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My issue with Amazon reviews is the ease that sellers are able to change the product and keep the reviews. I recently tried to buy a decent pair of USB C headph

My issue with Amazon reviews is the ease that sellers are able to change the product and keep the reviews. I recently tried to buy a decent pair of USB C headphones. The top two recommended products both had 5 starts with hundreds of verified reviews... for a dvd copy of a classic movie. I've decided I just can't trust Amazon reviews anymore.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
This is yet again another, surely well-known 'leak' in how products are presented and displayed, since it can still happen, Amazon is tacitly complicit with the fraud. Most of these issues could be mostly cleared up with some basic operational policies: purchase only reviews (or sideline the others), no 'changing the product', some degree of manufacturer verification etc.. But they chose not to do it.
- lugg 8y ago
  Why would a product change even be allowed they're different products. Manufacturers don't get to claim this year's junk is so much better than last year's junk that I just have to buy it all the while claiming it's the same product. What a joke.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    "Why would a product change even be allowed they're different products." Because Amazon has chosen to allow that, for reasons which probably have to do with money. The comments here indicate a surprising degree of naivte on this issue i.e. "I head to email jeff@amazon.com about this" - as if after 20 years of operations Amazon isn't 100% aware of all of these issues. Of course they know what's going on. In detail. If Amazon were some old, big, dumb company with slow moving ops, barely competent staff, then we could write all this off as lack of operational competence - but it's not. Amazon is actually a very well run and operationally competent company from top to bottom, and Bezos is a hands-on leader, intimately involved. Folks: Bezos knows exactly what is happening. Since they haven't made very small adjustments which could help fix a variety of these issues, it's not due to 'lack of will' - it's a choice that Amazon has made. Amazon wants lots of 5 star fake reviews by unverified sources or they would just get rid of them, which they could do, instantly, by sidelining reviews with no purchase, for example. Among a variety of other things. It's unbelievable the level of hagiography that goes on with these 'industry leaders' that we build up like Jobs, Zuck, Bezos, Welch etc. - especially when we have issues waiving us right in the face. I accept that business at scale is 'making sausage' and there will be unpleasant things. Factory workers can't make $80K (probably). We inherently lose some privacy on social media. There will be some fake reviews and fraud no matter what. Surely. But the scope and level of chicanery, combined with the fact these companies haven't made obvious changes proves they are complicit and it should definitely weigh into how we think of these companies and individuals. FYI people can do 'good stuff' and 'bad stuff' at the same time. Bezos and Zuck can build/fund schools for kids at the same time they are doing totally unscrupulous stuff, it's not a paradox. Fraud, fake reviews etc. is a problem not dealt with remotely enough by Amazon, this is obvious and the fault/concern is theirs, and it's Jeff Bezos - as founder, owner, CEO world's richest person to do it. Literally the richest guy in the world is gaining this wealth in part by promoting tons of counterfeit goods with fake reviews - 2019.
    - NotSammyHagar 8y ago
      I don't think the top people at amazon are aware of the issue or think it's so severe. spam in different forms is very difficult for even the most advanced companies to fix. look at gmail putting good email in spam or spam sneaking through to regular email. it keeps happening. spam comments on forum postings. amazon is facing another version of the spam problem in fake reviews, fake products, etc. it obviously competes against their agility to have more spam detection vs making it easier for people to sell stuff there.
      - sonnyblarney 8y ago
        Fraud and fake reviews are a major strategic concern, it has been since the start, i.e. for 20 years. Leadership is intimately aware of the problem. There are many easy things they could do to reduce fraud, #1 being only allowing reviews from actual purchasers, or at least now allowing the others into the rankings. As mentioned on this thread, there are 3rd party companies that do a decent job at detecting the crap reviews. This means either Amazon is incompetent, and is not even capable of basic filtering, or they are competent and complicit. It's the later. Yes, there will always be spam and fraud, but not remotely the levels we see on Amazon. It should be relatively rare. As it stands, it's pretty easy for a regular person simply to go on Amazon and literally find fake products. This is totally unacceptable. They are trying hard not to find the spam and fraud.
    - lugg 8y ago
      > Because Amazon has chosen to allow that, for reasons which probably have to do with money. Yea.. that, nor the tirade that follows comes close to answering my question. I also suspect your thinking and reasoning are incredibly misguided. While Amazon isn't stupid they aren't nearly as money focused as you seem to believe. What I suspect but do not know for sure is that their reviews were/are a massive part of their business model. Acting as big SEO signals and including a number of nice benefits when it comes to sales and marketing. What we are likely looking at now is friction at scale. Amazon has unleashed a large amount of Alibaba trash into the market in order to compete with a very real competitor, hell sales/revenue wise Amazon is the underdog. We will likely see moves to clean up reviews. So in the end I guess you were right "duh money" but it's a bit more nuanced than that and far from direct.
cortesoft 8y ago
Or the one product that has like ten different "variations" which are actually totally different products, yet share reviews. A review on one of them means nothing for the other nine.
- GordonS 8y ago
  I was looking at monitors recently and found this - 8 different monitors by the same seller, and reviews for them all lumped in together! Useless!
nathancahill 8y ago
Or grouping 20 distinct products under one item.
- Scoundreller 8y ago
  If you think Amazon is bad for this, just checkout Ebay.
gordon_freeman 8y ago
This always happens with various editions of books too especially for classic books. For example: I want to buy Meditations by Marcus Aurelius but there are so many editions of that book with different authors who translated these books but you'd see the same exact reviews on all of these editions. It is very hard for me in that case to choose the right book.
- DantesKite 8y ago
  I know what you mean. It took me a while to find the original version of Napoleon Hill's "How to Think and Grow Rich" because everyone and their mother's posted $0.99 versions. That's why I like Standard Ebooks. It's a website where volunteers transcribe public domain books into high-quality books for various eReaders. A lot of ebooks tends to suffer from poor formatting and grammar issues, but all the books on Standard Ebooks go through a rigorous proofreading process. The book covers are quite lovely too. I really like it. https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/
  - gordon_freeman 8y ago
    This site looks good. Thanks for sharing.
- harshreality 8y ago
  You shouldn't have to do the following, but there is a way around that mingled-reviews problem: Go to the "all reviews" page, search that page for "filter by", and and change "all formats" to the format you're viewing. My biggest complaint about books is not the review mixing problem, although that's bad. My biggest complaint is that different translations shouldn't be mixed at all, while identical translations by the same publisher (for instance, ebook and paperback versions) should always be comingled. On Amazon, both principles are routinely violated. For example, you can search the books category for "marcus aurelius hays meditations" and find the paperback (black cover red bird silhouette) as the first real result, but the ebook format under that entry is NOT the Hays translation. I don't see any way to get to the Hays translation from that search. If you search for the same keywords in the kindle category, the kindle edition is the first real result. (In both searches, you get two sponsored search results which are not the Hays translation but Amazon promotes them anyway). There you have it... the world's biggest online bookstore is incapable of selling books properly. An alternative would be to mix all editions, but have a clear well-designed selection interface so that it's clear which translation you're selecting, and then under each translation which edition (format, publishing date, and/or edition number if there are numbered editions) you're selecting. A commercial modern translation of something like Meditations might only have one ebook and one paperback by the same publisher. An out-of-copyright translation might have a dozen different editions made by taking the gutenberg edition and slapping a more engaging cover on it. If you're selling books and you make it difficult to navigate book editions in either of those common cases, you have utterly failed at being competent in your line of business. That incompetence might not show up in sales figures, because people who want a specific edition will grudgingly search until they find it, and people who don't want a specific edition will pay for whatever random awful edition catches their attention first.
rlander 8y ago
My last employer sent out a company-wide email asking every employee (and their friends and family) to order their flagship product (IoT device) on Amazon, write a 5-star review and e-mail the marketing department for reimbursement and product return. The returned products would then be re-shipped to Amazon. Needless to say, it was the shortest time I've ever spent at a job.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  Problem is its not even a scummy thing to do. Its just the only way to do business on Amazon. If every single company is faking the reviews then you can not afford to be the only one not faking them. An individual actor is not able to do the right thing because everyone has to at the same time.
  - mikeklaas 8y ago
    It's Moloch.
  - jamesrcole 8y ago
    It can be 'the rules of playing the game' AND also scummy. The overall system may be structured such that it basically forces such behavior. Saying it's scummy doesn't mean that this particular seller went out of their way to be scummy or likes acting in that way. But this doesn't stop it being a scummy practice from the consumer's perspective.
  - ajross 8y ago
    > Its just the only way to do business on Amazon. If every single company is faking the reviews then you can not afford to be the only one not faking them. That's... the only way to do business selling generic garbage on Amason, I guess. But it's not the only way to do business. I mean, the example is headphones. Bose and Beats and Shure no doubt sell a ton of hardware on Amazon on the basis of their established brands and not just reviews. And I'm sure they do fine, and Amazon is happy to have the business. The problem here is the search results, that searching for "headphones" (which is indeed a particularly bad category) gives you a bunch of garbage and not a good selection of products that match your search.
modzu 8y ago
i was looking at a speaker, a couple of the verified reviews said something like, "it fit a little tight".
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  I tend to mark down the obvious spam / shit reviews like that
- mring33621 8y ago
  fit where?
OrgNet 8y ago
just buy from somewhere else whenever it is cheaper
Semaphor 8y ago
While Amazon Germany (afaik) does not yet have many of the problems of Amazon US (I often hear on HN about fake products and the fake reviews of TFA), what really annoys me is the completely different products as one. I was looking at a drill, it's variants included a jigsaw. The reviews were almost all for the jigsaw and at some point, Amazon even removed the notice which variant was reviewed. Utterly useless.
- 2T1Qka0rEiPr 8y ago
  This! In many ways shared reviews for SKUs of the same product make absolute sense (if the blue bag is made well, so should the red one). But there seems to be huge abuse in defining the base product as you've highlighted. I presume sellers have complete autonomy to set them up, and Amazon might argue that it's "infeasible" for them to administer this, but from the perspective of the consumer I completely agree that it erodes confidence in "reviews". Over the years I've noticed a shift in the products I most readily find on Amazon from well established brands to utterly unknown Chinese manufacturers. I've been burnt enough times by buying such products that I've reverted to mostly looking for products which satisfy 1) from reputable company, and 2) positive reviews.
simonh 8y ago
In an unregulated market, brand identity and reputation becomes a very strong differentiating factor. The strongest brand on Amazon is Amazon, so by allowing the generic market to rot they are allowing their own-brand basics products to establish themselves because consumers can assume that Amazon products won't have this fake review problem. It does also work for other brands too of course. I was in the market for some Lightning cables recently and almost every single cheap cable was a switch-out with review for different products. The only brands I recognised were Amazon and Anker and both their stuff was legit (I bought from both).
- philipodonnell 8y ago
  This is an excellent point and one reason I think we'll inevitably have regulation preventing owners of platforms/marketplaces from competing in them. The incentives are completely out of whack.
sanderjd 8y ago
I really think Amazon needs to fix this. I'm about two shitty products away from cancelling Prime. Their business model is "good enough products shipped really quickly without needing to think about it much". Recently, things I order aren't good enough. I find myself thinking about whether I should just drive to Target so that I can see the thing before I buy it. This seems like a problem for Amazon.
- OJFord 8y ago
  But they make returns so easy, I'm not that bothered any more, if I get it and it's crap I'll just return it and look harder for a different one.
  - sanderjd 8y ago
    I used to feel this way, but I've recently turned a corner. Returning things seemed easy when my return rate was say 5%. Now that it's more like 25% and I'm mostly returning junk sold deceptively, it feels like an awful hassle. I'd much rather shop somewhere where I could choose from, say, three relatively expensive but good options, get one of those, and nearly always keep it, rather than a place where I have 100 cheap options most of which are junk, such that it takes me a couple rounds of returns to get something I want.
ReviewMeta 8y ago
I also agree that it should be very easy for Amazon to pick up on. I can't believe it's happening. We call this "Review Hijacking" and have a warning that appears at the top of our report if we detect it: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/amazon-review-hijacking/ https://reviewmeta.com/blog/amazon-review-hijacking/

sonnyblarney 8y ago

This is yet again another, surely well-known 'leak' in how products are presented and displayed, since it can still happen, Amazon is tacitly complicit with the fraud. Most of these issues could be mostly cleared up with some basic operational policies: purchase only reviews (or sideline the others), no 'changing the product', some degree of manufacturer verification etc.. But they chose not to do it.

lugg 8y ago
Why would a product change even be allowed they're different products. Manufacturers don't get to claim this year's junk is so much better than last year's junk that I just have to buy it all the while claiming it's the same product. What a joke.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  "Why would a product change even be allowed they're different products." Because Amazon has chosen to allow that, for reasons which probably have to do with money. The comments here indicate a surprising degree of naivte on this issue i.e. "I head to email jeff@amazon.com about this" - as if after 20 years of operations Amazon isn't 100% aware of all of these issues. Of course they know what's going on. In detail. If Amazon were some old, big, dumb company with slow moving ops, barely competent staff, then we could write all this off as lack of operational competence - but it's not. Amazon is actually a very well run and operationally competent company from top to bottom, and Bezos is a hands-on leader, intimately involved. Folks: Bezos knows exactly what is happening. Since they haven't made very small adjustments which could help fix a variety of these issues, it's not due to 'lack of will' - it's a choice that Amazon has made. Amazon wants lots of 5 star fake reviews by unverified sources or they would just get rid of them, which they could do, instantly, by sidelining reviews with no purchase, for example. Among a variety of other things. It's unbelievable the level of hagiography that goes on with these 'industry leaders' that we build up like Jobs, Zuck, Bezos, Welch etc. - especially when we have issues waiving us right in the face. I accept that business at scale is 'making sausage' and there will be unpleasant things. Factory workers can't make $80K (probably). We inherently lose some privacy on social media. There will be some fake reviews and fraud no matter what. Surely. But the scope and level of chicanery, combined with the fact these companies haven't made obvious changes proves they are complicit and it should definitely weigh into how we think of these companies and individuals. FYI people can do 'good stuff' and 'bad stuff' at the same time. Bezos and Zuck can build/fund schools for kids at the same time they are doing totally unscrupulous stuff, it's not a paradox. Fraud, fake reviews etc. is a problem not dealt with remotely enough by Amazon, this is obvious and the fault/concern is theirs, and it's Jeff Bezos - as founder, owner, CEO world's richest person to do it. Literally the richest guy in the world is gaining this wealth in part by promoting tons of counterfeit goods with fake reviews - 2019.
  - NotSammyHagar 8y ago
    I don't think the top people at amazon are aware of the issue or think it's so severe. spam in different forms is very difficult for even the most advanced companies to fix. look at gmail putting good email in spam or spam sneaking through to regular email. it keeps happening. spam comments on forum postings. amazon is facing another version of the spam problem in fake reviews, fake products, etc. it obviously competes against their agility to have more spam detection vs making it easier for people to sell stuff there.
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      Fraud and fake reviews are a major strategic concern, it has been since the start, i.e. for 20 years. Leadership is intimately aware of the problem. There are many easy things they could do to reduce fraud, #1 being only allowing reviews from actual purchasers, or at least now allowing the others into the rankings. As mentioned on this thread, there are 3rd party companies that do a decent job at detecting the crap reviews. This means either Amazon is incompetent, and is not even capable of basic filtering, or they are competent and complicit. It's the later. Yes, there will always be spam and fraud, but not remotely the levels we see on Amazon. It should be relatively rare. As it stands, it's pretty easy for a regular person simply to go on Amazon and literally find fake products. This is totally unacceptable. They are trying hard not to find the spam and fraud.
  - lugg 8y ago
    > Because Amazon has chosen to allow that, for reasons which probably have to do with money. Yea.. that, nor the tirade that follows comes close to answering my question. I also suspect your thinking and reasoning are incredibly misguided. While Amazon isn't stupid they aren't nearly as money focused as you seem to believe. What I suspect but do not know for sure is that their reviews were/are a massive part of their business model. Acting as big SEO signals and including a number of nice benefits when it comes to sales and marketing. What we are likely looking at now is friction at scale. Amazon has unleashed a large amount of Alibaba trash into the market in order to compete with a very real competitor, hell sales/revenue wise Amazon is the underdog. We will likely see moves to clean up reviews. So in the end I guess you were right "duh money" but it's a bit more nuanced than that and far from direct.

cortesoft 8y ago

Or the one product that has like ten different "variations" which are actually totally different products, yet share reviews. A review on one of them means nothing for the other nine.

GordonS 8y ago
I was looking at monitors recently and found this - 8 different monitors by the same seller, and reviews for them all lumped in together! Useless!

nathancahill 8y ago

Or grouping 20 distinct products under one item.

Scoundreller 8y ago
If you think Amazon is bad for this, just checkout Ebay.

gordon_freeman 8y ago

This always happens with various editions of books too especially for classic books. For example: I want to buy Meditations by Marcus Aurelius but there are so many editions of that book with different authors who translated these books but you'd see the same exact reviews on all of these editions. It is very hard for me in that case to choose the right book.

DantesKite 8y ago
I know what you mean. It took me a while to find the original version of Napoleon Hill's "How to Think and Grow Rich" because everyone and their mother's posted $0.99 versions. That's why I like Standard Ebooks. It's a website where volunteers transcribe public domain books into high-quality books for various eReaders. A lot of ebooks tends to suffer from poor formatting and grammar issues, but all the books on Standard Ebooks go through a rigorous proofreading process. The book covers are quite lovely too. I really like it. https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/
- gordon_freeman 8y ago
  This site looks good. Thanks for sharing.
harshreality 8y ago
You shouldn't have to do the following, but there is a way around that mingled-reviews problem: Go to the "all reviews" page, search that page for "filter by", and and change "all formats" to the format you're viewing. My biggest complaint about books is not the review mixing problem, although that's bad. My biggest complaint is that different translations shouldn't be mixed at all, while identical translations by the same publisher (for instance, ebook and paperback versions) should always be comingled. On Amazon, both principles are routinely violated. For example, you can search the books category for "marcus aurelius hays meditations" and find the paperback (black cover red bird silhouette) as the first real result, but the ebook format under that entry is NOT the Hays translation. I don't see any way to get to the Hays translation from that search. If you search for the same keywords in the kindle category, the kindle edition is the first real result. (In both searches, you get two sponsored search results which are not the Hays translation but Amazon promotes them anyway). There you have it... the world's biggest online bookstore is incapable of selling books properly. An alternative would be to mix all editions, but have a clear well-designed selection interface so that it's clear which translation you're selecting, and then under each translation which edition (format, publishing date, and/or edition number if there are numbered editions) you're selecting. A commercial modern translation of something like Meditations might only have one ebook and one paperback by the same publisher. An out-of-copyright translation might have a dozen different editions made by taking the gutenberg edition and slapping a more engaging cover on it. If you're selling books and you make it difficult to navigate book editions in either of those common cases, you have utterly failed at being competent in your line of business. That incompetence might not show up in sales figures, because people who want a specific edition will grudgingly search until they find it, and people who don't want a specific edition will pay for whatever random awful edition catches their attention first.

rlander 8y ago

My last employer sent out a company-wide email asking every employee (and their friends and family) to order their flagship product (IoT device) on Amazon, write a 5-star review and e-mail the marketing department for reimbursement and product return. The returned products would then be re-shipped to Amazon. Needless to say, it was the shortest time I've ever spent at a job.

baroffoos 8y ago
Problem is its not even a scummy thing to do. Its just the only way to do business on Amazon. If every single company is faking the reviews then you can not afford to be the only one not faking them. An individual actor is not able to do the right thing because everyone has to at the same time.
- mikeklaas 8y ago
  It's Moloch.
- jamesrcole 8y ago
  It can be 'the rules of playing the game' AND also scummy. The overall system may be structured such that it basically forces such behavior. Saying it's scummy doesn't mean that this particular seller went out of their way to be scummy or likes acting in that way. But this doesn't stop it being a scummy practice from the consumer's perspective.
- ajross 8y ago
  > Its just the only way to do business on Amazon. If every single company is faking the reviews then you can not afford to be the only one not faking them. That's... the only way to do business selling generic garbage on Amason, I guess. But it's not the only way to do business. I mean, the example is headphones. Bose and Beats and Shure no doubt sell a ton of hardware on Amazon on the basis of their established brands and not just reviews. And I'm sure they do fine, and Amazon is happy to have the business. The problem here is the search results, that searching for "headphones" (which is indeed a particularly bad category) gives you a bunch of garbage and not a good selection of products that match your search.

modzu 8y ago

i was looking at a speaker, a couple of the verified reviews said something like, "it fit a little tight".

C1sc0cat 8y ago
I tend to mark down the obvious spam / shit reviews like that
mring33621 8y ago
fit where?

OrgNet 8y ago

just buy from somewhere else whenever it is cheaper

Semaphor 8y ago

While Amazon Germany (afaik) does not yet have many of the problems of Amazon US (I often hear on HN about fake products and the fake reviews of TFA), what really annoys me is the completely different products as one. I was looking at a drill, it's variants included a jigsaw. The reviews were almost all for the jigsaw and at some point, Amazon even removed the notice which variant was reviewed. Utterly useless.

2T1Qka0rEiPr 8y ago
This! In many ways shared reviews for SKUs of the same product make absolute sense (if the blue bag is made well, so should the red one). But there seems to be huge abuse in defining the base product as you've highlighted. I presume sellers have complete autonomy to set them up, and Amazon might argue that it's "infeasible" for them to administer this, but from the perspective of the consumer I completely agree that it erodes confidence in "reviews". Over the years I've noticed a shift in the products I most readily find on Amazon from well established brands to utterly unknown Chinese manufacturers. I've been burnt enough times by buying such products that I've reverted to mostly looking for products which satisfy 1) from reputable company, and 2) positive reviews.

simonh 8y ago

In an unregulated market, brand identity and reputation becomes a very strong differentiating factor. The strongest brand on Amazon is Amazon, so by allowing the generic market to rot they are allowing their own-brand basics products to establish themselves because consumers can assume that Amazon products won't have this fake review problem. It does also work for other brands too of course. I was in the market for some Lightning cables recently and almost every single cheap cable was a switch-out with review for different products. The only brands I recognised were Amazon and Anker and both their stuff was legit (I bought from both).

philipodonnell 8y ago
This is an excellent point and one reason I think we'll inevitably have regulation preventing owners of platforms/marketplaces from competing in them. The incentives are completely out of whack.

sanderjd 8y ago

I really think Amazon needs to fix this. I'm about two shitty products away from cancelling Prime. Their business model is "good enough products shipped really quickly without needing to think about it much". Recently, things I order aren't good enough. I find myself thinking about whether I should just drive to Target so that I can see the thing before I buy it. This seems like a problem for Amazon.

OJFord 8y ago
But they make returns so easy, I'm not that bothered any more, if I get it and it's crap I'll just return it and look harder for a different one.
- sanderjd 8y ago
  I used to feel this way, but I've recently turned a corner. Returning things seemed easy when my return rate was say 5%. Now that it's more like 25% and I'm mostly returning junk sold deceptively, it feels like an awful hassle. I'd much rather shop somewhere where I could choose from, say, three relatively expensive but good options, get one of those, and nearly always keep it, rather than a place where I have 100 cheap options most of which are junk, such that it takes me a couple rounds of returns to get something I want.

ReviewMeta 8y ago

I also agree that it should be very easy for Amazon to pick up on. I can't believe it's happening. We call this "Review Hijacking" and have a warning that appears at the top of our report if we detect it: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/amazon-review-hijacking/ https://reviewmeta.com/blog/amazon-review-hijacking/