7 ms·

How Scammers in China Manipulate Amazon [video]

181 points by juokaz 8y ago

majortennis 8y ago
WSJ has a paywall. Anyone got a pastebin of the content?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mkspcd 8y ago
  Just replace 'wsj' by 'fullwsj' in the URL to access the content. EDIT : see below for what it actually does. :)
  - jwilk 8y ago
    It doesn't just "change the referer". It redirects you to Facebook, which redirects you back to WSJ. If you don't want Facebook to know which articles you read, there are web extensions to fake the referer. I'm using https://github.com/JoaoAparicio/read-ft-wsj https://github.com/JoaoAparicio/read-ft-wsj .
    - mkspcd 8y ago
      OK, thanks for the explanation. I didn't look into it in detail, my mistake.
  - bartcobain 8y ago
    Can something like this be done for Medium?
- eyeareque 8y ago
  Pay walled links should not be allowed here.
  - throwawaysea 8y ago
    Why? Some of the best content out there is supported by subscriptions and deserves discussion as well as financial support.
    - eyeareque 8y ago
      That’s fine, but if it’s not publicly accessible don’t advertise the pay for entry content, the masses can’t view it without waiting for someone to post a workaround link. I would be fine with this if the link was to working content (the workaround link).
  - floatingatoll 8y ago
    The mods generally seem to disagree. You might email the site operators using the Contact link below, as discussing here won’t have any impact on general site policy.
  - dang 8y ago
    If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20paywall https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- jwilk 8y ago
  https://archive.is/3VGLm https://archive.is/3VGLm , but there's isn't much content beyond the video. You should be able to download the video with youtube-dl.
- wetpaws 8y ago
  Obligatory outline link: https://outline.com/k4V2Gt https://outline.com/k4V2Gt
kitcar 8y ago
Also see this podcast from reply all: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124 https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124
alex_hitchins 8y ago
I know it is off topic, but has anyone else looked at the source for that site? I know I'm old school, but really? It's quite absurd the actual content to payload ratio.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Any newspaper site will be the same or worse.
  - alex_hitchins 8y ago
    I agree, they are all very much the same. I just find it a sorry state of affairs.
medmunds 8y ago
[video]
- dang 8y ago
  Thanks—added.
segfaultbuserr 8y ago
This article talks about the fraudulent practices by the vendors. But this title made me think of the fraudulent practices by the buyers. It's a well-known problem in China, a small percentage of scammers will always try to abuse the system to its knees, as a result, vendors are forced to end their favorable policies (e.g. RMA), effectively causing a Denial-of-Service of convenient and high-quality services to the majority, legitimate customers. It is not limited to vendors, customer, but also widespread in the public services and financial sector. I think this is called a "low-trust society". I believe having a system based on trust can be a viable solution. Unfortunately, this type proposal has been intentionally scaled-up by the government, leads to the upcoming "social credit system", based on mass surveillance. And I think nowadays this approach as a solution is a dead-end, any similar system proposed by a government or a corporation will eventually become a mass surveillance system. Even the """relatively""" harmless financial credit system seems to go out of control, and a more concerning issue is that, unlike the Anti-Encryption Bill, a trust-based system can be legitimate, and solves real, severe problems, making it harder to argue against mass surveillance systems in disguise of trust and credit.
- Gustomaximus 8y ago
  > I believe having a system based on trust can be a viable solution. Whats that mean? Something between existing rating systems and "social credit system"??
  - mikestew 8y ago
    I'm not OP, but here's what I thought about when I read that, and pardon me while I don my old man cap and reminisce about how much better it used to be. Used to be I'd buy something at a store, use it for a week, it breaks and I head back to the shop and say, "Hey, this broke and it's brand-new." The proprietor would apologize and get me a new one. As years went on, people started cheating the system a little: take stuff back to shops where they didn't originally purchase it. Okay, now we need a receipt for returns. Save the receipt, no big deal. But a little bit of trust was lost there. Shop keeper assumed that if you're returning it, you must have purchased it there, but that's no longer a safe assumption. Save your receipt. REI and L. L. Bean, as two examples, would warrant their stuff for life even if the manufacturer didn't. If you thought a pair of boots should have lasted three years instead of two, take/send 'em back and get new ones. But then people started going skiing on new skis and returning them on Monday. Or (again) returning stuff that REI sells, but wasn't purchased there. Now REI and L. L. Bean don't do that anymore. From the seller's end, I present rebates that they have no intention of honoring if at all possible. 'nuf said on that side. And so on, until today where I feel like I'm in a never-ending loop of that scene from The Big Short: I'll do the deal, but you have to tell me how you're going to fuck me. Because shopping online in many respects makes me feel the need constantly look over my virtual shoulder. Trust is completely gone. Amazon, as a simplistic example, just takes a bunch of shit of varying quality, tosses it all in the same bin with a single label, and it's up to you to figure out which is the genuine lightning cable and which one will burn your house down. In summary, my view of a trust-based system is that I can assume what you're selling is what you say it is, and I the customer will not try and game whatever customer-oriented system you have in place.
cs702 8y ago
The video is must-watch for those who are unfamiliar with the many ways in which shady vendors game Amazon's systems to scam customers. Speaking as a longtime Amazon customer: * I do feel the authenticity of products in some categories can no longer be taken for granted on Amazon. For example, if I search for electronics, the search results look like "a sea of endless crap," full of the kinds of products you might find at a counterfit-goods store in a shady part of town. * Product search no longer works as well as it did in the past for me. Frequently, I find myself having to invest time and effort to identify which items are of decent or good quality in that "sea of endless crap." I find myself having to click on results and scan descriptions to find products that are sold "by Amazon" instead of third parties, to minimize worry. * Product reviews and ratings no longer seem trustworthy. It's not just that there are large operations cranking out fake reviews every day,[a] but that I often find it time-consuming to sort out which reviews are true versus fake. Fake reviewers seem to be getting better and better at fooling human beings. Over the past year, I've started going to local "brick and mortar" retailers like Best Buy more and more, because I find they provide a better-curated shopping experience. There are fewer products from which to choose, but I feel more certain that they're authentic and of known quality. I'm hoping Amazon will address all these issues... soon. [a] For example, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18262101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18262101
- stupidbird 8y ago
  I'm at the point now where I've gone from trusting a review consensus to seeking an individual reviewer on a product that seems thorough and reliable. My favorite example might be trying to find outdoor solar-powered lights. Mountains of garbage, with a lot of sellers just re-branding the same garbage. The silver-lining is that there are power-reviewers out there doing complete tear-downs and reviewing wiring/soldering quality. These people are the true heroes.
  - notus 8y ago
    Do any of these people have their own sites for these reviews? The problem is that they are getting buried on Amazon, but I would still like to read them.
_nickwhite 8y ago
Since I haven't seen it posted yet, an invaluable tool for sifting through fake vs real Amazon reviews is fakespot.com. They use AI to score every product and crawl an item's review tree (reviews left by the same people for other products) to verify the authenticity of individual reviewers. I've sifted out a lot of shady products AND sellers using this. (I'm not affiliated in any way with them.)
- jacobtwotwo 8y ago
  I've been using this for a good part of the last year and it's definitely helped me dodge a few bullets that were in my cart. I would love if the creator made a browser add-on.
- jeron 8y ago
  if Amazon doesn't want to address this issue by fixing its reviews, it should just acquire/incorporate Fakespot itself
  - tachyonbeam 8y ago
    It seems to me like one of the basic things Amazon should do is... Only allow reviews from people who have actually bought the product, and had time to receive it in the mail. I know, what a mind boggling concept. This reminds me of the hateful comments that plague YouTube. Most of them come from accounts that only ever post hate comments. Would it be so fucking hard to write a heuristic that tags users constantly getting their comments downvoted so that someone can review them? Then, if they fail the review, you mute them for 6 months, delete all their comments, but let them think their comments are still visible. Maybe let all the haters see each other's comments and reply to one another so they can live in their own parallel universe of hate. These problems are not hard to solve. There is a lack of will to solve them.
    - oflannabhra 8y ago
      Amazon actually marks such reviews as "Verified Purchase". The issue is that the upside of a good review is typically worth more to a vendor than the cost of the product. Vendors typically will pay above the cost of their product for a single good review.
oflannabhra 8y ago
For as much as Bezos bangs the "Customer Obsession" drum, I'm beginning to doubt any serious product managers have used Amazon in the past few years to actually buy any simple, everyday items. I've had the following experience for several device categories: (electronics, tools & hardware, 3rd party phone cases, etc) 1) Search Amazon with a description (ie, "Qi wireless charging stand"[0]) 2) Results are full of clearly duplicated products whose only difference is the screen printed brand. Sometimes, the Amazon tag of "Amazon's Choice" or "Best Seller" is applied multiple times on the first page, as a re-brander has taken over a subcategory that is irrelevant (eg, "Sports-Tennis Equipment"). These results also have ads injected and sometimes even totally irrelevant categories, deals, etc injected, further confusing the layout. 3) Look at several products pages and am unable to distinguish the differences or advantages of any. Obviously, most of these products are manufactured in a handful of OEM factories in China. The brands typically do not match the "sold by" section of the product page, either, further confusing me. 4) Scroll down to reviews. These are essentially worthless as they have been gamed to irrelevance. I mostly come down here to see if some angel who genuinely bought the product for their own use decided to write a review, with pictures. Even these can't be trusted now, though. 5) Check a review rating site, such as Fakespot, although I generally don't know what to do regardless of score, besides keep looking. (That is, a good review typically won't instill enough trust to flip me to "Buy it"). 6) Go to Google and search from there. Results are sometimes better, but not always. I'll check several results. 7) Look at the Wirecutter to see if they address the category. Just buy whatever they recommend if so. 8) Go to a specific community for recommendations. This would be a subreddit, looking through a trusted Twitter user, forums, etc. Now, I mostly skip all this, and my default behavior is to not trust anything on Amazon's website, and either start my search elsewhere, or buy whatever is cheapest and save my time. I used to go to Amazon to save time, but now I'd almost prefer going to Walmart and buying whatever option they have. [0] - https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Qi+wireless+charging+stand https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3...
wonthegame 8y ago
I worked at a place that was the only seller of a popular product yet it was sold on my countries amazon. They were about 25% off retail price too. They used pictures of genuine packaging and genuine items. I’m not so sure that they sent the customers the real things though.
bitshiffed 8y ago
I wish Amazon had a better system for reporting these things, that is, if they cared about the problem enough to implement one. If you contact support they will take your reports of specific items; but will act on those exact things reported only, and not bother to dig any deeper (at least, it appears that way). This time of year the fake reviews are especially bad as well. For example, if you go to something like the Electronics › Camera & Photo › Video › Camcorders category, every top rated item is padded with, or only contains, fake reviews. They have hundreds of non-verified five star reviews all occurring on a single day. On a few items you can see where there's a whole series of padded reviews, than a few bad, real, reviews from the people that fell for it, than a later series of fake reviews to re-up the score and bury the real ones. Many of the fake reviews are painfully obvious too, like they know they don't even need to try to hide it. You can view a users review history by clicking their name on the review. If you follow most of these fake accounts, all of the activity they have is unverified 5-star reviews for questionable products coming all within a sequence of a few days. If Amazon is using some internal/automated system to detect these things, it does a fairly horrible job. My guess is its not much of a priority for them though.
edoo 8y ago
I use a service that checks the reviews on every Amazon item I'm going to buy and reject any products with gamed reviews. In a different tangent I found myself disgusted with AliExpress lately when every listing I was looking at had semi-related bait items for higher listing position when sorting by price. Amazon isn't that bad yet.
insickness 8y ago
I use fakespot.com to try to suss out which reviews are reliable. But it's difficult to tell if Fakespot can be trusted.
wdn 8y ago
I stopped trusting Amazon's review and stop buying unfamiliar brands. I have seen too many "Amazon's choice" products with few hundreds reviews, all 5 stars, but the problem with these products are they were just listed a day ago and already got 400 or 500 five stars reviews. Looking at the review, they were all put on the same day and time. These 500 fives stars review push the product to the top of the search. Yet, Amazon did nothing about it as long as the products sell. I sell only Amazon and I am telling you, I get a product review under 1% of the sales.
beebmam 8y ago
I refuse to purchase anything made in China from Amazon anymore. I've bought one too many extremely shitty (and dangerous) products from Amazon for me to get bitten again.
dqpb 8y ago
Why isn't the origin of a product a filter option on Amazon?
peterwwillis 8y ago
Recently I was looking for a charger for my Lenovo laptop. On product listings from Lenovo's official account, I found reviews talking about receiving an unbranded chinese knock-off (not a Lenovo OEM product). I'd rather pay more money on some other site to at least get the product I intended to buy.
bob_theslob646 8y ago
The question that no one in the thread is addressing is Amazon's thirst for growth. By not developing a close to foolproof protocol for detecting and eliminating 'spam' (i.e fake products), this incentives the sellers to keep doing what they are doing. I am not saying that this is not an easy problem. It is an incredibly difficult problem, but what has made Amazon super successful in the past, is figuring out incredibly difficult problems. Maybe I am being impatient, but this problem has persisted for quite a long time. Their are ads everywhere. I just speak for myself, but having to spend close to an hour sifting out what is a fake review and what is not, does not encourage trust from me. I would be really interested what the customer retention is like for people who have received fake products.
josefresco 8y ago
Shout out to https://reviewmeta.com https://reviewmeta.com - A service I recently discovered (maybe here!) and have been using for our holiday shopping needs. My wife now uses it and was horrified at how shady most reviews are. Note: I have no affiliation with the company.
mattbeckman 8y ago
Anyone currently working on replacing product SKUs with public keys and verification process on the last hop where only the manufacturer can verify that a product is brand new? That has blockchain all over it.
zachguo 8y ago
Take a look at Chinese e-commerce sites and learn how they deal with frauds, they have been dealing with these for more than 10 years. In terms of technology, one can use machine learning for fraud detection. In terms of business operation, they have dedicated e-commerce site for official sellers, and there are several sites aiming up middle class market where products are curated and QCed by the sites.(sort of higher end Amazon Basics)

181 points by juokaz 8y ago

majortennis 8y ago

WSJ has a paywall. Anyone got a pastebin of the content?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mkspcd 8y ago
Just replace 'wsj' by 'fullwsj' in the URL to access the content. EDIT : see below for what it actually does. :)
- jwilk 8y ago
  It doesn't just "change the referer". It redirects you to Facebook, which redirects you back to WSJ. If you don't want Facebook to know which articles you read, there are web extensions to fake the referer. I'm using https://github.com/JoaoAparicio/read-ft-wsj https://github.com/JoaoAparicio/read-ft-wsj .
  - mkspcd 8y ago
    OK, thanks for the explanation. I didn't look into it in detail, my mistake.
- bartcobain 8y ago
  Can something like this be done for Medium?
eyeareque 8y ago
Pay walled links should not be allowed here.
- throwawaysea 8y ago
  Why? Some of the best content out there is supported by subscriptions and deserves discussion as well as financial support.
  - eyeareque 8y ago
    That’s fine, but if it’s not publicly accessible don’t advertise the pay for entry content, the masses can’t view it without waiting for someone to post a workaround link. I would be fine with this if the link was to working content (the workaround link).
- floatingatoll 8y ago
  The mods generally seem to disagree. You might email the site operators using the Contact link below, as discussing here won’t have any impact on general site policy.
- dang 8y ago
  If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20paywall https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
jwilk 8y ago
https://archive.is/3VGLm https://archive.is/3VGLm , but there's isn't much content beyond the video. You should be able to download the video with youtube-dl.
wetpaws 8y ago
Obligatory outline link: https://outline.com/k4V2Gt https://outline.com/k4V2Gt

kitcar 8y ago

Also see this podcast from reply all: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124 https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124

alex_hitchins 8y ago

I know it is off topic, but has anyone else looked at the source for that site? I know I'm old school, but really? It's quite absurd the actual content to payload ratio.

ams6110 8y ago
Any newspaper site will be the same or worse.
- alex_hitchins 8y ago
  I agree, they are all very much the same. I just find it a sorry state of affairs.

medmunds 8y ago

[video]

dang 8y ago
Thanks—added.

segfaultbuserr 8y ago

This article talks about the fraudulent practices by the vendors. But this title made me think of the fraudulent practices by the buyers. It's a well-known problem in China, a small percentage of scammers will always try to abuse the system to its knees, as a result, vendors are forced to end their favorable policies (e.g. RMA), effectively causing a Denial-of-Service of convenient and high-quality services to the majority, legitimate customers. It is not limited to vendors, customer, but also widespread in the public services and financial sector. I think this is called a "low-trust society". I believe having a system based on trust can be a viable solution. Unfortunately, this type proposal has been intentionally scaled-up by the government, leads to the upcoming "social credit system", based on mass surveillance. And I think nowadays this approach as a solution is a dead-end, any similar system proposed by a government or a corporation will eventually become a mass surveillance system. Even the """relatively""" harmless financial credit system seems to go out of control, and a more concerning issue is that, unlike the Anti-Encryption Bill, a trust-based system can be legitimate, and solves real, severe problems, making it harder to argue against mass surveillance systems in disguise of trust and credit.

Gustomaximus 8y ago
> I believe having a system based on trust can be a viable solution. Whats that mean? Something between existing rating systems and "social credit system"??
- mikestew 8y ago
  I'm not OP, but here's what I thought about when I read that, and pardon me while I don my old man cap and reminisce about how much better it used to be. Used to be I'd buy something at a store, use it for a week, it breaks and I head back to the shop and say, "Hey, this broke and it's brand-new." The proprietor would apologize and get me a new one. As years went on, people started cheating the system a little: take stuff back to shops where they didn't originally purchase it. Okay, now we need a receipt for returns. Save the receipt, no big deal. But a little bit of trust was lost there. Shop keeper assumed that if you're returning it, you must have purchased it there, but that's no longer a safe assumption. Save your receipt. REI and L. L. Bean, as two examples, would warrant their stuff for life even if the manufacturer didn't. If you thought a pair of boots should have lasted three years instead of two, take/send 'em back and get new ones. But then people started going skiing on new skis and returning them on Monday. Or (again) returning stuff that REI sells, but wasn't purchased there. Now REI and L. L. Bean don't do that anymore. From the seller's end, I present rebates that they have no intention of honoring if at all possible. 'nuf said on that side. And so on, until today where I feel like I'm in a never-ending loop of that scene from The Big Short: I'll do the deal, but you have to tell me how you're going to fuck me. Because shopping online in many respects makes me feel the need constantly look over my virtual shoulder. Trust is completely gone. Amazon, as a simplistic example, just takes a bunch of shit of varying quality, tosses it all in the same bin with a single label, and it's up to you to figure out which is the genuine lightning cable and which one will burn your house down. In summary, my view of a trust-based system is that I can assume what you're selling is what you say it is, and I the customer will not try and game whatever customer-oriented system you have in place.

cs702 8y ago

The video is must-watch for those who are unfamiliar with the many ways in which shady vendors game Amazon's systems to scam customers. Speaking as a longtime Amazon customer: * I do feel the authenticity of products in some categories can no longer be taken for granted on Amazon. For example, if I search for electronics, the search results look like "a sea of endless crap," full of the kinds of products you might find at a counterfit-goods store in a shady part of town. * Product search no longer works as well as it did in the past for me. Frequently, I find myself having to invest time and effort to identify which items are of decent or good quality in that "sea of endless crap." I find myself having to click on results and scan descriptions to find products that are sold "by Amazon" instead of third parties, to minimize worry. * Product reviews and ratings no longer seem trustworthy. It's not just that there are large operations cranking out fake reviews every day,[a] but that I often find it time-consuming to sort out which reviews are true versus fake. Fake reviewers seem to be getting better and better at fooling human beings. Over the past year, I've started going to local "brick and mortar" retailers like Best Buy more and more, because I find they provide a better-curated shopping experience. There are fewer products from which to choose, but I feel more certain that they're authentic and of known quality. I'm hoping Amazon will address all these issues... soon. [a] For example, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18262101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18262101

stupidbird 8y ago
I'm at the point now where I've gone from trusting a review consensus to seeking an individual reviewer on a product that seems thorough and reliable. My favorite example might be trying to find outdoor solar-powered lights. Mountains of garbage, with a lot of sellers just re-branding the same garbage. The silver-lining is that there are power-reviewers out there doing complete tear-downs and reviewing wiring/soldering quality. These people are the true heroes.
- notus 8y ago
  Do any of these people have their own sites for these reviews? The problem is that they are getting buried on Amazon, but I would still like to read them.

_nickwhite 8y ago

Since I haven't seen it posted yet, an invaluable tool for sifting through fake vs real Amazon reviews is fakespot.com. They use AI to score every product and crawl an item's review tree (reviews left by the same people for other products) to verify the authenticity of individual reviewers. I've sifted out a lot of shady products AND sellers using this. (I'm not affiliated in any way with them.)

jacobtwotwo 8y ago
I've been using this for a good part of the last year and it's definitely helped me dodge a few bullets that were in my cart. I would love if the creator made a browser add-on.
jeron 8y ago
if Amazon doesn't want to address this issue by fixing its reviews, it should just acquire/incorporate Fakespot itself
- tachyonbeam 8y ago
  It seems to me like one of the basic things Amazon should do is... Only allow reviews from people who have actually bought the product, and had time to receive it in the mail. I know, what a mind boggling concept. This reminds me of the hateful comments that plague YouTube. Most of them come from accounts that only ever post hate comments. Would it be so fucking hard to write a heuristic that tags users constantly getting their comments downvoted so that someone can review them? Then, if they fail the review, you mute them for 6 months, delete all their comments, but let them think their comments are still visible. Maybe let all the haters see each other's comments and reply to one another so they can live in their own parallel universe of hate. These problems are not hard to solve. There is a lack of will to solve them.
  - oflannabhra 8y ago
    Amazon actually marks such reviews as "Verified Purchase". The issue is that the upside of a good review is typically worth more to a vendor than the cost of the product. Vendors typically will pay above the cost of their product for a single good review.

oflannabhra 8y ago

For as much as Bezos bangs the "Customer Obsession" drum, I'm beginning to doubt any serious product managers have used Amazon in the past few years to actually buy any simple, everyday items. I've had the following experience for several device categories: (electronics, tools & hardware, 3rd party phone cases, etc) 1) Search Amazon with a description (ie, "Qi wireless charging stand"[0]) 2) Results are full of clearly duplicated products whose only difference is the screen printed brand. Sometimes, the Amazon tag of "Amazon's Choice" or "Best Seller" is applied multiple times on the first page, as a re-brander has taken over a subcategory that is irrelevant (eg, "Sports-Tennis Equipment"). These results also have ads injected and sometimes even totally irrelevant categories, deals, etc injected, further confusing the layout. 3) Look at several products pages and am unable to distinguish the differences or advantages of any. Obviously, most of these products are manufactured in a handful of OEM factories in China. The brands typically do not match the "sold by" section of the product page, either, further confusing me. 4) Scroll down to reviews. These are essentially worthless as they have been gamed to irrelevance. I mostly come down here to see if some angel who genuinely bought the product for their own use decided to write a review, with pictures. Even these can't be trusted now, though. 5) Check a review rating site, such as Fakespot, although I generally don't know what to do regardless of score, besides keep looking. (That is, a good review typically won't instill enough trust to flip me to "Buy it"). 6) Go to Google and search from there. Results are sometimes better, but not always. I'll check several results. 7) Look at the Wirecutter to see if they address the category. Just buy whatever they recommend if so. 8) Go to a specific community for recommendations. This would be a subreddit, looking through a trusted Twitter user, forums, etc. Now, I mostly skip all this, and my default behavior is to not trust anything on Amazon's website, and either start my search elsewhere, or buy whatever is cheapest and save my time. I used to go to Amazon to save time, but now I'd almost prefer going to Walmart and buying whatever option they have. [0] - https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Qi+wireless+charging+stand https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3...

wonthegame 8y ago

I worked at a place that was the only seller of a popular product yet it was sold on my countries amazon. They were about 25% off retail price too. They used pictures of genuine packaging and genuine items. I’m not so sure that they sent the customers the real things though.

bitshiffed 8y ago

I wish Amazon had a better system for reporting these things, that is, if they cared about the problem enough to implement one. If you contact support they will take your reports of specific items; but will act on those exact things reported only, and not bother to dig any deeper (at least, it appears that way). This time of year the fake reviews are especially bad as well. For example, if you go to something like the Electronics › Camera & Photo › Video › Camcorders category, every top rated item is padded with, or only contains, fake reviews. They have hundreds of non-verified five star reviews all occurring on a single day. On a few items you can see where there's a whole series of padded reviews, than a few bad, real, reviews from the people that fell for it, than a later series of fake reviews to re-up the score and bury the real ones. Many of the fake reviews are painfully obvious too, like they know they don't even need to try to hide it. You can view a users review history by clicking their name on the review. If you follow most of these fake accounts, all of the activity they have is unverified 5-star reviews for questionable products coming all within a sequence of a few days. If Amazon is using some internal/automated system to detect these things, it does a fairly horrible job. My guess is its not much of a priority for them though.

edoo 8y ago

I use a service that checks the reviews on every Amazon item I'm going to buy and reject any products with gamed reviews. In a different tangent I found myself disgusted with AliExpress lately when every listing I was looking at had semi-related bait items for higher listing position when sorting by price. Amazon isn't that bad yet.

insickness 8y ago

I use fakespot.com to try to suss out which reviews are reliable. But it's difficult to tell if Fakespot can be trusted.

wdn 8y ago

I stopped trusting Amazon's review and stop buying unfamiliar brands. I have seen too many "Amazon's choice" products with few hundreds reviews, all 5 stars, but the problem with these products are they were just listed a day ago and already got 400 or 500 five stars reviews. Looking at the review, they were all put on the same day and time. These 500 fives stars review push the product to the top of the search. Yet, Amazon did nothing about it as long as the products sell. I sell only Amazon and I am telling you, I get a product review under 1% of the sales.

beebmam 8y ago

I refuse to purchase anything made in China from Amazon anymore. I've bought one too many extremely shitty (and dangerous) products from Amazon for me to get bitten again.

dqpb 8y ago

Why isn't the origin of a product a filter option on Amazon?

peterwwillis 8y ago

Recently I was looking for a charger for my Lenovo laptop. On product listings from Lenovo's official account, I found reviews talking about receiving an unbranded chinese knock-off (not a Lenovo OEM product). I'd rather pay more money on some other site to at least get the product I intended to buy.

bob_theslob646 8y ago

The question that no one in the thread is addressing is Amazon's thirst for growth. By not developing a close to foolproof protocol for detecting and eliminating 'spam' (i.e fake products), this incentives the sellers to keep doing what they are doing. I am not saying that this is not an easy problem. It is an incredibly difficult problem, but what has made Amazon super successful in the past, is figuring out incredibly difficult problems. Maybe I am being impatient, but this problem has persisted for quite a long time. Their are ads everywhere. I just speak for myself, but having to spend close to an hour sifting out what is a fake review and what is not, does not encourage trust from me. I would be really interested what the customer retention is like for people who have received fake products.

josefresco 8y ago

Shout out to https://reviewmeta.com https://reviewmeta.com - A service I recently discovered (maybe here!) and have been using for our holiday shopping needs. My wife now uses it and was horrified at how shady most reviews are. Note: I have no affiliation with the company.

mattbeckman 8y ago

Anyone currently working on replacing product SKUs with public keys and verification process on the last hop where only the manufacturer can verify that a product is brand new? That has blockchain all over it.

zachguo 8y ago

Take a look at Chinese e-commerce sites and learn how they deal with frauds, they have been dealing with these for more than 10 years. In terms of technology, one can use machine learning for fraud detection. In terms of business operation, they have dedicated e-commerce site for official sellers, and there are several sites aiming up middle class market where products are curated and QCed by the sites.(sort of higher end Amazon Basics)