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There are so many fake reviews on Amazon that the "average" stars for a product are no longer reliable indicators of quality. Especially for cheap electronics (

There are so many fake reviews on Amazon that the "average" stars for a product are no longer reliable indicators of quality. Especially for cheap electronics (read: headphones), products that have only been listed for a month somehow have hundreds of 5 star glowing reviews. When I do research nowadays I have to deliberately select the 1 star reviews to see if there is a real issue that's glossed over by the paid reviews.

xfitm3 8y ago
I always search for negative information first. When using a search engine for a product I always append "sucks", "broken", etc. Generally speaking three star reviews are the most informative to me.
- smt88 8y ago
  Sellers know people do this and plant fake, negative reviews on competitors at the same time they give themselves good reviews. I noticed this once when repurchasing a space heater I'd bought multiple times in the past. Several reviews mentioned the temperature sensor failing, but this particular heater had no temperature sensor. That isn't the only product I've seen with suspicious bad reviews, and I've read pieces of investigative journalism that confirm it's fairly widespread.
- Rapzid 8y ago
  "Sucks" is one of the true casualties of today's PC climate. Used to be you could get all sorts of great opposing opinions with that search keyword, particularly in IT. Sure, it's around here in there. But back in the day if you were going to write about why you didn't like something, you were going to write an article about why it "sucks".
  - xfitm3 8y ago
    That sucks.
president 8y ago
Even the 1 star negative reviews are faked. Sellers pay users to leave negative reviews to competitors. EDIT: Funny how completely broken and anti-customer the Amazon review system is given that the #1 leadership principle at Amazon [1] is the following: "Customer Obsession - Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers." Just goes to show how these things are always BS. [1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/our-leadership-principles https://www.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/our-leadership...
- hombre_fatal 8y ago
  If I were inflating my rating with 5-star reviews, I'd also want some 1-star reviews to complain about inconsequential things like "the coffee machine's cord was only 5 meters long" or "it was a bit louder than I expected, waking me up more than I wanted during my morning routine."
  - CamelCaseName 8y ago
    No you wouldn't. 1 star reviews will tank your average star rating and increase your NCX, which are far more important than the off chance someone reads your negative reviews closely. Unless you're selling 20 dollar bills for $5, you'll naturally get negative reviews. I've had to pull several products off Amazon because someone left an early, nonsense review that killed sales. (E.g. "Fast and easy" - 2 stars or "Works perfectly. Thanks!" - 1 star)
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- vanzorn 8y ago
  Perhaps their definition of their customer has evolved to focus on resellers/manufacturers, and we, the public consumers, are simply a crop to be farmed?
  - 8y ago
duskwuff 8y ago
Or reviews that were transferred over from other products. Here's a case in point: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MH9HPTR https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MH9HPTR Over 3000 reviews... most of them for products completely unrelated to the one on sale. I see reviews for a bicycle lamp, a phone screen protector, and a voltage converter. This seems like a bug. Surely Amazon shouldn't allow sellers to transfer product reviews over from other products?
- organsnyder 8y ago
  They're abusing the "color" parameter to be multiple products instead. It's astounding that Amazon has yet to actively prohibit this.
  - toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
    Nothing about Amazon’s abuse of their customers surprises me anymore. Their “Amazon’s Recommemdation” is a joke too, and they’re associating their brand with garbage. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gflpf0DrCgw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gflpf0DrCgw Par for the Amazon course, cheap Chinese knockoffs. If they had anything other than a highly permissive refund system, they’d already be drowning in lawsuits. They must bleed refund money though, and I thought Bezos was all about right margins?
    - Judgmentality 8y ago
      > They must bleed refund money though, and I thought Bezos was all about right margins? That's the part that worries me. Amazon surely knows this is a problem, and I'm sure they know much more about it than we do. And yet they allow it to continue. It genuinely makes me concerned for the future of their business, where they know actually providing a quality experience is going to hammer their revenue/profits.
    - macintux 8y ago
      What percentage of customers go through the refund process? I think I refund maybe one purchase every 4-5 years, for all of my retail activity combined. I don't believe I've ever bothered with Amazon.
duxup 8y ago
Not sure how much the negative reviews are useful. It's not uncommon to hear about folks targeting competitors with lower star reviews as just getting 5* reviews isn't enough to stand out.
ashelmire 8y ago
Same. A friend in the ecommerce industry tells of some pretty dark patterns - some companies won't allow negative reviews to be posted at all. Attempts to leave negative reviews trigger chat or other communication methods instead of posting the review. Amazon also won't allow most negative reviews - I've had many 1 star reviews denied by their automated system, but this has never happened with a 5 star review.
- fogetti 8y ago
  Exactly. If you go to Amazon's seller forum you can see how those little snowflakes who call themselves merchants complain about the fact that they couldn't remove all the negative reviews. I guess in the end they all find their ways to get rid of negative reviews.
  - derefr 8y ago
    I mean, sometimes, it's justified. Should a negative review about a wireless-charging bug in a phone stick around once the manufacturer pushes out an update to the firmware that makes the bug go away? This is why app stores only show reviews/scores for the current version of the app. There's no such thing as "versions" of a product, though. (Or, well, there are product revisions with distinct UPC codes, but an OTA firmware update doesn't qualify as one, and yet should be a new "version" for the purposes of reviews.)
    - ashelmire 8y ago
      Shouldn't the app maker have to prove that the new version doesn't have the same problem? It's not justified, it's just a way to swindle consumers.
    - ionised 8y ago
      Reviews are typically dated, so yes, they should stick around.
elektor 8y ago
I recommend that you copy and paste the Amazon link to https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/ and https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ to see how many of the reviews are actually legit.
- vanzorn 8y ago
  Was just about to post fakespot.com -- I've used it to great benefit in spotting some of my purchases that didn't have a reasonably priced, stand-out name brand to choose from (HDMI -> RCA audio splitters, or as mentioned in this thread, good bluetooth wireless earbuds. Amazon is consistently allowing multi-hundred unverified 5 star reviews for new products to persist, and my wife and I are starting to drift to other, more reputable resources. After a decade+ of Prime membership, this is a really disappointing betrayal of trust.
- anitil 8y ago
  Spoiler: It gets an 'F'. Color me surprised.
- r00fus 8y ago
  Any browser extensions that use reviewmeta or fakespot so that I don’t have to cut and paste the URL? Ideally I’d like to simply filter out all fake reviews and recalculate the stars rating.
  - ReviewMeta 8y ago
    https://reviewmeta.com/blog/extensions/ https://reviewmeta.com/blog/extensions/
  - HelloMcFly 8y ago
    Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-review-checker/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-revi... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot-analyze-fake-ama/nakplnnackehceedgkgkokbgbmfghain?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot-analyze-f...
dontbenebby 8y ago
>There are so many fake reviews on Amazon that the "average" stars for a product are no longer reliable indicators of quality. Is it just me, or is it harder to sort by critical nowadays? I find I have to click into all reviews to reveal the option for "all critical". And recently when looking at one product, when I tried to pull the "negative" reviews, they included several five star reviews. I'm seriously considering ditching Prime and signing up for a Target credit card - there's no annual fee, you get the same prime style free shipping, and there's a base level of quality to the products at Target that just doesn't seem to be present in Amazon's offerings.
duado 8y ago
Shopping on Amazon is like shopping in Chinatown now. The funny thing is, you know Amazon has the data and must be optimizing in the short term. This shit must be working, for some definition of working. Personally, anything that touches my child, or goes in my body, is not allowed to be bought on Amazon.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Most companies collapse from within, they don't get trounced by competitors. Competitors come along with a new angle that seems innocuous at first, but then turns out to entail 'the thing people want'. It's very, very easy from an operational perspective to focus on the data-driven decision to sell crap, to ignore fake reviews etc. because that's what sells 'today'. But an A/B test (short view) does not capture users recurring behaviour, and response to that experience overall. If the A/B test encompassed a 'year long study' they might find a different set of data: upset customers who don't come back. Which could lead to systematic 'sand in the engine' that could seriously erode Amazon. The only way this would be resolved really is if Bezos himself makes a pretty firm commitment to it, which is hard obviously because 'quality' is a difficult thing to put a number on. That said, it's hard to conclude how truly damaging this is. Once people are hooked on something, it takes an alternative for them to change their behaviour.
  - duado 8y ago
    The alternative: Target.com. Once you try it, you’ll never go back. Amazon is still where I buy a wireless mouse, or a phone holder for my car, but big electronics come from B&H or Newegg, diapers and kids toys and baby food comes from Target.
    - treis 8y ago
      >Newegg They have gone the way of being a market and are not to be trusted. They robbed me out of $630 through a combination of fraud and my CC company being wankers.
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
Guest10928391 8y ago
Even off Amazon I feel it's becoming more and more difficult to find honest product reviews. For example, if I search on Google for "best umbrellas", every result on my front page is a website that is filled with Amazon affiliate links. I feel like none of them can be trusted because most have never touched any of the umbrellas, but they are just doing a top 10 list and rewriting opinions they read on Amazon. Of course, they don't even consider products outside of Amazon because they wouldn't receive commission on sales. So, no one is talking about the small companies producing high quality, handmade umbrellas throughout the country, but instead every source funnels traffic to the same made in China Amazon clones.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  Yup, and since you can generate those pages algorithmically it's easy money for a clever coder.
- ABCLAW 8y ago
  I don't mind the affiliate links, but I mind dishonest or low quality churned reviews. When TV shopping, I used the reviews from https://www.rtings.com/ https://www.rtings.com/ They pointed me to issues and concerns with TV quality, provided me with an understanding of the trade-offs at various price points, and then directed me to a TV model that I purchased and have been incredibly satisfied with. Maybe we need a reputable internet equivalent to consumer reports. We obviously have demand, the question is how to finance it. I think consistent, ethical, non-conflicted third party quality reviews can be a solid lifestyle business. Won't be a unicorn, but it'll keep a few people gainfully employed and make the world a bit better.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Well? What's wrong with Consumer Reports? Sign up, pay for it, done. Why does valuable information that takes a lot of time and expense to produce need to be free? That attitude is the root of most of what's wrong with the web today. s/internet/web/
    - 8y ago
zanmat0 8y ago
A healthy combination of Fakespot and Wirecutter goes a long way to fighting this.
new_here 8y ago
Honestly, I don’t know why fake Amazon reviews are not more of an issue. This really is a huge problem that should be getting covered in mainstream media the way Facebook is scrutinised about privacy. Millions of people are being swindled out of real money. Amazon needs to be held accountable to fix this.
ascar 8y ago
I got also very annoyed by that to the point where I spent more time filtering fake reviews than the cheap product is worth. I always start npw by remembering myself that a physical shop would not give me any reviews, but also often the same bad quality to an even higher price.
acchow 8y ago
I wish Amazon would separate verified reviews (actually shipped item from Amazon Warehouse to this Amazon account who is writing a review) from unverified reviews. Does anyone know why they don't do this?
- slantyyz 8y ago
  > I wish Amazon would separate verified reviews (actually shipped item from Amazon Warehouse to this Amazon account who is writing a review) from unverified reviews. Honestly, that's a useless metric. Since banning incentivized reviews, the situation is actually _worse_ than it was before. All of the vendors who were sending out products for incentivized reviews now reimburse reviewers after they buy the product and leave a review, which means the review gets a "Verified Purchase" tag. This is against the rules, but it's happening. In the age of incentivized reviews, those reviews did not have a "Verified Purchase" tag. Source: Used to be an incentivized reviewer (stopped after rule change).
- dawnerd 8y ago
  Doesn’t matter, won’t solve anything. The fake reviewers will email people and tell them to buy the product and they’ll be reimbursed. I’ve gotten a few emails asking me to do this (would never of course). They even explicitly mention that you need to buy it so it gets a verified tag. They’re not even trying to hide the scam anymore, Amazon doesn’t care.
  - sourthyme 8y ago
    There's a solution to this. Reviewers are anonymous to the sellers. Sellers should not be able to link a review to a purchase.
    - dawnerd 8y ago
      That wont stop them. They still require proof of your review before they refund the other 50% to you. I don't think there's really a solution at all. As long as people are free to do outside deals there's always going to be review manipulation. The one thing that could help this is Amazon getting rid of third party sellers or go the route Target announced today and only partner with trusted companies.
tyingq 8y ago
There's also confusion between when a product is being reviewed, or a seller. Buyers often leave a bad review meant for a seller to the product itself. So, a good product, with multiple sellers, might get dinged due to one bad seller. Or, one bad seller out of four sellers is shipping counterfeits. Because of commingling, all sellers and the product get tarnished.
crwalker 8y ago
One-star reviews are the best signal I can find for product quality. They will let you know if there is a repeatable issue with trustworthy incentives. If there are more 2 star reviews than 1 star reviews and there is no pattern in the 1 star reviews, that's a great sign.
- castlecrasher2 8y ago
  One-star reviews and the date the item was posted on Amazon are my go-to.
zaidf 8y ago
I don't think this is intentional but fake reviews could be helping amazon's ad business (one of the fastest growing units within amazon). Here's what I've observed: 1. Mom-and-mom brand buys fake reviews 2. Mom-and-mom brand displaces well-known brands on amazon search 3. Well-known brand buys amazon ads to appear higher in search than shit brands with fake reviews
slantyyz 8y ago
>> There are so many fake reviews on Amazon that the "average" stars for a product are no longer reliable indicators of quality. There are two universes in Amazon. Recognized name brands, and unrecognized name brands. In the recognized name brand universe, the reviews are pretty reliable. In the unrecognized name brand universe, the reviews are not reliable. Generally speaking, with the no-name cheap stuff, you are generally getting what you pay for, irrespective of the review scores. When I did incentivized reviews (stopped after rule change), I always gave a score based on value for the price. Four stars for a $20 pair of headphones should not be the same as four stars for a $300 pair of headphones, because the expectations for quality should be much different at the higher price point. Generally speaking, though, the vast majority of the no-name stuff I got was pretty good for their selling price (but I was also picky about what I accepted for review). At most, I only got one or two pieces of junk, and scored those products accordingly.
CobrastanJorji 8y ago
I have to assume that there's a team of about a dozen engineers at Amazon whose entire job is solving this problem, and every so often their boss has to write a report up to SVPs about how their attempts to solve the problem are going. I imagine it involves a lot of really cool machine learning algorithms and also some simple but obvious hacks, like just blacklisting certain wide IP ranges of known bad reviewers. I imagine that the report makes a big deal about how it's successfully stopping the vast majority of these fake reviews, and it's removing more fake reviews than ever before. There's probably a series of pretty graphs that go up and to the right. I imagine that writing this report makes their boss very nervous because I would also be nervous if I had to repeatedly tell Jeff Bezos that I was failing to stop the slowly increasing flow of people's trust away from Amazon's retail site.
- nameisu 8y ago
  bezos is busy getting his dick sucked to see all this
- salawat 8y ago
  You're looking at it wrong. As much as I hate that hack Edison, he's right: you're reporting you've discovered X new ways to not solve the problem.
  - ekovarski 8y ago
    Nicely sums up a lot of corporate project meetings.
lawnchair_larry 8y ago
Amazon is the new Alibaba. It’s full of cheap Chinese junk and products from quality brands that actually have a company website are becoming rare.
gesman 8y ago
Actually number of 1-2 star reviews vs time product been listed might be an interesting indicator. But then - it maybe competitor efforts of course.
cmroanirgo 8y ago
Ironically, I haven't bought off Amazon for years, and have never left a review. I've been seeing all of these posts about gamafication of Amazon reviews and don't understand why Amazon just don't limit the reviews on a product to people who've actually purchased it from Amazon? Ironically, I came across a small eligibility requirement, (but otherwise seems to allow reviews by anyone for anything): > To contribute to Customer features (for example, Customer Reviews, Customer Answers, Idea Lists) or to follow other contributors, you must have spent at least $50 on Amazon.com using a valid credit or debit card in the past 12 months. Promotional discounts don't qualify towards the $50 minimum. Amazon's clearly able to disallow reviews unless you've bought it from them. They're also big enough to add incentives to people who have purchases (eg. maybe 1-5% of product value that goes toward future purchases), to encourage reviews. They could even gamify the 1-5% based upon the "I've found this helpful" response, encouraging quality reviews. I just don't get it. Have I missed something?
grey-area 8y ago
Amazon needs to move to verified reviews only, tied to a purchase on amazon and with a unique credit card on the account. They could cut out paid reviews with some effort if they took steps to verify identity.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
Even the 1 star reviews are fake sometimes. I feel like some of the competition in the space buy fake 1 star reviews on competitor products.
subpixel 8y ago
Fake reviews move product, otherwise Amazon would only let you review products you had ordered via Amazon.
snarf21 8y ago
The issue is that reviews for the same SKU are shared across all sellers. That doesn't even address the fact that some products have quality issues per color. They also mix the inventory together for efficiency in logistics. Once you do that, you admit that you don't care because you can't get the pee out of the pool. It seems like it should be easy to track the content coming in with an additional barcode sticker. You scan that barcode when the order is fulfilled and based on the user review/return/etc. ban that seller for counterfeit goods. It just seems like Amazon isn't interested in solving this because it becomes fairly trivial. I think the long term goal is to erode confidence in now Amazon branded products as they have different SKUs. Additionally, most people are lazy and won't bother returning something < $25 and will just pitch it but Amazon still collects their fees.
b3b0p 8y ago
Amazon went from my go to reliable source of basically everything that wasn't perishable to not. I used to have packages from Amazon coming weekly and daily and took full advantage of my Prime membership. Now, I can't even remember the last time I bought anything from Amazon. I'm simply afraid I'll get a fake, even if it says ship and sold by Amazon. I hope Amazon sees this and many similar complaints. I feel the greater population will catch on to this in due time and they could very well fall from their throne. In fact, if they don't, I hope they do. In the meantime, I'm more than willing to pay more get products directly from the manufactures and stores in person (e.g. Apple, Apple Store, Best Buy, Target, Nike, etc...). Not sure how this affects their other holdings such as Zappos.
ReviewMeta 8y ago
We've been noticing a big surge in the number of really inauthentic looking reviews - I'm talking 1,000 written over just a few days, 100% unverified, and some obvious manipulation going on with the product versions. Here are a few examples. I just don't understand how Amazon isn't catching this low-hanging fruit. Here are just a few examples: https://www.amazon.com/VOWSVOWS-Microphone-Earphones-Headphones-Compatible/dp/B07MV2JR87 https://www.amazon.com/VOWSVOWS-Microphone-Earphones-Headpho... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MF81QMS https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MF81QMS https://www.amazon.com/VOWSVOWS-Microphone-Earphones-Headphones-Compatible/dp/B07MLPYN9R https://www.amazon.com/VOWSVOWS-Microphone-Earphones-Headpho... https://www.amazon.com/Headphones-Microphone-Earphones-Compatible-Cancelling/dp/B07NXX21MM https://www.amazon.com/Headphones-Microphone-Earphones-Compa...
stefek99 8y ago
Same here. I look for 2 stars as 1 star is emotional.

xfitm3 8y ago

I always search for negative information first. When using a search engine for a product I always append "sucks", "broken", etc. Generally speaking three star reviews are the most informative to me.

smt88 8y ago
Sellers know people do this and plant fake, negative reviews on competitors at the same time they give themselves good reviews. I noticed this once when repurchasing a space heater I'd bought multiple times in the past. Several reviews mentioned the temperature sensor failing, but this particular heater had no temperature sensor. That isn't the only product I've seen with suspicious bad reviews, and I've read pieces of investigative journalism that confirm it's fairly widespread.
Rapzid 8y ago
"Sucks" is one of the true casualties of today's PC climate. Used to be you could get all sorts of great opposing opinions with that search keyword, particularly in IT. Sure, it's around here in there. But back in the day if you were going to write about why you didn't like something, you were going to write an article about why it "sucks".
- xfitm3 8y ago
  That sucks.

president 8y ago

Even the 1 star negative reviews are faked. Sellers pay users to leave negative reviews to competitors. EDIT: Funny how completely broken and anti-customer the Amazon review system is given that the #1 leadership principle at Amazon [1] is the following: "Customer Obsession - Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers." Just goes to show how these things are always BS. [1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/our-leadership-principles https://www.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/our-leadership...

hombre_fatal 8y ago
If I were inflating my rating with 5-star reviews, I'd also want some 1-star reviews to complain about inconsequential things like "the coffee machine's cord was only 5 meters long" or "it was a bit louder than I expected, waking me up more than I wanted during my morning routine."
- CamelCaseName 8y ago
  No you wouldn't. 1 star reviews will tank your average star rating and increase your NCX, which are far more important than the off chance someone reads your negative reviews closely. Unless you're selling 20 dollar bills for $5, you'll naturally get negative reviews. I've had to pull several products off Amazon because someone left an early, nonsense review that killed sales. (E.g. "Fast and easy" - 2 stars or "Works perfectly. Thanks!" - 1 star)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
vanzorn 8y ago
Perhaps their definition of their customer has evolved to focus on resellers/manufacturers, and we, the public consumers, are simply a crop to be farmed?
- 8y ago

duskwuff 8y ago

Or reviews that were transferred over from other products. Here's a case in point: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MH9HPTR https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MH9HPTR Over 3000 reviews... most of them for products completely unrelated to the one on sale. I see reviews for a bicycle lamp, a phone screen protector, and a voltage converter. This seems like a bug. Surely Amazon shouldn't allow sellers to transfer product reviews over from other products?

organsnyder 8y ago
They're abusing the "color" parameter to be multiple products instead. It's astounding that Amazon has yet to actively prohibit this.
- toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
  Nothing about Amazon’s abuse of their customers surprises me anymore. Their “Amazon’s Recommemdation” is a joke too, and they’re associating their brand with garbage. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gflpf0DrCgw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gflpf0DrCgw Par for the Amazon course, cheap Chinese knockoffs. If they had anything other than a highly permissive refund system, they’d already be drowning in lawsuits. They must bleed refund money though, and I thought Bezos was all about right margins?
  - Judgmentality 8y ago
    > They must bleed refund money though, and I thought Bezos was all about right margins? That's the part that worries me. Amazon surely knows this is a problem, and I'm sure they know much more about it than we do. And yet they allow it to continue. It genuinely makes me concerned for the future of their business, where they know actually providing a quality experience is going to hammer their revenue/profits.
  - macintux 8y ago
    What percentage of customers go through the refund process? I think I refund maybe one purchase every 4-5 years, for all of my retail activity combined. I don't believe I've ever bothered with Amazon.

duxup 8y ago

Not sure how much the negative reviews are useful. It's not uncommon to hear about folks targeting competitors with lower star reviews as just getting 5* reviews isn't enough to stand out.

ashelmire 8y ago

Same. A friend in the ecommerce industry tells of some pretty dark patterns - some companies won't allow negative reviews to be posted at all. Attempts to leave negative reviews trigger chat or other communication methods instead of posting the review. Amazon also won't allow most negative reviews - I've had many 1 star reviews denied by their automated system, but this has never happened with a 5 star review.

fogetti 8y ago
Exactly. If you go to Amazon's seller forum you can see how those little snowflakes who call themselves merchants complain about the fact that they couldn't remove all the negative reviews. I guess in the end they all find their ways to get rid of negative reviews.
- derefr 8y ago
  I mean, sometimes, it's justified. Should a negative review about a wireless-charging bug in a phone stick around once the manufacturer pushes out an update to the firmware that makes the bug go away? This is why app stores only show reviews/scores for the current version of the app. There's no such thing as "versions" of a product, though. (Or, well, there are product revisions with distinct UPC codes, but an OTA firmware update doesn't qualify as one, and yet should be a new "version" for the purposes of reviews.)
  - ashelmire 8y ago
    Shouldn't the app maker have to prove that the new version doesn't have the same problem? It's not justified, it's just a way to swindle consumers.
  - ionised 8y ago
    Reviews are typically dated, so yes, they should stick around.

elektor 8y ago

I recommend that you copy and paste the Amazon link to https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/ and https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ to see how many of the reviews are actually legit.

vanzorn 8y ago
Was just about to post fakespot.com -- I've used it to great benefit in spotting some of my purchases that didn't have a reasonably priced, stand-out name brand to choose from (HDMI -> RCA audio splitters, or as mentioned in this thread, good bluetooth wireless earbuds. Amazon is consistently allowing multi-hundred unverified 5 star reviews for new products to persist, and my wife and I are starting to drift to other, more reputable resources. After a decade+ of Prime membership, this is a really disappointing betrayal of trust.
anitil 8y ago
Spoiler: It gets an 'F'. Color me surprised.
r00fus 8y ago
Any browser extensions that use reviewmeta or fakespot so that I don’t have to cut and paste the URL? Ideally I’d like to simply filter out all fake reviews and recalculate the stars rating.
- ReviewMeta 8y ago
  https://reviewmeta.com/blog/extensions/ https://reviewmeta.com/blog/extensions/
- HelloMcFly 8y ago
  Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-review-checker/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-revi... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot-analyze-fake-ama/nakplnnackehceedgkgkokbgbmfghain?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot-analyze-f...

dontbenebby 8y ago

>There are so many fake reviews on Amazon that the "average" stars for a product are no longer reliable indicators of quality. Is it just me, or is it harder to sort by critical nowadays? I find I have to click into all reviews to reveal the option for "all critical". And recently when looking at one product, when I tried to pull the "negative" reviews, they included several five star reviews. I'm seriously considering ditching Prime and signing up for a Target credit card - there's no annual fee, you get the same prime style free shipping, and there's a base level of quality to the products at Target that just doesn't seem to be present in Amazon's offerings.

duado 8y ago

Shopping on Amazon is like shopping in Chinatown now. The funny thing is, you know Amazon has the data and must be optimizing in the short term. This shit must be working, for some definition of working. Personally, anything that touches my child, or goes in my body, is not allowed to be bought on Amazon.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
Most companies collapse from within, they don't get trounced by competitors. Competitors come along with a new angle that seems innocuous at first, but then turns out to entail 'the thing people want'. It's very, very easy from an operational perspective to focus on the data-driven decision to sell crap, to ignore fake reviews etc. because that's what sells 'today'. But an A/B test (short view) does not capture users recurring behaviour, and response to that experience overall. If the A/B test encompassed a 'year long study' they might find a different set of data: upset customers who don't come back. Which could lead to systematic 'sand in the engine' that could seriously erode Amazon. The only way this would be resolved really is if Bezos himself makes a pretty firm commitment to it, which is hard obviously because 'quality' is a difficult thing to put a number on. That said, it's hard to conclude how truly damaging this is. Once people are hooked on something, it takes an alternative for them to change their behaviour.
- duado 8y ago
  The alternative: Target.com. Once you try it, you’ll never go back. Amazon is still where I buy a wireless mouse, or a phone holder for my car, but big electronics come from B&H or Newegg, diapers and kids toys and baby food comes from Target.
  - treis 8y ago
    >Newegg They have gone the way of being a market and are not to be trusted. They robbed me out of $630 through a combination of fraud and my CC company being wankers.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago

Guest10928391 8y ago

Even off Amazon I feel it's becoming more and more difficult to find honest product reviews. For example, if I search on Google for "best umbrellas", every result on my front page is a website that is filled with Amazon affiliate links. I feel like none of them can be trusted because most have never touched any of the umbrellas, but they are just doing a top 10 list and rewriting opinions they read on Amazon. Of course, they don't even consider products outside of Amazon because they wouldn't receive commission on sales. So, no one is talking about the small companies producing high quality, handmade umbrellas throughout the country, but instead every source funnels traffic to the same made in China Amazon clones.

ChuckMcM 8y ago
Yup, and since you can generate those pages algorithmically it's easy money for a clever coder.
ABCLAW 8y ago
I don't mind the affiliate links, but I mind dishonest or low quality churned reviews. When TV shopping, I used the reviews from https://www.rtings.com/ https://www.rtings.com/ They pointed me to issues and concerns with TV quality, provided me with an understanding of the trade-offs at various price points, and then directed me to a TV model that I purchased and have been incredibly satisfied with. Maybe we need a reputable internet equivalent to consumer reports. We obviously have demand, the question is how to finance it. I think consistent, ethical, non-conflicted third party quality reviews can be a solid lifestyle business. Won't be a unicorn, but it'll keep a few people gainfully employed and make the world a bit better.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Well? What's wrong with Consumer Reports? Sign up, pay for it, done. Why does valuable information that takes a lot of time and expense to produce need to be free? That attitude is the root of most of what's wrong with the web today. s/internet/web/
  - 8y ago

zanmat0 8y ago

A healthy combination of Fakespot and Wirecutter goes a long way to fighting this.

new_here 8y ago

Honestly, I don’t know why fake Amazon reviews are not more of an issue. This really is a huge problem that should be getting covered in mainstream media the way Facebook is scrutinised about privacy. Millions of people are being swindled out of real money. Amazon needs to be held accountable to fix this.

ascar 8y ago

I got also very annoyed by that to the point where I spent more time filtering fake reviews than the cheap product is worth. I always start npw by remembering myself that a physical shop would not give me any reviews, but also often the same bad quality to an even higher price.

acchow 8y ago

I wish Amazon would separate verified reviews (actually shipped item from Amazon Warehouse to this Amazon account who is writing a review) from unverified reviews. Does anyone know why they don't do this?

slantyyz 8y ago
> I wish Amazon would separate verified reviews (actually shipped item from Amazon Warehouse to this Amazon account who is writing a review) from unverified reviews. Honestly, that's a useless metric. Since banning incentivized reviews, the situation is actually _worse_ than it was before. All of the vendors who were sending out products for incentivized reviews now reimburse reviewers after they buy the product and leave a review, which means the review gets a "Verified Purchase" tag. This is against the rules, but it's happening. In the age of incentivized reviews, those reviews did not have a "Verified Purchase" tag. Source: Used to be an incentivized reviewer (stopped after rule change).
dawnerd 8y ago
Doesn’t matter, won’t solve anything. The fake reviewers will email people and tell them to buy the product and they’ll be reimbursed. I’ve gotten a few emails asking me to do this (would never of course). They even explicitly mention that you need to buy it so it gets a verified tag. They’re not even trying to hide the scam anymore, Amazon doesn’t care.
- sourthyme 8y ago
  There's a solution to this. Reviewers are anonymous to the sellers. Sellers should not be able to link a review to a purchase.
  - dawnerd 8y ago
    That wont stop them. They still require proof of your review before they refund the other 50% to you. I don't think there's really a solution at all. As long as people are free to do outside deals there's always going to be review manipulation. The one thing that could help this is Amazon getting rid of third party sellers or go the route Target announced today and only partner with trusted companies.

tyingq 8y ago

There's also confusion between when a product is being reviewed, or a seller. Buyers often leave a bad review meant for a seller to the product itself. So, a good product, with multiple sellers, might get dinged due to one bad seller. Or, one bad seller out of four sellers is shipping counterfeits. Because of commingling, all sellers and the product get tarnished.

crwalker 8y ago

One-star reviews are the best signal I can find for product quality. They will let you know if there is a repeatable issue with trustworthy incentives. If there are more 2 star reviews than 1 star reviews and there is no pattern in the 1 star reviews, that's a great sign.

castlecrasher2 8y ago
One-star reviews and the date the item was posted on Amazon are my go-to.

zaidf 8y ago

I don't think this is intentional but fake reviews could be helping amazon's ad business (one of the fastest growing units within amazon). Here's what I've observed: 1. Mom-and-mom brand buys fake reviews 2. Mom-and-mom brand displaces well-known brands on amazon search 3. Well-known brand buys amazon ads to appear higher in search than shit brands with fake reviews

slantyyz 8y ago

>> There are so many fake reviews on Amazon that the "average" stars for a product are no longer reliable indicators of quality. There are two universes in Amazon. Recognized name brands, and unrecognized name brands. In the recognized name brand universe, the reviews are pretty reliable. In the unrecognized name brand universe, the reviews are not reliable. Generally speaking, with the no-name cheap stuff, you are generally getting what you pay for, irrespective of the review scores. When I did incentivized reviews (stopped after rule change), I always gave a score based on value for the price. Four stars for a $20 pair of headphones should not be the same as four stars for a $300 pair of headphones, because the expectations for quality should be much different at the higher price point. Generally speaking, though, the vast majority of the no-name stuff I got was pretty good for their selling price (but I was also picky about what I accepted for review). At most, I only got one or two pieces of junk, and scored those products accordingly.

CobrastanJorji 8y ago

I have to assume that there's a team of about a dozen engineers at Amazon whose entire job is solving this problem, and every so often their boss has to write a report up to SVPs about how their attempts to solve the problem are going. I imagine it involves a lot of really cool machine learning algorithms and also some simple but obvious hacks, like just blacklisting certain wide IP ranges of known bad reviewers. I imagine that the report makes a big deal about how it's successfully stopping the vast majority of these fake reviews, and it's removing more fake reviews than ever before. There's probably a series of pretty graphs that go up and to the right. I imagine that writing this report makes their boss very nervous because I would also be nervous if I had to repeatedly tell Jeff Bezos that I was failing to stop the slowly increasing flow of people's trust away from Amazon's retail site.

nameisu 8y ago
bezos is busy getting his dick sucked to see all this
salawat 8y ago
You're looking at it wrong. As much as I hate that hack Edison, he's right: you're reporting you've discovered X new ways to not solve the problem.
- ekovarski 8y ago
  Nicely sums up a lot of corporate project meetings.

lawnchair_larry 8y ago

Amazon is the new Alibaba. It’s full of cheap Chinese junk and products from quality brands that actually have a company website are becoming rare.

gesman 8y ago

Actually number of 1-2 star reviews vs time product been listed might be an interesting indicator. But then - it maybe competitor efforts of course.

cmroanirgo 8y ago

Ironically, I haven't bought off Amazon for years, and have never left a review. I've been seeing all of these posts about gamafication of Amazon reviews and don't understand why Amazon just don't limit the reviews on a product to people who've actually purchased it from Amazon? Ironically, I came across a small eligibility requirement, (but otherwise seems to allow reviews by anyone for anything): > To contribute to Customer features (for example, Customer Reviews, Customer Answers, Idea Lists) or to follow other contributors, you must have spent at least $50 on Amazon.com using a valid credit or debit card in the past 12 months. Promotional discounts don't qualify towards the $50 minimum. Amazon's clearly able to disallow reviews unless you've bought it from them. They're also big enough to add incentives to people who have purchases (eg. maybe 1-5% of product value that goes toward future purchases), to encourage reviews. They could even gamify the 1-5% based upon the "I've found this helpful" response, encouraging quality reviews. I just don't get it. Have I missed something?

grey-area 8y ago

Amazon needs to move to verified reviews only, tied to a purchase on amazon and with a unique credit card on the account. They could cut out paid reviews with some effort if they took steps to verify identity.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

Even the 1 star reviews are fake sometimes. I feel like some of the competition in the space buy fake 1 star reviews on competitor products.

subpixel 8y ago

Fake reviews move product, otherwise Amazon would only let you review products you had ordered via Amazon.

snarf21 8y ago

The issue is that reviews for the same SKU are shared across all sellers. That doesn't even address the fact that some products have quality issues per color. They also mix the inventory together for efficiency in logistics. Once you do that, you admit that you don't care because you can't get the pee out of the pool. It seems like it should be easy to track the content coming in with an additional barcode sticker. You scan that barcode when the order is fulfilled and based on the user review/return/etc. ban that seller for counterfeit goods. It just seems like Amazon isn't interested in solving this because it becomes fairly trivial. I think the long term goal is to erode confidence in now Amazon branded products as they have different SKUs. Additionally, most people are lazy and won't bother returning something < $25 and will just pitch it but Amazon still collects their fees.

b3b0p 8y ago

Amazon went from my go to reliable source of basically everything that wasn't perishable to not. I used to have packages from Amazon coming weekly and daily and took full advantage of my Prime membership. Now, I can't even remember the last time I bought anything from Amazon. I'm simply afraid I'll get a fake, even if it says ship and sold by Amazon. I hope Amazon sees this and many similar complaints. I feel the greater population will catch on to this in due time and they could very well fall from their throne. In fact, if they don't, I hope they do. In the meantime, I'm more than willing to pay more get products directly from the manufactures and stores in person (e.g. Apple, Apple Store, Best Buy, Target, Nike, etc...). Not sure how this affects their other holdings such as Zappos.

ReviewMeta 8y ago

We've been noticing a big surge in the number of really inauthentic looking reviews - I'm talking 1,000 written over just a few days, 100% unverified, and some obvious manipulation going on with the product versions. Here are a few examples. I just don't understand how Amazon isn't catching this low-hanging fruit. Here are just a few examples: https://www.amazon.com/VOWSVOWS-Microphone-Earphones-Headphones-Compatible/dp/B07MV2JR87 https://www.amazon.com/VOWSVOWS-Microphone-Earphones-Headpho... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MF81QMS https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MF81QMS https://www.amazon.com/VOWSVOWS-Microphone-Earphones-Headphones-Compatible/dp/B07MLPYN9R https://www.amazon.com/VOWSVOWS-Microphone-Earphones-Headpho... https://www.amazon.com/Headphones-Microphone-Earphones-Compatible-Cancelling/dp/B07NXX21MM https://www.amazon.com/Headphones-Microphone-Earphones-Compa...

stefek99 8y ago

Same here. I look for 2 stars as 1 star is emotional.