's clear that Amazon doesn't give two shit about who and what gets sold, they just care about volume. Fixing reviews is not part of that strategy.
  - coredog64 9y ago
    Wouldn't this be a classic use case for block chain technology?
    - SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
      Of course not. It's not a distribute problem (Amazon is centralized) it doesn't require trustlessness (Amazon trusts itself), but it is something where you want an auditable ledger. Say, an append-only database.
  - mjevans 9y ago
    You require the data to be part of the listing, and you share that data with the consumer. It thus becomes a statement that can be enforced as part of advertising to a customer. Counterfeits would be one thing to go after. Lying to customers would be another. After a while 'dodgy factories' and/or sellers that lie more often than not would be able to be sorted out and removed from listings. More importantly factories and sellers could build actual solid reputations for telling the truth. Most importantly, it would make middle-level-marketing stuff much more obvious.
    - RhodesianHunter 9y ago
      I wish it we're this simple, but after working in this space I can tell you that getting that data is a Herculean task.
  - RhodesianHunter 9y ago
JohnTHaller 9y ago
Unfortunately all goods at Amazon are intermingled including those Amazon itself ships. The only exception is companies who specifically pay not to do so in which case you lose access to prime shipping.
- astura 9y ago
  Amazon seller here. This is not strictly true, you can still have your orders shipped "prime" but not commingle.

kelukelugames 9y ago

I worked at Amazon as an intern in 2005 and recall a talk on fake reviews. There were groups of people who wrote fake positive reviews for each other's books. Today I have friends who sell on Amazon and they write fake reviews for each other's products.

pishpash 9y ago
People give fake reviews all the time in other circumstances (e.g. at work, reviewing papers). Human nature really can't be changed. You just have to keep your skepticism and read critically.
- jonnycomputer 9y ago
  I don't know anyone who has given a fake review on a paper. Could happen. I do know that reviewing papers can be a royal time suck on people who don't really have a lot of time to spare.

Finnucane 9y ago

If they're not going to do anything about fake stuff, why should they care about fake reviews? As it is, they're trying to make it so you don't know what you're buying or who you're buying it from, or even be entirely sure what the price is going to be, or who is going to be delivering to your door, so why should they care about reviews?

pishpash 9y ago
You have a problem they'll shower $ on you. As long as Amazon does that, people seem to accept it.

jccooper 9y ago

Social proof via reviews (of products, restaurants, anything) is a great idea if you can assume good intent. Back in the good ol' days of the Internet this seemed plausible for some reason, but now there's real money to be made and that's out the window. Amazon and Yelp and the like may be better or worse at stemming the tide of fakery, but asking them to be better isn't going to fundamentally help. The whole idea is broken.

mc32 9y ago
I wonder if it will come back to a more distributed CR type of system. Also branding and maintaining the integrity of a brand. Currently you have a bevvy of brands for China sourced goods. The brands are obviously made up without much thought. Something like "Scarvast" trekking pole. "Vargus" flashlights, "Zukil" wireless speakers. "Brikor" dehumidifiers. And often times the same seller will have multiple "brands". This is what makes it unreliable and untrustworthy. It's like they live A/B test products on AMZ.
- pogue 9y ago
  I highly recommend a 30 Day trial subscription on Consumer Reports (CR) online if you're looking to buy a big ticket item. You can put in your CC# & other details and get free 30 day access to CR testing of a lot of products. Then cancel before the 30 days are up. You may end up paying a little more for a top notch product, but you can be assured if CR reviewed it, you're getting what you pay for.
  - tomerico 9y ago
    If consumer report (or the more general, independent testing lab) is the solution, I wonder if Amazon should buy them or build their own. A trusted source of reviews has proved itself successful with the USB-C cable example and Benson from Google verifying all of them
  - doglet 9y ago
    Maybe there's a market for verified customer reviews of popular items - even ones that aren't big ticket. Consumer Reports might grow to cover additional items and perhaps develop a browser extension for subscribers who gain access to trusted reviews.

corvallis 9y ago

I am much more wary about buying from Amazon than most of my peers, who easily click and buy on a whim or out of habit. I went to buy a toy at a brick and mortar, and compared the price to Amazon while there - $12.99 in the store and $27.xx at Amazon! I think they've marketed them to be the low price leaders but that's definitely not the case. I'm also concerned about counterfeit products - I don't care as much about reviews because I'll usually have researched beforehand or already know what I want. However with brand name items, I always wonder if it's the real thing and as a result have stopped buying shoes, etc from Amazon. I also don't buy anything from Amazon that goes in my body or on my body (supplements, cosmetics/hygiene, etc). I stick with brick & mortar or the online storefront. It's unfortunate, because Amazon is fantastic as a concept, unfortunately my trust in them does not extend to most items. I'd rather pay more and be confident in the product. I think whatever they are doing is working for them and they have no incentive to change because the vast majority of customers are not so discerning.

bootlooped 9y ago
> $12.99 in the store and $27.xx at Amazon! Was this from a 3rd party seller? I have seen a lot of 3rd party sellers have listings for pretty outrageous prices. I think they're either trying to catch people who don't shop around / don't know what the product is worth, or they are just not managing their pricing well. On a lot of popular products you can see an example of the latter where Amazon themselves will be selling a product for a given price, and then if you look at other offers you'll see the same thing being sold by other sellers for double or triple Amazon's price.
- corvallis 9y ago
  I don’t remember if this was the exact link as this was several weeks ago. This was the toy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00OYJNKJG/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1513458578&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=parking+garage+motor+max&dpPl=1&dpID=51q0rM-%2BYDL&ref=plSrch https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00OYJNKJG/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=...
  - 9y ago

ineedasername 9y ago

The open review system (anyone can review any item) maybe made some sense when it was just book reviews, but makes much less sense for all items. A good start would be to only allow reviews on verified purchases. At least then it would be much harder for bad actors to up stakes on a listing and clone to a new one once the authentic negative reviews piled up. Verified reviews can be faked and gamed as well, but it is harder, more costly and time consuming.

Marazan 9y ago
It seems insanely obvious to me that only people who have purchased the item through Amazon should get to review the product.
- ineedasername 9y ago
  Yes. I'm trying to remember back to early amazon, circa the bubble burst... my vague recollection is that reviews were more in the vein of a platform for book reviews, not review of books as products... a fine difference, maybe one wothout distinction when it comes to books, but an either way an open platform for book reviews has very different trust and reliabilty requirements than reviews attached to products being sold.

xellisx 9y ago

I usually look at the 1 star reviews first and see if the complaints are user error, unreal expectations or really a poorly designed product.

stri8ed 9y ago
I don't know that this solves the problem, since competitors can just start leaving fake negative reviews on competing products.
- xellisx 9y ago
  While that is true, if it's a low effort 1 star review, E.g. "It's crap", with no explanation of why it's crap, I ignore that. If there's a lengthy 1 star review with details, then I factor that in to "Was that one just bad, or all them are like that". I don't just look at the 1 stars, I work my way up. More details for me equal a higher weighted review. Pictures, video and stuff help too, but of course those can be faked. Lately I've been looking at audio equipment for S&Gs (Microphones, audio interfaces, phantom power injection, etc...).

maxxxxx 9y ago

Amazon is starting to feel more and more like eBay. The same product sold by multiple vendors under different names, questionable reviews, clearly fraudulent sellers and so on. I used to love Amazon but now when I look for something I dread to do so on Amazon because I don't feel I can trust anything there.

pishpash 9y ago
eBay product reviews (not vendor reviews) are actually pretty good. Have you looked? They report fake/defective stuff in them.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  I don't trust them because I don't think anybody at eBay is checking whether the product being sold right now is the same the review was for.
  - pishpash 9y ago
    That's a given because vendors list whatever they want. However, if they list wrong, that's a SNAD case waiting to happen.
    - maxxxxx 9y ago
      Often the item will look the same but on the inside it's different so it will be hard to file a case.
- bduerst 9y ago
  The vendor could still be sending fakes, and you wouldn't know because the remediation process involves removing negative reviews.
BlackjackCF 9y ago
Same here. I used to buy everything off of Amazon, but now I have to scrape the Internet for reviews to make sure that I can trust the thing I'm buying is actually going to be of good quality.

gesman 9y ago

>> Amazon – who has some of the world’s most advanced ML – really needs to step up its review fraud detection game. It's not in the interests of Amazon to be on a crusade against fake reviews. Mass fake reviews are the driving force of revenues. AMZN will always maintain the balance between public outcry and absolute minimal effort to show that they're doing something against spammers. From my side I maintain the right to buy the product and then write "not as described" as a reason for free return for full refund with free pickup. Quite often vendor/seller will give you refund without requiring you to return merchandise. I don't feel like I been abused too much by fake reviews as long as I can "abuse back" with my free return.

brianpan 9y ago
I don't understand your argument. How do reviews drive revenues? If all fake reviews were taken down, wouldn't buy less stuff from Amazon.
- maksimum 9y ago
  Many people look at # of reviews and average review as "social proof" about the quality of a product. The reason we do this is because it can be a useful short-cut to performing an intellectually rigorous evaluation. If Amazon removes a bunch of reviews they're removing incentives that users use to buy products.
  - Terretta 9y ago
    No. You’re at Amazon.com, you will make a purchase. Reviews affect which purchase. The incentive that matters is the sentiment or belief you should go to amazon.com in the first place. That’s what’s at risk.
- picodguyo 9y ago
  Most retailers find that conversion increases alongside review count, with diminishing returns above something like 50 reviews. It's important enough that most of the largest retailers either incentivize reviews with rewards or run "seeding" programs where they send out products in exchange for reviews.

amai 9y ago

https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/ and https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ can help.

perseusprime11 9y ago

This is not just Amazon’s problem. App store ratings, Reddit comments, Twitter/FB feeds, and Net Neutrality comments are all gamed. We are living in the age of human controlled bots looking to manipulate other humans through what we read.

mathgenius 9y ago
Yeah, these are all "message passing" algorithms, like belief propagation. The whole financial system itself is another good example of this.
- perseusprime11 9y ago
  I hope Hacker News will be the last bastion for fake comments. At least, I have never seen bots lurking around on Hacker News.
deleted 9y ago
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m3kw9 9y ago

Generally I always go to review sites first like wire cutter to see what are the best stuff, then I would see the little details, mostly what bad reviews say about it to contradict. A lot good reviews I can sniff out as fluff with a 5 star label. The bad thing is that when I see an avg of 4.5 stars with 100+ reviews, there is a slight bias inside me for this product. Amazon could do a better job to weight the avg stars.

slantyyz 9y ago
Well, you even have to take the Wirecutter with a grain of salt. IIRC, there was some heated debate over whether they were pay to play from some standing desk co that didn't sell through Amazon (Wirecutter makes a portion of their revenue from amazon referral links).

ausjke 9y ago

There are groups that do both: buying the first batches of products and writing nice reviews, then the seller will pay for what they have done, it's a mature business these days: you hire a team to market you at Amazon by faking reviews after "real" purchases(will be compensated or rewarded under the counter afterwards). This is very hard to detect indeed. Maybe Amazon can have some AI algorithm, that is for any newly arrived products with non-sales yet, monitoring the activities on them closely,the fake purchase and review must have some common pattern(same address, same ID, same IP,etc). But then, why does Amazon want to do that? it will decrease its own profit. So yes, customers will be the one got screwed up no matter what.

anthuswilliams 9y ago
But then, why does Amazon want to do that? it will decrease its own profit. Why would policing fake reviews decrease Amazon's profits?
- Spivak 9y ago
  Presumably because positive reviews cause people to buy products, they don't necessarily blame Amazon if they turn out to be bad, nor do they return them.

sputknick 9y ago

I tried to buy my son a remote control car on Amazon a few weeks ago. I gave up after wading through 2 pages of 5 star reviewed products where the reviews all looked the same, all had the same structure. Many referenced "my 11 year old son", or the name of the company. This seems like something that can be weeded out using ML sentiment analysis. If too many reviews have the same structure, your posting gets demoted. If I could have found one legit looking review I would have bought that car, instead I gave up and went to The hobby store.

doglet 9y ago
Nothing like the good old trusted hobby store. And yes, this repetition of phrase or structure should be a clear signal.

marban 9y ago

... And not speaking of all the 1-star reviews that just relate to some "horrible" delivery problems with the carrier.

bluedino 9y ago
Even the good reviews can be bad. "5 stars..looks great can't wait to actually use it"

billyvg 9y ago

I encountered this problem while trying to do Christmas shopping on Amazon. An example is this (parachute hammocks): https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=parachute+hammock https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias... I don't know anything about them, I'm not familiar with manufacturers, but this search result brings up very similar items from "different" companies. What's even more suspicious is that there are MULTIPLE results that have 1-2 thousand reviews and are at a perfect 5*.

maltalex 9y ago
Try this: https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/
- supermdguy 9y ago
  This looks really cool.

bdz 9y ago

I really like Aliexpress even tho it's more like eBay and not Amazon (but on the other hand Amazon is starting to feel like eBay nowdays) 1. You can sort the product search page by order number (who many people bought the same product). That alone is a big help to dodge fake products. 2. People are encouraged to make reviews with photos. The seller usually gives you a coupon if you make a review with photo which feels like a grey area (am I being bribed?) but as a potential buyer it helpes me a lot to make my decision.

ratsmack 9y ago

And there are also the poison pill reviews from competing vendors. They are usually easy to spot because they are just a bunch of vitriol without any substance.

thisisit 9y ago

It seems Amazon is in a bind. While we will like to believe the extensions which can sniff out fake reviews, they don't have the burden of false positives - reviews which are genuine but marked as fake. Imagine, what happens if Amazon does incorporate a stricter review guideline and lot of the reviews get tossed. It will be Youtube demonistation debate all over again.

ad_hominem 9y ago

If Amazon starts penalizing products for fake reviews then it's probably just a matter of time until that's weaponized by competitors to tank competing products. Then I imagine Amazon will have to come out with a "disavow review" tool similar to Google's disavow backlinks (to counteract targeted negative SEO).

degenerate 9y ago
I've been out of the google loop for way too long... I had no idea they introduced a way to disavow backlinks. I logged in to webmaster tools for the first time in 5 years and there's a LOT of new stuff. Thanks for randomly mentioning it. Time to read up on site snippets and structured data...
r00fus 9y ago
What's to say that isn't happening now? Seen quite a lot of pseudo positive reviews that are simply advising reader that "another product is better"
- j-c-hewitt 9y ago
  It is happening now in fairly large quantities.

jacek 9y ago

The fake review problem on Amazon is much bigger than people think. Here are my two anecdotes: 1. I got bluetooth headphones on amazon (~$65). They had great reviews, but were very disappointing. I returned them and gave 2 star review. Representative from the manufacturer contacted me and offered me a pair for free. After I got them, they asked for positive review. I refused. That manipulation technique wasn't enough for them though. They might have merged the listing with some other item. Even though the item was released this year, it has reviews from 2014. 2. When I need a cable or something similar, I go to a page like vipon.com . They offer huge discounts on some items on amazon (sometimes even -80%). They of course "suggest" leaving a review. The more I look at reviews, the less I trust them. I see similar patterns for most products on amazon.

rconti 9y ago
Huh. I've never really had an issue because I chalked it up more to people buying cheap crap and expecting it to be good. But $65 for a pair of headphones isn't exactly cheap. Was it a familiar brand but maybe a counterfeit? Or was it a brand you've never heard of, but the price is justified by very positive reviews? I'm curious.
- catdog 9y ago
  Headphones seem to be a very strange category in general. You can get exceptional good value for money if you know what to buy and on the other hand pay a lot for utter crap.
  - DanielleMolloy 9y ago
    Listening is extremely subjective though. Headphone types can be better / worse for certain listening habits (there are people out there who don't think great bass makes great music, folks), and for different ears. Music taste itself is extremely subjective. Best thing is still to get to a trusted hifi store nearby with your own, known music in best quality and your current best headphone model and test through candidate models yourself. (Admittedly, I'd still read some reviews before investing a few hundred dollars into headphones.)

enraged_camel 9y ago

Solving the fake review problem might be possible if Amazon takes steps to make it economically unfeasible for the bad actors to do it at scale. For example, let's say that each product is shipped with a unique review_id and that review_id is tied to the product. When posting reviews about said product, you need to provide a picture of the card that contains the review_id. This would need to be verified server-side before the review is accepted. IMO this would make it too difficult for vendors to buy fake reviews at volume, since each fake review now must go through the extra step of taking a picture of the review_id card and uploading it along with the review. Since that step would take place in the analog world it would defeat most automated review posting methods.

JohnTHaller 9y ago

Amazon has a habit of removing reviews if they contain words like counterfeit. This is likely due to the issue of counterfeit items on Amazon and intermingling of goods between vendors including Amazon itself.

mnm1 9y ago

Amazon will never do something to fix this problem. Fake goods and garbage products that break almost immediately after delivery are their bread and butter. They need those fake reviews to sell a huge percentage of their merchandise. They would much rather just close accounts of the people who complain or whose shopping habits their algorithms don't like.

deleted 9y ago

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zerebubuth 9y ago

This is why I subscribe to an independent review and consumer advice service / magazine. Money, even in small amounts, seems to distort reviews. Before I trust a review I want to know where the money that paid for it came from.

baxtr 9y ago

I’m starting to think that amazon might be in trouble, because of A. Fake reviews, see above B. Fake products [1] C. A growing organization, which will be slower and less like on “day 1” [2] So far, all of this has not affected their top line, but maybe will change soon. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743316 [2] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-soars-340k-employees-adding-110k-people-single-year/ https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-soars-340k-employees-ad...

LoSboccacc 9y ago

fake review is relative. the primary problem for consumers now is fake products from commingled inventory.

timtebow 9y ago

on a lot of products you will have 50 five star reviews all done in the same month and year by people with "verified purchase" with an obvious mandarin broken english style of writing, followed by a bunch of one star reviews saying not to trust all the broken english one line five star reviews... i hope it ends soon. i think amazons change where they require you to have at least $50 in prior purchases before writing a review will help.

danbower 9y ago

Well the situation does seem quite bad when you see people who leave fake reviews become brazen enough to actually advertise their services on Amazon itself [1]. I reported this review about 10 days ago and it's still up. The email address provided appears on hundreds of product listings [2]. When they can't even filter out nonsense like this I can only assume they put zero effort into tackling fake reviews. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R7J38CTD1MNT0 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R7J38CTD1MNT0 [2] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:amazon.co.uk+sohant855%40gmail.com https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:amazon.co.uk+sohant85...

dhimes 9y ago
Holy smokes!
yesenadam 9y ago
Nice investigative work there.
Theodores 9y ago
...this is sad in the instance you describe because the actual seller did not request that 'advert for reviews' and it now marks their product as 'fake'. Yet the actual seller is legit and doing a great job according to 'fakespot'. Sample listing: https://www.fakespot.com/company/ketdirect https://www.fakespot.com/company/ketdirect
yborg 9y ago
Looks like someone at Amazon at least reads HN, it's dead now.

wybiral 9y ago

This may seem off topic but what do we do when bots catch up to our state of the art for keeping them out? Do we milk the concept of captchas until they turn into some kind of Turing test? Can we even automate a Turing test in a way that machines can't bypass? Do we basically ditch the concept of privacy and require some kind of systematic provable identity in most places? Or do we accept the fact that consensus can be faked by bots and try to mitigate the noise by removing the spam as it appears?

miles_matthias 9y ago

Here's my anecdote: my wife is an author on Amazon and personally knows most of the people who review her books. FakeSpot gave her most popular book an F grade because people were "suspiciously positive". Most people leaving reviews only leave reviews for things they absolutely love, so saying that it's "suspiciously positive" is not an indicator of it being fake. In her case, she knows these people personally and they're not fake scripts. Yet FakeSpot, who OP holds up as doing the great job that Amazon is not, is completely wrong. tldr; spotting fake reviews is harder than it seems apparently. EDIT: the other thing is that she has lost quite a bit of legitimate reviews from Amazon deleting them. Amazon is actually doing more than the end user sees about this problem. EDIT 2: Another thing Amazon completely ignores are reviewers who get an early copy of the product in exchange for an honest review. This is how a lot of people kickstart reviews on their products and Amazon completely ignores that valid use case. In fact, they hurt it because they don't mark those reviews as "Verified Purchase" since the reviewer got the product outside of the Amazon channels. They need to come up with a system for this.

aerion1 9y ago
I have been using Fakespot on Amazon and pay for the subscription features to simplify my online purchasing because it is needed. From what I have seen, Fakespot will detect ANY biased reviews. So if your wife had friends read and then leave a review with an affiliation as they mention in their FAQ/About.
Someone1234 9y ago
> my wife is an author on Amazon and personally knows most of the people who review her books. So your wife has people she knows leave positive reviews in order to bump her book's review score and you're upset that Fakespot gave it an F due to them being non-organic reviews? As a consumer it sounds like Fakespot is doing a great job, and exactly what it states on the tin. What your wife is doing is at best dishonest and I'm glad they're exposed as sham reviews. Hopefully these people are putting a disclaimer in the reviews stating the conflict but I highly doubt it. > Yet FakeSpot, who OP holds up as doing the great job that Amazon is not, is completely wrong. Except according to your own anecdote they were completely right?

awinder 9y ago

I got scammed on some hdmi cables and iPhone charging cables a few months back. They all broke within a month, which I thought was weird, definitely the worst purchases I’ve made on amazon but they were top reviewed products on the front page of a search. I just checked them on fakespot and they were both rated at 98% fake reviews. This is pretty confidence shattering for me; how do I pay $80 a year for prime if amazon is in cahoots with such obvious scams...

mikequinlan 9y ago

I mostly look at the 1 and 2 star reviews. It saves me a huge amount of money -- I will see something interesting and think I want to buy it but then I read the reviews and realize it is a bunch of crap.

usaphp 9y ago
The same issue applies there, a lot of competitors are buying fake negative reviews to damage competitor
Rotareti 9y ago
The negative reviews could be fake as well.

aSockPuppeteer 9y ago

Lately people will receive a message, email, or letter requesting a review from the vendor in exchange for a free product or heavily discounted one. It is hard to trust one thousand 5-star reviews.

doglet 9y ago
similar to a lot of apartments incentivizing positive reviews from their tenants

propman 9y ago

I briefly considered offering a curated review service for Amazon many years back (I know it's unethical and it was just posturing) and was not surprised to find many services already offering that. I thought Millennials had become desensitized to all 5 star over the top, big flashy sounding reviews so a service that carefully curates reviews for top items seemed like a decent idea. Sprinkle a few 1 star reviews for the wrong item sent or a fault of Amazon, a few 4 stars raving about the product but complaining about some minor aspect irrelevant to the average buyer to make it sound authentic. Many people compare a few products and when they make a purchase, they do so feeling really proud of themselves that they picked the perfect product for the best price. The "it's too good to be true" doesn't really seem to work anymore. This honestly seems to be the case for every Amazon product these days. We'll probabzky get desensitized to this soon too and something else will come up. That said, fake products are ridiculous and there are a few sites I've bookmarked that do a pretty decent job of spotting a fake product and I do admit it's becoming harder to differentiate lately but the too good to be true adage still stands.

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago

It's not perfect, but I've been using Fakespot [0] for all my Amazon purchases. It helps filter down the info a bit, which makes it easier to make decisions. Honestly, I think what we need is a Consumer Report reboot. I signed up for a subscription recently, and was very disappointed with their service, although I still like idea behind it. I'm often overwhelmed by the huge number of options, and it can be incredibly challenging to narrow the number down, even for everyday purchases. Heck, sometimes you have two options and no easy way of differentiating between em, like with generic vs brand over-the-counter medicine. Unfortunately, now-a-days trying to do any kind of research is most likely to pull up fake or questionable info from paid shills. I wonder how feasible it would be to create a decentralized chain of trust for product and service reviews. [0] https://www.fakespot.com https://www.fakespot.com

pwaai 9y ago
what did you find disappointing about it? First time I heard about it, what is it they do that's worth subscribing? On researching, yeah it's honestly a chore everytime because so much disinformation/misinformation. I'm not sure what decentralization would look like or even make sense. It seems like you just need some central guy like CR to vet and test out all the products. I go to Youtube for that tho.
- TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
  Well, I'd had access to their physical catalogues when I was younger through my parents' subscription, so I had good memories of their reviews. Their site has TONS of tracking and marketing scripts, which I consider anti-user. Furthermore, if you block or disable any, the site breaks. For a service claiming to be pro-user they seem to be engaging in a lot of dark patterns. Aside from that, I found their reviews lacking in detail. For many categories they have dozens of options marked as recommended, with prices ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars, but no explanation of why one might prefer certain models. I subscribed because I wanted help narrowing down my options. I wouldn't suggest subscribing for more than a single month. They have some useful information, but not enough to justify a long-term subscription.

akshaypuradkar 9y ago

i had a friend who worked at a place whose owners had a forum board(or perhaps many) and the employees working there were supposed to 1. search shit up the internet. this could be any random stuff. electronics to politics to plain BS. 2. start a thread by logging into one of the board accounts by literally copy pasting the stuff they chose to select based on some criteria. 3. reply the question from different accounts(all taken from a pool), usually more copy pasted shit. 4. copy-paste all that into some document and submit it as a worklog to the management. i think the source of income was advertisement(what else could support such a thing?). what i found fascinating was that this cottage industry somehow managed to pay middle-class salaries to about 20 odd employees in a place like suburban mumbai by siphoning money from a burgeoning advertising industry and doing nothing of any value whatsoever. i guess this is what Friedman really meant by a free market. stupidity begets stupidity! the point being, it's become really difficult to figure what's of value in this weird weird world!

Havoc 9y ago

I don’t really bother reading the reviews anymore. They’re invariably useless promotional crap

FabHK 9y ago

Reminds me of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

irl_zebra 9y ago
True. My team started targeting site availability since using that as a measure. Now my site uptime is four nines! About to tell them to cut it out.
WhoIsSatoshi 9y ago
When you see this start to happen to Bitcoin, that's when you sell and buy ethereum (or other secondary crypto!)
CM30 9y ago
See anything associated with SEO.

apinstein 9y ago

I am finding myself more and more suspicious of buying from Amazon. I have had issues with fake reviews, disclarity over the actual vendor/source of an item, particularly due to their mixed logistics system. It’s scary how many 1-Star reviews are clearly from people who’ve gotten a fake / different product than what’s listed. I am close to done with buying from Amazon.

GrumpyNl 9y ago

Give people power and it will be corrupted.

frabbit 9y ago

The fake-review problem was amusingly exposed for TripAdvisor by a journalist who with, the aid of five people, had his garden shed rated as five stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shed_at_Dulwich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shed_at_Dulwich At the end of the TRASHFUTURE podcast (14 Dec 2017 "The Shed Chronicles ft. Oobah Butler, ca. 36 minutes in http://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/feed/ http://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/feed/ ) people are still calling for what he describes as "frozen dinners with the sort of things that wankers like on them, like microherbs".

j-c-hewitt 9y ago

Amazon does do a lot to detect bribed reviews automatically. However, in the long run, this may be an arms race that Amazon will lose. One issue with detecting fakes with identical phrases is that many real reviewers will take phrases from the product description or from other peoples' reviews either consciously or unconsciously. This also matches up with a common bribed review technique of giving people canned phrases to repeat in their reviews or hundreds of prewritten reviews to be distributed out to people who are part of the review program. Top reviewers are also not a good brake on this process because the best way for them to profit from their reviews is to take bribes. Just going after people who only leave positive reviews also doesn't really work because smart reviewers salt their reviews with the occasional negative one (generally for people who aren't bribing them). User generated reviews emerged because many surveys across many different product categories have shown that shoppers tend to trust peer reviews more than they trust expert reviews. Part of this is because so many expert reviews have been corrupted to an even greater degree, with PR departments basically being bribery and party-throwing departments whose jobs are to manipulate journalists and place articles in supposedly unbiased publications. The issue from the seller side is that shoppers are absurd perfectionists. A product can go from a 4.24 star to a 4.26 star average and have its conversion rate double. The difference between 4 and 4.5 stars is the difference between losses on the product and profits in many competitive categories. Also many people just give 1 star reviews to products when they have minor nitpicks. That'd be fine if that 1 star review didn't tank a product average and suddenly mean the budget that was there for an employee suddenly isn't there anymore. In real terms the main difference in most categories between the reliably 4.5-5 star product and the 4 star product is that one seller spams harder than the other one. Considering that nice guys finish last in that particular competition, it rapidly becomes a triumph or the worst. Long-run what will happen is that the reaction against user reviews will be as severe as the reaction against critics has been. Part of this is also just a scale issue: with so many products and brands constantly popping up globally, there isn't enough time and editorial attention available to review everything.

defgeneric 9y ago
> smart reviewers salt their reviews with the occasional negative one (generally for people who aren't bribing them) This is exactly the problem with the "consumer protection" racket--companies like Consumer Affairs will curate a negative presentation of your company or product, then call you up offering a $2,500/month subscription which basically allows you to remove old negative reviews and prevent new ones from appearing on their site.

slackingoff2017 9y ago

The problem is massive. Most people haven't noticed yet but it's only a matter of time. Eventually everyone gets burned at least once and Amazon becomes the new ebay. They need to get a handle on their supply chain and stop outsourcing so much of their product listings to shady third party sellers. Shady third party sellers go hand-in-hand with fake reviews. Most reputable brands don't want to get their hands dirty with that stuff. It's guys making margin on reselling that have all the skin in the game and most of the incentive to manipulate the system. I've never gotten a fake from any brick and mortar or online merchant that sells direct. Only places I've gotten fakes and been duped by rampant fake reviews are eBay and Amazon. Once a competitor gets their shit together (I'm betting on Walmart) and has an equally convenient online store, Amazon will be the Myspace of online sales. People have loyatly to brands but not the company that sells them. If something better comes along I'll switch immediately just like I did years ago with ebay

emh68 9y ago
I've actually recently gotten a fake from Macys.com, so it seems to me that sites like Amazon and eBay are saturated with fakes, and the scammers are infiltrating supply chains in general. (They refused to accept the return, however, so I don't think the problem is that widespread, or maybe they're just not aware of the issue yet.) This might be brick & mortar's last laugh. How do you protect against fake merchandise? Don't worry about it, customers simply won't buy the obviously incorrect items, and you can identify and deal with them when you take inventory.
- astura 9y ago
  What was the product, if you don't mind sharing.
  - emh68 9y ago
    Clothing item. I received a really cheap item by the same manufacturer, with a tag jammed into it identifying it as the higher-priced item.
9y ago

bsg75 9y ago

How much of this problem would be eliminated if Amazon only allowed reviews from accounts that purchased that item?

slantyyz 9y ago
Zero. Because the workaround is that reviewers are asked to buy the products with their own money and then reimbursed via Paypal. Source: I used to do incentivized reviews but stopped after the rule changes. I still get asked to do the Paypal workaround. In fact, the old system was better. At least the incentivized review disclosures let you know to take a review with a grain of salt. Now, it's even shadier.

nbrempel 9y ago

I can say from personal experience that I used to seek out reviews on Amazon even when buying goods from a brick and mortar store. Now it’s almost the opposite. I’m hesitant to trust any reviews on the site and buy goods from other vendors whenever possible. It’s unfortunate; I hope they can implement some measures to prevent fraudulent reviews.

pogue 9y ago

I left this comment on the site's comment section (apologies if others have already posted these suggestions - I didn't read through all the comments): Try using fakespot.com or reviewmeta.com. They're both sites setup to try & check the validity of Amazon comments using different methodology - such as how many times a reviewer has left a review, certain trigger keywords known to be used by bots & how many reviews Amazon has deleted from a review by request of the merchant (yes, Amazon will do this!). This will leave you with a much better sense of whether or not a product has been 'review-bombed' or if the company is up to shady practices.

ecommerceguy 9y ago
To be clear, Amazon will remove reviews at merchant request when the review is about FBA shipping. Generally, these are bad reviews. A merchant would not want to remove a good review when the subject is shipping. "This came really fast!" 5 Stars is not a product review, however a merchant would not want to remove it. "The box was completely damaged and destroyed the product!!" 1 Star - will be removed by request if shipped via FBA. As with anything for selling on Amazon, they are not exactly consistent with this policy.
- pogue 9y ago
  Sorry, FBA = ?
  - j79 9y ago
    Fulfillment By Amazon

abiox 9y ago

fake reviews are an issue, but so are low-quality reviews. for example i've seen quite a few books with a modest handful of reviews have their stars tanked by some terrible bad-faith reviews by people who take an issue with the book that isn't directly about the quality or merit of the content. (this really shows up in political and philosophy areas.) this isn't the end of the world if i take the time to carefully survey reviews, but i just don't have time to give every book due process. few people really do. i really wish i had some way to ignore individual reviews as well as everything from a reviewer - 'ignore' meaning that the site discounts their contribution to scoring when rendered for me.

rdlecler1 9y ago

Amazon reviews system is broken. It seems to favor the cheapest functional product but not everyone wants to buy the cheapest thing. Sometimes they want the best quality item and it’s hard to interpolate this from the review system. Reviews really need to be weighted to the kinds of purchases people make. Someone buying the top of the line OLED TV is going to have a different set of preferences than someone who is buying a no-name 65” LCD.

grapeshot 9y ago
With TVs and computer parts it becomes impossible to read the reviews because they are merged with every other variation of that product from the same brand, with wildly different features and quality levels. Look up LG monitors or eVGA power supplies for instance.

diebir 9y ago

Could somebody explain the mechanism for creating "verified purchase" fake reviews? Somebody actually bothers to go through trouble of doing a purchase and creating a fake review? Anybody has any factual examples? Any pay for services that can be used? Seems like an area just waiting to be investigated by a media outlet...

naner 9y ago
As long as the item isn't prohibitively expensive the company paying for the review could just provide you the money to purchase the product.
- diebir 9y ago
  Is this really practical for small time items? Does this happen at scale, or there's some other mechanism to create fake reviews? Seems like the practice is widespread, all real purchases?

z3t4 9y ago

I try to do my purchase's based on scientific research methods. There needs to be benchmarks that you can use to compare the products. That is however problematic for some products, such as books. What's even worse then fake reviews is fake bad reviews where competitors give your products a low rating. If your first review ends up bad you are screwed, unless you get 100 good reviews to compensate.

sogen 9y ago

I rated a book poorly (1-2 stars). This book only had 3 reviews after one year since it was published. Crazily enough, after my review appeared, two days later this book had over TWELVE glowing reviews, all of them Five-stars ...

asdjasldkjkljd 9y ago

This is becoming a SEVERE problem for Amazon. My wife and I have been talking about cancelling our Prime account just because unless you're getting something from an obviously known manufacturer, the site is riddled with junk and counterfeits. With clothing it's annoying, but with electronics it can be outright dangerous because there are a lot of falsely certified products. I bought a cheap outdoor LED fixture thinking at worst it would just be a bright LED in a cheap housing... it was manufactured so poorly that it didn't work out of the box, and upon investigation bare wires were exposed within and arcing. It was some of the sloppiest soldering I've ever seen.

shahbaby 9y ago

Recently I've avoided buying certain things just because I didn't want to put in the time to do my own research on it. I would rather not buy it than take the risk of getting ripped off buy a fake review. Some things are worth the money but not the time.

ashman5 9y ago

An even bigger problem they have is with the fake 2 Day shipping. Tried to order a Prime 2 Day shipping item today (Sat 12/16) and delivery was 2 day guaranteed for Thursday 12/21. And recently, I'm getting zero weekend delivery. Oddly, recent Ebay orders were delivered on Sunday.

seanwilson 9y ago

Do any companies offer you some kind of incentive to write reviews or rate all the products you bought? I would have thought some variation of this would be a good way to drown out fake reviews. Maybe this is too expensive to do well.

intopieces 9y ago

Amazon's solution to fake reviews is Amazon Basics, a "verified good" version of whatever you were looking for. Thus, they have little incentive to combat fake reviews for products not directly sold by them, since that bad experience, they hope, will cause you to run back to them for the product next time. They also get to avoid being called a monopoly by selling products of various qualities and from various sellers.

doglet 9y ago
Interestingly, Amazon might have a secondary payoff here: they actually get some good ground truth (honest review data) since these reviews - at least the positive ones - aren't tainted by the same incentives.

zherbert 9y ago

The key is to never buy from an FBA seller. Only buy from Amazon.com as the seller.

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KeepTalking 9y ago

Fake reviews? I received a firkin fake Bose QC-35 II Headphone! Check out the fake product and read the reviews, and this listing is still active even after Amazon verified and refunded me the cost of the product. https://www.amazon.com/Bose-QuietComfort-headphones-Bluetooth-NFC-Black/dp/B01L92BERK#customerReviews https://www.amazon.com/Bose-QuietComfort-headphones-Bluetoot... Infact one of the reviewers did a detail comparison between the fake product and the real QC-35.

hippich 9y ago
This is very different issue. Amazon, unlike eBay, has single product page for product. And multiple sellers can sell under that page. Including sellers of counterfeit. This does not make original product bad (so reviews are incorrect) - but rather seller should be reported. Granted - that concept is very complicated for typical amazon shopper and that's how you end up with bunch of "fake" 1-star reviews under brand-names products...
- emh68 9y ago
  That isn't the issue mentioned by OP.

phantom0308 9y ago

Anecdotally, on WeChat 微信, top Chinese social media app, I know some friends have received solicitations for good reviews in exchange for free goods.

megaman22 9y ago

Friend of mine hada huge problem with this recently https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-24/amazon-merchants-still-find-new-ways-to-cheat-in-shopping-frenzy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-24/amazon-me...

dheera 9y ago

For me, I only look at a review if it states at least one or two non-trivial negative aspects of the product. That alone weeds out a lot of fake reviews. Most honest reviews are never 100% positive.

alok-g 9y ago
Yes. Even if it mentions some "non-trivial" positive aspects, it still helps.

Nition 9y ago

The fake review problem is clearly bad, but if it's going to take some fancy machine learning algorithm to solve it, why not start with a simpler improvement to user reviews: Weighting the Top Rated scores so it doesn't show an item with a single 5-star review above an item with 5000 reviews and a 4.9 star average.

EvilTerran 9y ago
Amen to that. It's a solved problem in statistics, too: https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...

barking 9y ago

I was surprised to see that possibly the best vb6 book ever written, which has 96 reviews on amazon.com, is scored an F by fakespot https://www.fakespot.com/product/programming-microsoft-visual-basic-6-0-80322ea5-2da7-410c-9777-704d5f97695a https://www.fakespot.com/product/programming-microsoft-visua...

jasonlotito 9y ago
I searched a few more well known and popular books (ones that HN would recommend) and they all come back with nothing better than a C. This doesn't instill much confidence in me.

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ouid 9y ago

They don't try to solve this problem at all. I was looking for a cheap macbook charger, and ran across two very different products with identical reviews, spelling mistakes and all. I'm sure this is common, even. How hard would it be to automatically detect this behavior?

jasonlotito 9y ago

Amazon allows people known to sell reviews for money or product into their special review program (I forget what it's called, but it highlights someone as a good reviewer). I know this because a family member got caught and effectively nothing happened.

intrasight 9y ago

This old phrase is still relevant today: "caveat emptor"

davidgerard 9y ago

Fakespot is not so great. It assumes anyone who doesn't have multiple reviews is a bot, which is not a great heuristic in practice.

Chattered 9y ago

It's not the same 23 word sentence. It's the same 23 word run-on. The first comma should be either a semi-colon, colon or stop.

Chattered 9y ago
Point being that plagiarism/copying might be easier to spot via mistakes. I understand that this is how scholars do it for ancient texts.
- doglet 9y ago
  In other words, repetition of the same mistakes implies higher probability of copying

rebootthesystem 9y ago

Amazon has the power to fix this. They don't seem to care. Simple logic and heuristics would be enough. Amazon allows anyone to post a review. You don't even have to buy the product. That is fundamentally wrong. That's the first easy step: If you did not buy the product on Amazon you cannot post a review. Amazon allows people who receive deep discounts to post reviews. That is ripe for manipulation. And so, the second filter is simple: If someone doesn't pay at least N%, say 50%, for a product they don't get to post a review. Amazon allows people to post a review at any time, even before the product ships. You can post a review for toothpaste before you actually use it. The third filter would include a variable purchase-to-review period. The length of this period is different depending on the type of product. Maybe someone who buys a USB cable can post a review a couple of weeks after actually receiving it --but not sooner. Someone buying weight loss pills might need to wait 60 days. In other words, introduce some common sense into a process that would only allow actual retail buyers of a product to experience the product for a reasonable amount of time before allowing them to post a review, positive or negative. It goes beyond that. Negative reviews need to be routed to the vendor before they appear publicly on Amazon. Why? Amazon needs to give vendors a first shot at solving the problem. The current system is moronic. People can give a USB cable a bad review because they don't like the color. The thing might work just fine but the person wanted a different shade of green and can give the product a 1 star review. This is nonsense. In general terms, Amazon reviews, due to Amazon's own incompetence, are pretty much worthless these days.

soverance 9y ago

Fake reviews on Amazon (or internet e-commerce sites at large) is a significant problem. I have had a previous employer use my personal information to manually create and post fake reviews of his own products under my name. Nothing surprises me anymore. I only found out because I received a notification email asking me to confirm my review (which I had not written). Needless to say, I quit.