13 ms·

Amazon can’t end fake reviews, but its new system might drown them out

114 points by pabo 7y ago

AlexandrB 7y ago
In my experience, making reviews easier to give causes the review quality and usefulness to go down. This happened when Netflix went from 5 stars to a simple like/dislike. I’m not sure why Amazon didn’t just block non-verified-purchaser reviews, increasing spammer costs significantly. I suspect that Amazon reviews are going to be even less useful now. Especially given things like this: > Amazon does not provide many specifics about how a product’s overall star rating is calculated, other than stating that it is not a simple average but instead uses “machine-learned models” that take into account factors such as how recent the rating or review is and whether it was a verified purchase or not.
- awinder 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure that a ton of the review fraud on amazon comes through verified purchases. You refund/pay people to buy the product on amazon and leave a review in the best case, in the worst case you operate accounts buying your own stuff, and then flow the inventory back and basically pay an amazon tax for leaving good reviews. IMO this is pretty solvable by looking at an account's purchase history too, but I don't think it's just as simple as blocking non-verified-purchase reviews.
  - outlace 7y ago
    As long as there is some, even small, cost to posting a review it makes review fraud much less scalable compared to zero-cost reviewing.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      That's true if it costs more than it's worth. The same applies to links and Google. Buying/renting backlinks costs money, and still pretty much everybody that wants to rank in competitive fields does it.
  - figgyc 7y ago
    Perhaps they could limit refunded products to 3 star or below? Really there isn't a good reason to positively review something and take it back, if it was your fault eg if it didn't fit, then you could just not review it.
    - heartbeats 7y ago
      What if you refund out-of-band?
      - frandroid 7y ago
        That's what usually happens. Amusingly, in the form of Amazon gift cards (so you go out and buy more products for review...)
    - takeda 7y ago
      There are probably multiple ways, but often it's fine by providing the product for free in exchange for a good review. They can for example provide a coupon that will reduce the price.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    I suspect solving it is hard to impossible. You can heuristic anything as suspicious at a glance but moderation at scale fails. You personally can decide "this review is bullshit" and block without issue but start flagging in a false positive or even true positive by a manipulator looking to start shit could cause considerable backlash as a futile attempt at pleasing everyone is made. Transparent and consistent rules invite gaming and opaque ones invite accusations of malfeasance and the uncertainty promotes bad feelings and bad behavior. Worse still is that even taking a stance to not take a stance because you know it cannot be done will bring backlash as there are many who demand you take their stance, even allowing easy distribution of self chosen block and filter lists are not enough. There are many who demand the appliance experience.
  - freeAgent 7y ago
    Yes, I've seen articles where people who do this say there are a bunch of Facebook groups for exactly this purpose. Manufacturers/sellers ask people to buy their goods on the group and write good reviews. Once they get the proof of the purchase/review, they Paypal (or whatever) money to the "reviewer." I remember an article I read where some woman's house was overflowing with junk she didn't want because she was writing so many of these fake reviews. I would think Amazon could apply their awesome machine learning to figure out which accounts are pumping out these suspect reviews and perhaps de-prioritizing and maybe even rate limiting and delaying publishing of their reviews. I'd think that would do a lot to alleviate the problem.
    - julianlam 7y ago
      If you stand back and think about how these schemes operate, you wouldn't actually _need_ ML to solve it. Step 1 is getting a list of new products that are receiving a higher than expected number of 5-star reviews Step 2, add it to a list of similar products. Step 3, find accounts that all happen to purchase the same products in the same order. Step 4, ban accounts and sellers.
      - sidlls 7y ago
        That is a very simple algorithm! It’s also something the sort of people who do this will overcome relatively quickly. Automated or systemic attacks and mitigation is a war of escalation.
      - martin_a 7y ago
        > If you stand back and think about how these schemes operate, you wouldn't actually _need_ ML to solve it. As Machine Learning is just a fancy way of doing statistics, you will totally not need it for this.
      - luckylion 7y ago
        step 5: I now have a great way to boot competitors off of your marketplace.
      - zadkey 7y ago
  - Brave-Steak 7y ago
    Can't you just invalidate positive reviews if the purchaser refunds the product? You might end up invalidating some legit reviews, but I think that'd be okay.
  - sct202 7y ago
    There's also low scale review fraud like my sister bought a pet cam and gave it a 3 star review, and the seller started to offer escalating offers for her to remove or increase the rating from full refund, another camera, refund + free camera, and refund + money for the inconvenience.
    - dreamcompiler 7y ago
      It does bug me that scummy vendors know my email address and physical address. What's next? They send goons to my house demanding a good review or my dog gets it?
    - teruakohatu 7y ago
      Last time I left a negitive review not only did I get nothing offered, but Amazon removed the review with some nonsense reason.
    - zadokshi 7y ago
      Last time I left a negative review, Amazon banned my account from making comments. Did they think I was being paid to write a negative comment, is that such a thing? or perhaps they don’t like negative comments either. I don’t know.
  - groby_b 7y ago
    And while you're dreaming that purchase history solves that, the scam world has long moved on. Currently, companies pay people to buy items. They can keep those items, they just need to leave a good review. There are intermediaries who handle lots of sellers, so people buy a mixed bag of random garbage in exchange for the occasional review. Yes, you can probably test for statistical anomalies, but I'm willing to bet that's quickly countered too - just have people buy occasional legit items so their profile is "statistically normal". As far as I can tell, Amazon tries to fight that by keeping their ML model secret so scammers don't learn too quickly, but essentially, they're currently finding out what the Internet learned about SEOs manipulating search results.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  I rather look at the content of the reviews than their ratings, there's been times where someone left what looks like an honest review and it's 4 / 5 but they only write positive things. I don't know what the solution is, but I definitely think more thorough reviews would help. If you return a bad product, try and get a replacement to see if it was just bad luck, but also please do write a detailed review. If you get a good product and it barely has reviews please review it.
  - CWuestefeld 7y ago
    someone left what looks like an honest review and it's 4 / 5 but they only write positive things That may well be me. I don't think that "meets requirements" should merit a 5. When I do reviews, I view a bare "meets requirements" as 3 or maybe 4, depending on the type of product. I want to leave some headroom to be able to point out products that really do excel. Another ambiguity is whether the rating is on an absolute scale, or normalized for value (it's not a perfect product, but it's super-cheap).
    - giancarlostoro 7y ago
      That makes sense, and you don't seem to be the only one, but yeah that is misleading to people like me who hadn't considered that being the reason.
- throwaway55554 7y ago
  > I’m not sure why Amazon didn’t just block non-verified-purchaser reviews, increasing spammer costs significantly. I'm not sure this would help much. I've been asked by vendors to leave a review and if it's 5 stars, I will get something in return. I think for some people this would be a "well, nobody is getting hurt, right?" decision and they'd just do it.
  - TwoHeadedBeast 7y ago
    Amazon should provide an incentive for reporting this sort of thing.
- thiagomgd 7y ago
  I think that on Netflix's case they are not going for reviews. They want to know what you like, to suggest something you'll probably like too. Doesn't matter if it's 4 or 5 stars.
- Seenso 7y ago
  > I’m not sure why Amazon didn’t just block non-verified-purchaser reviews, increasing spammer costs significantly. I don't think it'd do much good. There are already large groups that subsidize verified purchases to get 5 star reviews. I read an article about it, confirmed some investigation on Facebook of on my own. Basically someone runs a Facebook group where sellers advertise free product, promising Paypal reimbursement of the purchase price in exchange for reviews. There are at least (or were, I haven't checked recently) hundreds of Facebook groups across many languages with thousands of members each doing these activities. The reviewers are randos who like free stuff, and I don't think anyone could detect them if they only casually participate in the review scams.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  > making reviews easier to give causes the review quality and usefulness to go down Allow me to generalize making X easier causes the quality and usefulness to go down
ebg13 7y ago
> “For brands, this means the black-hat review clubs and sellers will have less impact, as fake reviews as a percentage of legit reviews should decrease.” Well, at least they're thinking happy thoughts.
luckylion 7y ago
Amazon is competing against the fake reviews with their own Vine club. I've checked dozens of their verified & official "testers", and their five-star-rate averaged somewhere north of 98% which makes their reviews just as useless as the cheap auto-translated fakes to me.
- FakespotCom 7y ago
  And from our internal research at Fakespot, we concur. The positivity bias from influenced reviews such as the Vine review program and multitudes others is rampant. Our ML based algorithms will penalize any biased reviews and show case them to our users.
MichaelApproved 7y ago
> The new one-tap feature asks customers to select from one to five stars for a product. It’s only available to customers who have actually purchased the item from Amazon — “verified” buyers. That barrier alone creates one hurdle that will make the new rating system harder to game, since Amazon does allow written reviews from non-verified buyers. I understand that Amazon allows non-verified buyers to leave a review, so they can have more product reviews but those non-verified reviews are the source of so much garbage. Sure, let people post non-verified reviews, so you look like you have a lot of reviews but at least let me filter them out in my search. Filter: 4+ stars from only verified reviews. Hell, even 3+ stars from verified reviews would be helpful. I know sellers can fake verified reviews by paying the consumer back for the product but that's a massively higher barrier for the manufacturer. The difference is a few cents per review VS a few dollars per review. I've seen products with thousands of fake non-verified reviews. I'm pretty sure they couldn't afford to do the same with verified reviews.
- beerandt 7y ago
  Except negative non-verified reviews tend to be helpful, especially for sellers that constantly relist the same product under different listings. I've bought a few products that are bad to the level of fraudulent, only to see the product relisted so that my review wouldn't be verified. Off course this could be abused by leaving fake negative reviews for competitors. Whack mole. Repeat.
  - heartbeats 7y ago
    What about making them stick, somehow? If I leave a negative review for a product that later gets delisted, Amazon could flag the account on basis of "deleted product with poor reviews". It could then try and see if there are any substantially similar items listed a week on. If so, ban them. Perhaps even easier, make verified negative reviews stick to the seller's account. If you delist a product with negative reviews, those just transfer over to the seller, so you see a 5-star product sold by a 1-star seller.
tobtoh 7y ago
The (edit: average) Amazon star rating has been such a poor indication of the quality of a product for a very long time - at best, it's a weak indicator of which products you might check out first. For me personally, the most valuable bit of feedback are the negative (edit: 1 and 2-star written) reviews - they are pretty much the only review content I trust. I'm looking for patterns of issues that multiple reviewers raise about the product. The positive reviews have so little value when anyone can post a review. So many shallow positive reviews from unverified 'buyers'.
- casion 7y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with this. I always look for and at the 1 start reviews, and I find that to be more useful than reviews I find anywhere else. 4/5 star reviews are useless, but 2/1 star reviews reveal a great deal of useful information about a product. A bunch of 1 star reviews of "UPS damaged my product" indicates a product that's as advertised and isn't astroturfed (much?). No 1 star reviews, or 1 star reviews indicating misleading advertising tend to indicate astroturing. 1 star reviews indicating product failures, support failures, DOA etc... indicate to not purchase the product at all. It's not a pure indicator, but I've found it to be more reliable than other review systems.
  - Shivetya 7y ago
    plus with some of the low star reviews you can compare what they stated was wrong with your own expectations of what could go wrong with the product. the only two considerations for me are the number of reviews and the quality of the low star reviews for the same. the dates of reviews is very useful as well, if a product doesn't have many recent good reviews it can offset the number of reviews in my view
  - obelos 7y ago
    A useful heuristic that I also use, but it's good to be aware that fake reviews go in the other direction, too, of sabotaging competitors' product reviews.
  - 0xffff2 7y ago
olah_1 7y ago
When you review books on amazon, are you reviewing the content or the edition that you purchased (paper, typesetting, cover, etc)? I wish there were two separate ratings.
- martin_a 7y ago
  I think this a constant problem with these type of rating systems. We have also implemented one of the leading feedback-survey-customer happiness-system-things in one of our shops. The amount of negative ratings, because the shipping service provider fucked something up, is immense. There is no way for us to really get those removed (integrity of the platform - good thing in theory) and commenthing something like "it wasn't our fault" doesn't really help either as the rating will influence the total rating one way or another. Maybe that's cost of business, not sure.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    The other problem with reviews is that they seem to be scaled according to price. A garbage product that sells cheap often gets reviewed as highly as genuinely great product that is more expensive.
- tumblen 7y ago
  Yep - and a lot of reviews are even people complaining about shipping which really is irrelevant (unless it's a packaging complaint about the product itself).
jasode 7y ago
>But the new rating system isn’t fool-proof, since some fake-review schemers have a way to get around the “verified purchase” requirement. One popular method is to recruit buyers in private Facebook groups with a promise to refund them for their purchase via PayPal after the shoppers show proof of writing a five-star review. I heard similar gaming techniques are used by makers of diet supplements to build up 5-star reviews. They notify customers that they will send another free bottle of supplements of they leave a 5-star review. This means that the following amazon search results example showing showing overwhelming 5-star ratings are very likely fabricated and can't be trusted: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=lion%27s+mane+supplement https://www.amazon.com/s?k=lion%27s+mane+supplement This is how you get "snake oil" products like noncompliant USB cables or defective Apple chargers into the "5-star" club that amazon buyers unwittingly trust.
- seunosewa 7y ago
  Amazon should strongly incentivize their customers to report sellers who make such offers to them. This should make the game more dangerous for sellers seeking fake reviews.
  - martin_a 7y ago
    If I'm somewhat "vulnerable" to "free stuff", this will not work. Couldn't care less about Amazons problems with fake reviews if I get something for free (that I kind of like).
  - mrec 7y ago
    Doesn't that just shift the game to joe jobs against the competition? There's no reason the offerers need to be closely/obviously tied to the seller. If I'm flogging Foo brand widgets and you're flogging Bar brand widgets, I offer $$$ in exchange for 5-star Bar reviews, report it and bingo, you get a kicking from Amazon.
  - alok-g 7y ago
    Any such incentive by itself be prone to abuse.
the_duke 7y ago
Amazon reviews are about as trustworthy as the selling points of a slimy salesman. I've bought products with a lot of 5-star ratings which were utter garbage. Even if you only consider "Verified Purchase" reviews, every one of them requires careful vetting for authenticity. There are companies providing quality fake reviews by native speakers as a service, where care is taken to not be overly optimistic and provide a few negatives to sound more believable. Even negative reviews might be fake, often mentioning a competing product that is supposed to be better. There are plenty of valid reviews out there, but the need to constantly question the authenticity makes them almost worthless to me. I've mostly gone back to buying from medium sized local retailers. They might have a much smaller selection and are a bit more expensive, but make up for it with a decent quality control.
- coleca 7y ago
  It would be a shame if the reviews went away though. There are tons of garbage reviews out there, but I still find some gems out there. Recently, I was in the market for a paint sprayer and one reviewer wrote this crazy detailed review of the sprayer he purchased, what type of paint he used to paint his cabinets, why this paint worked vs. the other ones he tried, and included numerous pictures of the process and results. It was super helpful not only in making my selection, but ultimately completing my project. I also have found a bunch of instances where people will post tips in the reviews about how to fix or modify a product to make it perform better (or sometimes unfortunately just perform to its advertised specs). In one case I was able to repair my own refrigerator with a part purchased on Amazon and the instructions found in a review. While I'd rather have purchased it locally, that would have meant a service call and spending half the cost of the unit to get it repaired vs. a hundred or so dollars for the new circuit board from Amazon.
olah_1 7y ago
The most useful reviews will always be ones from within your own social network. Because if you have a relationship with the person, they won’t endorse something unless it reflects well on themselves. This is why I’m bullish on protocols like SSB[1] and Iris[2]. [1]: https://handbook.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://handbook.scuttlebutt.nz/ [2]: https://hackernoon.com/what-is-wrong-with-the-internet-and-how-to-fix-it-c67w32no https://hackernoon.com/what-is-wrong-with-the-internet-and-h...
krisroadruck 7y ago
I wonder what the average account age and purchase total is of genuine amazon accounts. Seems like setting some sort of age and purchase threshold to reviews could make the fake review game a lot more difficult.
- heartbeats 7y ago
  One approach might be to shadowban fake accounts' reviews. They still show up as text, but they don't get counted in the average. If Amazon at T = 0 know which reviews are legitimate and which aren't, someone who consistently gives five-star reviews to shit products could have their ratings lowered in importance. You could go all the way with this: look at my reviews, and then only show me reviews made by people with similar tastes.
  - julianlam 7y ago
    A good idea. I'd wager that a high proportion of users who join these "rating review" schemes are accounts that rate 90+% of their items as 5 stars. If you check my Amazon account, I don't even rate most of my purchases. It's a rather low sensitivity metric but one that has some value.
ahpearce 7y ago
I did a quick Google to see if anyone was trying to solve this independently, and this looks pretty neat: https://thereviewindex.com/ https://thereviewindex.com/ ... Anyone have experience with it?
- brlewis 7y ago
  See reviewmeta thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22327272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22327272
izzydata 7y ago
At what point does the poor experience of Amazon outweigh its convenience and cause people to start shopping in physical stores again? Or would people shift to other online retailers?
- DarkTree 7y ago
  I think this parallels really well with the question of how much privacy people are willing to give up for the convenience of digital services. In both cases, it seems like we are increasingly willing to give up privacy and trust in the name of convenience, but I do wonder if there is a breaking point. If there is a breaking point, is it even a system that can be reversed?
- tumblen 7y ago
  Amazon has been more expensive lately and most other stores have free-shipping now too. I've definitely found myself being much more open to shopping around and purchasing elsewhere than I was 4-5 years ago.
- davio 7y ago
  Amazon is probably in excess of 99% perfect service for me. It feels like a step back in time when I order from other retailers.
- kop316 7y ago
  I haven't ordered from amazon in over a year. I to go to physical stores and/or order from a reputable vendor online. Actually it's nice. If I truly want it, I'll actually go and get it, or spend the time to find a reputable vendor. The added friction ensures I don't buy random things that I thought I wanted but don't.
- GaryNumanVevo 7y ago
  For anything outdoor related, climbing, hiking, cycling. I'll always go to REI and talk with a sales person there. REI seems to hire people who have actually used the equipment they sell, I don't mind paying a small markup for the experience.
- JohnFen 7y ago
cik 7y ago
Doesn't everyone just use reviewmeta (https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/) now? They're pretty solid at what they do, the results appear to be rather accurate - and at the very least it's a decent filter.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  I use Fakespot. I think it's only a matter of time before these sites get coopted/bribed by vendors, in the same way a lot of adblockers have been.
  - FakespotCom 7y ago
    Hi, Saoud from Fakespot here. My co-founders and I all got scammed and duped by fake reviews and Fakespot was built to bring back trust and transparency to the e-commerce experience (and others). We have a strict policy to remain neutral in our analyses and we do not in any way, shape or form accept bribes or copt partnerships.
    - fl0wenol 7y ago
      Thanks for explaining the background, Sauod. But don't you need to say that? What policies or strategies are you using to prevent this from happening beyond the shared experience of being burned and avoiding a deep sense of shame if one were to abuse their position?
      - FakespotCom 7y ago
        We have been bootstrapped and funded by institutional investors that allows us to function freely from being in the "unnamed but big review website starting with Y" business model. Ethically speaking, I personally would never support that as it goes against our mission as a company and what we are aiming to build here. We actually get consistent DDoS attacks which are coming from angry e-Commerce sellers that have dismal grades on Fakespot, and that is occurring ever more frequently.
  - 7y ago
subroutine 7y ago
To me a bigger problem than fake reviews is the rampant bait-and-switch. Way too often I will see a product with a 4 or 5 star rating, and find the reviews are talking about something completely different. That, or there will be 10 different products nested under the same identifier. Not just different colors, but different products. So I have no idea which one the person it praising or calling crap. Maybe instead of Avatars next to the reviewer's name, Amazon should just attach an expandable screencap of the product page at the time the "verified purchase" was made.
topicseed 7y ago
Sadly, Amazon and Google reviews are mostly ignored when I am looking for a product, or service. It's so evidently clearly gamed. And Amazon's results pages with 5 of the very same product just with a different sticker/brand is also silly. Reminds me of SEO's early days with keyword stuffing.
JohnFen 7y ago
This may help a bit with fake reviews, but it amplifies the other substantial problem -- authentic, but untrustworthy reviews. I see two type of those all the time: 1) Reviews by people who have not used the product. The tipoff for this is when the customer says something like "I just got this, it looks great! I can't wait to use it." If someone hasn't even used it, then they can't possibly give a useful review of any sort. 2) Reviews in product listings that contain multiple products, or products that have changed since the original listing. The tipoff for this is comments describing a product that is clearly not the one being listed, or is one of several different products in the same listing. If there is an increase in reviews that are just stars without comment, it becomes impossible to root these out at all. I don't see how this would lead to more reliable reviews.
tartoran 7y ago
Perhaps limiting the number of reviews a user can make could mitigate this somehow?
stebann 7y ago
What about the trade offs between privacy and the possibility of being part of a community? I mean, you have some way to identify core characteristics of the subjects whom make the reviews, and if you can't do that, how can you trust them?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
throwaway2786 7y ago
So here's some perspective from an Amazon seller doing 7 figures+ annually. - On average, only 1-3% of customers review products. - Each review is worth a lot of money, often times multiples of the product itself, and especially if you're just starting out. - Each category in Amazon has it's own Average rating, for example, electronics typically have lower ratings because more things can go wrong and there are more usability issues vs something like kitchenware, where less things fail outright. - If you play in a category with a certain failure rate, it is absolutely essential that you do everything you can to mitigate bad reviews as enough of them will sink your business, even if you have a great product. - It takes 8+ 5 star reviews to counteract a 1 star review if you want to maintain a 4.5 star average which is the bar for a good product. This is extremely hard to do without manipulation. - People who complain about fake reviews are only seeing half the problem, the other half is that legit businesses who do it the fair way can't compete. How do you launch a great product on Amazon with 0 reviews? Hope that 500 people buy it to maybe get 5 reviews? Alternatively you spend thousands on product ads hoping that enough people buy... or just succumb to the dark side and pay for reviews which is WAY cheaper. - If you hate Amazon reviews, do your part and start reviewing the good products on Amazon. It is worth more to the seller than you think!
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Here's my problem with leaving reviews: To me, a five star review means that a product went above and beyond my expectations in some extraordinary way. I have bought products that fit that description, but not many. Everything else, I'd give either 4 stars or a still-very-satisfactory 3 stars. The problem is, I know these 4-and-3 star reviews actually hurt sellers, which isn't my intention at all. So I just don't leave feedback. This is also why I don't rate Uber drivers.
  - TwoHeadedBeast 7y ago
    I totally agree. For five stars it would have to be exceptionally good. Something I'm very satisfied I might give four stars, which ironically drags the score down. I recently purchased an alarm clock. When I put the clock in my bedroom, the light from the display was so bright it kept me awake. I went back to the item on Amazon and read all the reviews. One person mentioned the same issue yet still gave it four stars!
user00012-ab 7y ago
I ended up just not buying stuff from amazon anymore, because I was just getting literal trash in the mail that I would have to deal with.
- miguelmota 7y ago
  What kind of stuff were you buying?
  - user00012-ab 7y ago
    The final straw was a NEW mechanical keyboard. I received a keyboard covered in perfume, that was clearly (and badly) repackaged.
- wombat-man 7y ago
  Yeah I cancelled my prime. Nowadays a lot of retailers will ship for free, sometimes 1 or 2 day shipping without an annual membership fee. You just have to spend a certain amount, but more and more items on amazon are 'add on' items anyway.
photon_off 7y ago
Amazon has been my wheelhouse, fulltime, for the past 7 months. I'm building a site that looks at most listings per category and determines "true" scores for each one. The site also lets your filter and sort, instantly, on a variety of attributes, like "price", "unit price", "shipping time", "recent price drop %", "used price discount", "popularity", "brand quality", etc. Spending 7 months collecting and analyzing data of several Amazon categories has been exhausting, but quite revealing. As you can imagine, dealing with low quality products with fake reviews is a challenge -- but it turns out it's not too hard to handle, even with my dataset which is far more limited than Amazon's. Without looking at any reviews or any metadata of reviews (author, count, chronology, etc), one could filter out "impostor" products with 95%+ accuracy. Here's a neat trick: Next time you're unsure if a product has fake reviews, click on the brand of the product and see what else they sell. If you're looking at binoculars, and that same brand also sells dog food bowls, then maybe you should reconsider. I've concluded that Amazon really doesn't care about fake reviews -- they will show users whatever listing has the maximum Expected Value (conversion rate * revenue), per your context (search term, category, or both). Even if a product has obvious fake reviews, if there are enough other people buying it it will float to the top, and Amazon is fine with that.
- the8472 7y ago
  > unit price This is quite an important feature. Amazon already shows this information (sometimes at least) and yet they don't let you sort by it.
  - photon_off 7y ago
    The main problem they have, I imagine, is sparse data. There are only certain fields (depending on category) which they force sellers to populate, eg: "name", "brand", etc. Item weight (which is distinct from _package_ weight), and "number of units" do not seem required, and so not many items have that information filled. So, with sparse data, they have three choices: 1) Allow filter/sort by "unit price" and do not show the X% of listings that are missing this data -- many of which the user may actually be aware of and/or interested in. 2) Don't allow the option at all, and just rely on the fact your customer will do comparisons manually. 3) Try to derive the number of units from text cues in the product name, features, and description, then do #1. It seems they chose #2. I'm going for #3.
MeltySmelty 7y ago
i've brought this up to "executive support" and they always dodge the question. amazon does not like talking about their fake reviews. wait until it comes out they had a hand in it all ;)
anonsivalley652 7y ago
I think, independent of Amazon, another way to combat fake reviews is to have a modern, social-media-enabled, subscriber/patron-supported "Consumer Reports" review service that: - doesn't accept free products or endorse any particular brands, and buys products like an individual could - tests products thoroughly, both short-term and longer-term, including what happens within the warranty period - reviews big-ticket items frequently enough to stay current - offers purchasing gotchas and decision tree for selecting a product - does the math on Total Cost of Ownership, including calculators so someone can plug in their local values (utility costs, taxes, rebates) to make the best decision - has concise maintenance/operating advice - starts small and looks for good products within a category - also seeks out lesser-known, independent manufacturers who stand behind their reputations and products that people might not find on their own - teardown and grade for repairability like iFixit - doesn't spew blog articles that are merely copies of press releases - compare products to those to the past to see the trends in quality, repairability, features and relative cost The problem is that going into a store, platform or IRL, without trustworthy information leads to more arbitrary decisions. And then when there is a more reliable system for deciding what to buy, it's not that hard to have a browser extension that tags items on various platforms with recommendation badges. There are various sites that try to present some reviews in particular genres, but the depth and breadth is usually relatively shallow and incomplete. Then there are the zillions of "review" sites that don't actually even test the products and just put manufacturer specs into a grid, and you have no idea if they have undisclosed sponsors, kickbacks or other deals. Granted, it would be a labor-intensive proposition, so I think the best model would be a worker-owned co-op.
- joshvm 7y ago
  In the UK you have described Which. They've been around for years and getting a "best buy" rating is generally seen as a big deal (certainly it will get you sales). Their website does have a lot of blogspam type content now, and whether you trust their "experts" is up to you. But for generic household goods, they're probably less biased than the average comparison site. https://www.which.co.uk/ https://www.which.co.uk/
vsskanth 7y ago
Slightly OT, but I noticed I've been banned from posting reviews or asking questions on Amazon. No idea why. I don't review usually and my last review was in 2017! I only noticed it a few days back because I wanted to ask a question on a product. Does anybody know how to get out of their blacklist ? I tried emailing but get no response.

114 points by pabo 7y ago

In my experience, making reviews easier to give causes the review quality and usefulness to go down. This happened when Netflix went from 5 stars to a simple like/dislike. I’m not sure why Amazon didn’t just block non-verified-purchaser reviews, increasing spammer costs significantly. I suspect that Amazon reviews are going to be even less useful now. Especially given things like this: > Amazon does not provide many specifics about how a product’s overall star rating is calculated, other than stating that it is not a simple average but instead uses “machine-learned models” that take into account factors such as how recent the rating or review is and whether it was a verified purchase or not.

awinder 7y ago
I'm pretty sure that a ton of the review fraud on amazon comes through verified purchases. You refund/pay people to buy the product on amazon and leave a review in the best case, in the worst case you operate accounts buying your own stuff, and then flow the inventory back and basically pay an amazon tax for leaving good reviews. IMO this is pretty solvable by looking at an account's purchase history too, but I don't think it's just as simple as blocking non-verified-purchase reviews.
- outlace 7y ago
  As long as there is some, even small, cost to posting a review it makes review fraud much less scalable compared to zero-cost reviewing.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    That's true if it costs more than it's worth. The same applies to links and Google. Buying/renting backlinks costs money, and still pretty much everybody that wants to rank in competitive fields does it.
- figgyc 7y ago
  Perhaps they could limit refunded products to 3 star or below? Really there isn't a good reason to positively review something and take it back, if it was your fault eg if it didn't fit, then you could just not review it.
  - heartbeats 7y ago
    What if you refund out-of-band?
    - frandroid 7y ago
      That's what usually happens. Amusingly, in the form of Amazon gift cards (so you go out and buy more products for review...)
  - takeda 7y ago
    There are probably multiple ways, but often it's fine by providing the product for free in exchange for a good review. They can for example provide a coupon that will reduce the price.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  I suspect solving it is hard to impossible. You can heuristic anything as suspicious at a glance but moderation at scale fails. You personally can decide "this review is bullshit" and block without issue but start flagging in a false positive or even true positive by a manipulator looking to start shit could cause considerable backlash as a futile attempt at pleasing everyone is made. Transparent and consistent rules invite gaming and opaque ones invite accusations of malfeasance and the uncertainty promotes bad feelings and bad behavior. Worse still is that even taking a stance to not take a stance because you know it cannot be done will bring backlash as there are many who demand you take their stance, even allowing easy distribution of self chosen block and filter lists are not enough. There are many who demand the appliance experience.
- freeAgent 7y ago
  Yes, I've seen articles where people who do this say there are a bunch of Facebook groups for exactly this purpose. Manufacturers/sellers ask people to buy their goods on the group and write good reviews. Once they get the proof of the purchase/review, they Paypal (or whatever) money to the "reviewer." I remember an article I read where some woman's house was overflowing with junk she didn't want because she was writing so many of these fake reviews. I would think Amazon could apply their awesome machine learning to figure out which accounts are pumping out these suspect reviews and perhaps de-prioritizing and maybe even rate limiting and delaying publishing of their reviews. I'd think that would do a lot to alleviate the problem.
  - julianlam 7y ago
    If you stand back and think about how these schemes operate, you wouldn't actually _need_ ML to solve it. Step 1 is getting a list of new products that are receiving a higher than expected number of 5-star reviews Step 2, add it to a list of similar products. Step 3, find accounts that all happen to purchase the same products in the same order. Step 4, ban accounts and sellers.
    - sidlls 7y ago
      That is a very simple algorithm! It’s also something the sort of people who do this will overcome relatively quickly. Automated or systemic attacks and mitigation is a war of escalation.
    - martin_a 7y ago
      > If you stand back and think about how these schemes operate, you wouldn't actually _need_ ML to solve it. As Machine Learning is just a fancy way of doing statistics, you will totally not need it for this.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      step 5: I now have a great way to boot competitors off of your marketplace.
    - zadkey 7y ago
- Brave-Steak 7y ago
  Can't you just invalidate positive reviews if the purchaser refunds the product? You might end up invalidating some legit reviews, but I think that'd be okay.
- sct202 7y ago
  There's also low scale review fraud like my sister bought a pet cam and gave it a 3 star review, and the seller started to offer escalating offers for her to remove or increase the rating from full refund, another camera, refund + free camera, and refund + money for the inconvenience.
  - dreamcompiler 7y ago
    It does bug me that scummy vendors know my email address and physical address. What's next? They send goons to my house demanding a good review or my dog gets it?
  - teruakohatu 7y ago
    Last time I left a negitive review not only did I get nothing offered, but Amazon removed the review with some nonsense reason.
  - zadokshi 7y ago
    Last time I left a negative review, Amazon banned my account from making comments. Did they think I was being paid to write a negative comment, is that such a thing? or perhaps they don’t like negative comments either. I don’t know.
- groby_b 7y ago
  And while you're dreaming that purchase history solves that, the scam world has long moved on. Currently, companies pay people to buy items. They can keep those items, they just need to leave a good review. There are intermediaries who handle lots of sellers, so people buy a mixed bag of random garbage in exchange for the occasional review. Yes, you can probably test for statistical anomalies, but I'm willing to bet that's quickly countered too - just have people buy occasional legit items so their profile is "statistically normal". As far as I can tell, Amazon tries to fight that by keeping their ML model secret so scammers don't learn too quickly, but essentially, they're currently finding out what the Internet learned about SEOs manipulating search results.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
I rather look at the content of the reviews than their ratings, there's been times where someone left what looks like an honest review and it's 4 / 5 but they only write positive things. I don't know what the solution is, but I definitely think more thorough reviews would help. If you return a bad product, try and get a replacement to see if it was just bad luck, but also please do write a detailed review. If you get a good product and it barely has reviews please review it.
- CWuestefeld 7y ago
  someone left what looks like an honest review and it's 4 / 5 but they only write positive things That may well be me. I don't think that "meets requirements" should merit a 5. When I do reviews, I view a bare "meets requirements" as 3 or maybe 4, depending on the type of product. I want to leave some headroom to be able to point out products that really do excel. Another ambiguity is whether the rating is on an absolute scale, or normalized for value (it's not a perfect product, but it's super-cheap).
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    That makes sense, and you don't seem to be the only one, but yeah that is misleading to people like me who hadn't considered that being the reason.
throwaway55554 7y ago
> I’m not sure why Amazon didn’t just block non-verified-purchaser reviews, increasing spammer costs significantly. I'm not sure this would help much. I've been asked by vendors to leave a review and if it's 5 stars, I will get something in return. I think for some people this would be a "well, nobody is getting hurt, right?" decision and they'd just do it.
- TwoHeadedBeast 7y ago
  Amazon should provide an incentive for reporting this sort of thing.
thiagomgd 7y ago
I think that on Netflix's case they are not going for reviews. They want to know what you like, to suggest something you'll probably like too. Doesn't matter if it's 4 or 5 stars.
Seenso 7y ago
> I’m not sure why Amazon didn’t just block non-verified-purchaser reviews, increasing spammer costs significantly. I don't think it'd do much good. There are already large groups that subsidize verified purchases to get 5 star reviews. I read an article about it, confirmed some investigation on Facebook of on my own. Basically someone runs a Facebook group where sellers advertise free product, promising Paypal reimbursement of the purchase price in exchange for reviews. There are at least (or were, I haven't checked recently) hundreds of Facebook groups across many languages with thousands of members each doing these activities. The reviewers are randos who like free stuff, and I don't think anyone could detect them if they only casually participate in the review scams.
agumonkey 7y ago
> making reviews easier to give causes the review quality and usefulness to go down Allow me to generalize making X easier causes the quality and usefulness to go down

ebg13 7y ago

> “For brands, this means the black-hat review clubs and sellers will have less impact, as fake reviews as a percentage of legit reviews should decrease.” Well, at least they're thinking happy thoughts.

luckylion 7y ago

Amazon is competing against the fake reviews with their own Vine club. I've checked dozens of their verified & official "testers", and their five-star-rate averaged somewhere north of 98% which makes their reviews just as useless as the cheap auto-translated fakes to me.

FakespotCom 7y ago
And from our internal research at Fakespot, we concur. The positivity bias from influenced reviews such as the Vine review program and multitudes others is rampant. Our ML based algorithms will penalize any biased reviews and show case them to our users.

MichaelApproved 7y ago

> The new one-tap feature asks customers to select from one to five stars for a product. It’s only available to customers who have actually purchased the item from Amazon — “verified” buyers. That barrier alone creates one hurdle that will make the new rating system harder to game, since Amazon does allow written reviews from non-verified buyers. I understand that Amazon allows non-verified buyers to leave a review, so they can have more product reviews but those non-verified reviews are the source of so much garbage. Sure, let people post non-verified reviews, so you look like you have a lot of reviews but at least let me filter them out in my search. Filter: 4+ stars from only verified reviews. Hell, even 3+ stars from verified reviews would be helpful. I know sellers can fake verified reviews by paying the consumer back for the product but that's a massively higher barrier for the manufacturer. The difference is a few cents per review VS a few dollars per review. I've seen products with thousands of fake non-verified reviews. I'm pretty sure they couldn't afford to do the same with verified reviews.

beerandt 7y ago
Except negative non-verified reviews tend to be helpful, especially for sellers that constantly relist the same product under different listings. I've bought a few products that are bad to the level of fraudulent, only to see the product relisted so that my review wouldn't be verified. Off course this could be abused by leaving fake negative reviews for competitors. Whack mole. Repeat.
- heartbeats 7y ago
  What about making them stick, somehow? If I leave a negative review for a product that later gets delisted, Amazon could flag the account on basis of "deleted product with poor reviews". It could then try and see if there are any substantially similar items listed a week on. If so, ban them. Perhaps even easier, make verified negative reviews stick to the seller's account. If you delist a product with negative reviews, those just transfer over to the seller, so you see a 5-star product sold by a 1-star seller.

tobtoh 7y ago

The (edit: average) Amazon star rating has been such a poor indication of the quality of a product for a very long time - at best, it's a weak indicator of which products you might check out first. For me personally, the most valuable bit of feedback are the negative (edit: 1 and 2-star written) reviews - they are pretty much the only review content I trust. I'm looking for patterns of issues that multiple reviewers raise about the product. The positive reviews have so little value when anyone can post a review. So many shallow positive reviews from unverified 'buyers'.

casion 7y ago
I'm not sure I agree with this. I always look for and at the 1 start reviews, and I find that to be more useful than reviews I find anywhere else. 4/5 star reviews are useless, but 2/1 star reviews reveal a great deal of useful information about a product. A bunch of 1 star reviews of "UPS damaged my product" indicates a product that's as advertised and isn't astroturfed (much?). No 1 star reviews, or 1 star reviews indicating misleading advertising tend to indicate astroturing. 1 star reviews indicating product failures, support failures, DOA etc... indicate to not purchase the product at all. It's not a pure indicator, but I've found it to be more reliable than other review systems.
- Shivetya 7y ago
  plus with some of the low star reviews you can compare what they stated was wrong with your own expectations of what could go wrong with the product. the only two considerations for me are the number of reviews and the quality of the low star reviews for the same. the dates of reviews is very useful as well, if a product doesn't have many recent good reviews it can offset the number of reviews in my view
- obelos 7y ago
  A useful heuristic that I also use, but it's good to be aware that fake reviews go in the other direction, too, of sabotaging competitors' product reviews.
- 0xffff2 7y ago

olah_1 7y ago

When you review books on amazon, are you reviewing the content or the edition that you purchased (paper, typesetting, cover, etc)? I wish there were two separate ratings.

martin_a 7y ago
I think this a constant problem with these type of rating systems. We have also implemented one of the leading feedback-survey-customer happiness-system-things in one of our shops. The amount of negative ratings, because the shipping service provider fucked something up, is immense. There is no way for us to really get those removed (integrity of the platform - good thing in theory) and commenthing something like "it wasn't our fault" doesn't really help either as the rating will influence the total rating one way or another. Maybe that's cost of business, not sure.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  The other problem with reviews is that they seem to be scaled according to price. A garbage product that sells cheap often gets reviewed as highly as genuinely great product that is more expensive.
tumblen 7y ago
Yep - and a lot of reviews are even people complaining about shipping which really is irrelevant (unless it's a packaging complaint about the product itself).

jasode 7y ago

>But the new rating system isn’t fool-proof, since some fake-review schemers have a way to get around the “verified purchase” requirement. One popular method is to recruit buyers in private Facebook groups with a promise to refund them for their purchase via PayPal after the shoppers show proof of writing a five-star review. I heard similar gaming techniques are used by makers of diet supplements to build up 5-star reviews. They notify customers that they will send another free bottle of supplements of they leave a 5-star review. This means that the following amazon search results example showing showing overwhelming 5-star ratings are very likely fabricated and can't be trusted: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=lion%27s+mane+supplement https://www.amazon.com/s?k=lion%27s+mane+supplement This is how you get "snake oil" products like noncompliant USB cables or defective Apple chargers into the "5-star" club that amazon buyers unwittingly trust.

seunosewa 7y ago
Amazon should strongly incentivize their customers to report sellers who make such offers to them. This should make the game more dangerous for sellers seeking fake reviews.
- martin_a 7y ago
  If I'm somewhat "vulnerable" to "free stuff", this will not work. Couldn't care less about Amazons problems with fake reviews if I get something for free (that I kind of like).
- mrec 7y ago
  Doesn't that just shift the game to joe jobs against the competition? There's no reason the offerers need to be closely/obviously tied to the seller. If I'm flogging Foo brand widgets and you're flogging Bar brand widgets, I offer $$$ in exchange for 5-star Bar reviews, report it and bingo, you get a kicking from Amazon.
- alok-g 7y ago
  Any such incentive by itself be prone to abuse.

the_duke 7y ago

Amazon reviews are about as trustworthy as the selling points of a slimy salesman. I've bought products with a lot of 5-star ratings which were utter garbage. Even if you only consider "Verified Purchase" reviews, every one of them requires careful vetting for authenticity. There are companies providing quality fake reviews by native speakers as a service, where care is taken to not be overly optimistic and provide a few negatives to sound more believable. Even negative reviews might be fake, often mentioning a competing product that is supposed to be better. There are plenty of valid reviews out there, but the need to constantly question the authenticity makes them almost worthless to me. I've mostly gone back to buying from medium sized local retailers. They might have a much smaller selection and are a bit more expensive, but make up for it with a decent quality control.

coleca 7y ago
It would be a shame if the reviews went away though. There are tons of garbage reviews out there, but I still find some gems out there. Recently, I was in the market for a paint sprayer and one reviewer wrote this crazy detailed review of the sprayer he purchased, what type of paint he used to paint his cabinets, why this paint worked vs. the other ones he tried, and included numerous pictures of the process and results. It was super helpful not only in making my selection, but ultimately completing my project. I also have found a bunch of instances where people will post tips in the reviews about how to fix or modify a product to make it perform better (or sometimes unfortunately just perform to its advertised specs). In one case I was able to repair my own refrigerator with a part purchased on Amazon and the instructions found in a review. While I'd rather have purchased it locally, that would have meant a service call and spending half the cost of the unit to get it repaired vs. a hundred or so dollars for the new circuit board from Amazon.

olah_1 7y ago

The most useful reviews will always be ones from within your own social network. Because if you have a relationship with the person, they won’t endorse something unless it reflects well on themselves. This is why I’m bullish on protocols like SSB[1] and Iris[2]. [1]: https://handbook.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://handbook.scuttlebutt.nz/ [2]: https://hackernoon.com/what-is-wrong-with-the-internet-and-how-to-fix-it-c67w32no https://hackernoon.com/what-is-wrong-with-the-internet-and-h...

krisroadruck 7y ago

I wonder what the average account age and purchase total is of genuine amazon accounts. Seems like setting some sort of age and purchase threshold to reviews could make the fake review game a lot more difficult.

heartbeats 7y ago
One approach might be to shadowban fake accounts' reviews. They still show up as text, but they don't get counted in the average. If Amazon at T = 0 know which reviews are legitimate and which aren't, someone who consistently gives five-star reviews to shit products could have their ratings lowered in importance. You could go all the way with this: look at my reviews, and then only show me reviews made by people with similar tastes.
- julianlam 7y ago
  A good idea. I'd wager that a high proportion of users who join these "rating review" schemes are accounts that rate 90+% of their items as 5 stars. If you check my Amazon account, I don't even rate most of my purchases. It's a rather low sensitivity metric but one that has some value.

ahpearce 7y ago

I did a quick Google to see if anyone was trying to solve this independently, and this looks pretty neat: https://thereviewindex.com/ https://thereviewindex.com/ ... Anyone have experience with it?

brlewis 7y ago
See reviewmeta thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22327272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22327272

izzydata 7y ago

At what point does the poor experience of Amazon outweigh its convenience and cause people to start shopping in physical stores again? Or would people shift to other online retailers?

DarkTree 7y ago
I think this parallels really well with the question of how much privacy people are willing to give up for the convenience of digital services. In both cases, it seems like we are increasingly willing to give up privacy and trust in the name of convenience, but I do wonder if there is a breaking point. If there is a breaking point, is it even a system that can be reversed?
tumblen 7y ago
Amazon has been more expensive lately and most other stores have free-shipping now too. I've definitely found myself being much more open to shopping around and purchasing elsewhere than I was 4-5 years ago.
davio 7y ago
Amazon is probably in excess of 99% perfect service for me. It feels like a step back in time when I order from other retailers.
kop316 7y ago
I haven't ordered from amazon in over a year. I to go to physical stores and/or order from a reputable vendor online. Actually it's nice. If I truly want it, I'll actually go and get it, or spend the time to find a reputable vendor. The added friction ensures I don't buy random things that I thought I wanted but don't.
GaryNumanVevo 7y ago
For anything outdoor related, climbing, hiking, cycling. I'll always go to REI and talk with a sales person there. REI seems to hire people who have actually used the equipment they sell, I don't mind paying a small markup for the experience.
JohnFen 7y ago

cik 7y ago

Doesn't everyone just use reviewmeta (https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/) now? They're pretty solid at what they do, the results appear to be rather accurate - and at the very least it's a decent filter.

ceejayoz 7y ago
I use Fakespot. I think it's only a matter of time before these sites get coopted/bribed by vendors, in the same way a lot of adblockers have been.
- FakespotCom 7y ago
  Hi, Saoud from Fakespot here. My co-founders and I all got scammed and duped by fake reviews and Fakespot was built to bring back trust and transparency to the e-commerce experience (and others). We have a strict policy to remain neutral in our analyses and we do not in any way, shape or form accept bribes or copt partnerships.
  - fl0wenol 7y ago
    Thanks for explaining the background, Sauod. But don't you need to say that? What policies or strategies are you using to prevent this from happening beyond the shared experience of being burned and avoiding a deep sense of shame if one were to abuse their position?
    - FakespotCom 7y ago
      We have been bootstrapped and funded by institutional investors that allows us to function freely from being in the "unnamed but big review website starting with Y" business model. Ethically speaking, I personally would never support that as it goes against our mission as a company and what we are aiming to build here. We actually get consistent DDoS attacks which are coming from angry e-Commerce sellers that have dismal grades on Fakespot, and that is occurring ever more frequently.
- 7y ago

subroutine 7y ago

To me a bigger problem than fake reviews is the rampant bait-and-switch. Way too often I will see a product with a 4 or 5 star rating, and find the reviews are talking about something completely different. That, or there will be 10 different products nested under the same identifier. Not just different colors, but different products. So I have no idea which one the person it praising or calling crap. Maybe instead of Avatars next to the reviewer's name, Amazon should just attach an expandable screencap of the product page at the time the "verified purchase" was made.

topicseed 7y ago

Sadly, Amazon and Google reviews are mostly ignored when I am looking for a product, or service. It's so evidently clearly gamed. And Amazon's results pages with 5 of the very same product just with a different sticker/brand is also silly. Reminds me of SEO's early days with keyword stuffing.

JohnFen 7y ago

This may help a bit with fake reviews, but it amplifies the other substantial problem -- authentic, but untrustworthy reviews. I see two type of those all the time: 1) Reviews by people who have not used the product. The tipoff for this is when the customer says something like "I just got this, it looks great! I can't wait to use it." If someone hasn't even used it, then they can't possibly give a useful review of any sort. 2) Reviews in product listings that contain multiple products, or products that have changed since the original listing. The tipoff for this is comments describing a product that is clearly not the one being listed, or is one of several different products in the same listing. If there is an increase in reviews that are just stars without comment, it becomes impossible to root these out at all. I don't see how this would lead to more reliable reviews.

tartoran 7y ago

Perhaps limiting the number of reviews a user can make could mitigate this somehow?

stebann 7y ago

What about the trade offs between privacy and the possibility of being part of a community? I mean, you have some way to identify core characteristics of the subjects whom make the reviews, and if you can't do that, how can you trust them?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

throwaway2786 7y ago

So here's some perspective from an Amazon seller doing 7 figures+ annually. - On average, only 1-3% of customers review products. - Each review is worth a lot of money, often times multiples of the product itself, and especially if you're just starting out. - Each category in Amazon has it's own Average rating, for example, electronics typically have lower ratings because more things can go wrong and there are more usability issues vs something like kitchenware, where less things fail outright. - If you play in a category with a certain failure rate, it is absolutely essential that you do everything you can to mitigate bad reviews as enough of them will sink your business, even if you have a great product. - It takes 8+ 5 star reviews to counteract a 1 star review if you want to maintain a 4.5 star average which is the bar for a good product. This is extremely hard to do without manipulation. - People who complain about fake reviews are only seeing half the problem, the other half is that legit businesses who do it the fair way can't compete. How do you launch a great product on Amazon with 0 reviews? Hope that 500 people buy it to maybe get 5 reviews? Alternatively you spend thousands on product ads hoping that enough people buy... or just succumb to the dark side and pay for reviews which is WAY cheaper. - If you hate Amazon reviews, do your part and start reviewing the good products on Amazon. It is worth more to the seller than you think!

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
Here's my problem with leaving reviews: To me, a five star review means that a product went above and beyond my expectations in some extraordinary way. I have bought products that fit that description, but not many. Everything else, I'd give either 4 stars or a still-very-satisfactory 3 stars. The problem is, I know these 4-and-3 star reviews actually hurt sellers, which isn't my intention at all. So I just don't leave feedback. This is also why I don't rate Uber drivers.
- TwoHeadedBeast 7y ago
  I totally agree. For five stars it would have to be exceptionally good. Something I'm very satisfied I might give four stars, which ironically drags the score down. I recently purchased an alarm clock. When I put the clock in my bedroom, the light from the display was so bright it kept me awake. I went back to the item on Amazon and read all the reviews. One person mentioned the same issue yet still gave it four stars!

user00012-ab 7y ago

I ended up just not buying stuff from amazon anymore, because I was just getting literal trash in the mail that I would have to deal with.

miguelmota 7y ago
What kind of stuff were you buying?
- user00012-ab 7y ago
  The final straw was a NEW mechanical keyboard. I received a keyboard covered in perfume, that was clearly (and badly) repackaged.
wombat-man 7y ago
Yeah I cancelled my prime. Nowadays a lot of retailers will ship for free, sometimes 1 or 2 day shipping without an annual membership fee. You just have to spend a certain amount, but more and more items on amazon are 'add on' items anyway.

photon_off 7y ago

Amazon has been my wheelhouse, fulltime, for the past 7 months. I'm building a site that looks at most listings per category and determines "true" scores for each one. The site also lets your filter and sort, instantly, on a variety of attributes, like "price", "unit price", "shipping time", "recent price drop %", "used price discount", "popularity", "brand quality", etc. Spending 7 months collecting and analyzing data of several Amazon categories has been exhausting, but quite revealing. As you can imagine, dealing with low quality products with fake reviews is a challenge -- but it turns out it's not too hard to handle, even with my dataset which is far more limited than Amazon's. Without looking at any reviews or any metadata of reviews (author, count, chronology, etc), one could filter out "impostor" products with 95%+ accuracy. Here's a neat trick: Next time you're unsure if a product has fake reviews, click on the brand of the product and see what else they sell. If you're looking at binoculars, and that same brand also sells dog food bowls, then maybe you should reconsider. I've concluded that Amazon really doesn't care about fake reviews -- they will show users whatever listing has the maximum Expected Value (conversion rate * revenue), per your context (search term, category, or both). Even if a product has obvious fake reviews, if there are enough other people buying it it will float to the top, and Amazon is fine with that.

the8472 7y ago
> unit price This is quite an important feature. Amazon already shows this information (sometimes at least) and yet they don't let you sort by it.
- photon_off 7y ago
  The main problem they have, I imagine, is sparse data. There are only certain fields (depending on category) which they force sellers to populate, eg: "name", "brand", etc. Item weight (which is distinct from _package_ weight), and "number of units" do not seem required, and so not many items have that information filled. So, with sparse data, they have three choices: 1) Allow filter/sort by "unit price" and do not show the X% of listings that are missing this data -- many of which the user may actually be aware of and/or interested in. 2) Don't allow the option at all, and just rely on the fact your customer will do comparisons manually. 3) Try to derive the number of units from text cues in the product name, features, and description, then do #1. It seems they chose #2. I'm going for #3.

MeltySmelty 7y ago

i've brought this up to "executive support" and they always dodge the question. amazon does not like talking about their fake reviews. wait until it comes out they had a hand in it all ;)

anonsivalley652 7y ago

I think, independent of Amazon, another way to combat fake reviews is to have a modern, social-media-enabled, subscriber/patron-supported "Consumer Reports" review service that: - doesn't accept free products or endorse any particular brands, and buys products like an individual could - tests products thoroughly, both short-term and longer-term, including what happens within the warranty period - reviews big-ticket items frequently enough to stay current - offers purchasing gotchas and decision tree for selecting a product - does the math on Total Cost of Ownership, including calculators so someone can plug in their local values (utility costs, taxes, rebates) to make the best decision - has concise maintenance/operating advice - starts small and looks for good products within a category - also seeks out lesser-known, independent manufacturers who stand behind their reputations and products that people might not find on their own - teardown and grade for repairability like iFixit - doesn't spew blog articles that are merely copies of press releases - compare products to those to the past to see the trends in quality, repairability, features and relative cost The problem is that going into a store, platform or IRL, without trustworthy information leads to more arbitrary decisions. And then when there is a more reliable system for deciding what to buy, it's not that hard to have a browser extension that tags items on various platforms with recommendation badges. There are various sites that try to present some reviews in particular genres, but the depth and breadth is usually relatively shallow and incomplete. Then there are the zillions of "review" sites that don't actually even test the products and just put manufacturer specs into a grid, and you have no idea if they have undisclosed sponsors, kickbacks or other deals. Granted, it would be a labor-intensive proposition, so I think the best model would be a worker-owned co-op.

joshvm 7y ago
In the UK you have described Which. They've been around for years and getting a "best buy" rating is generally seen as a big deal (certainly it will get you sales). Their website does have a lot of blogspam type content now, and whether you trust their "experts" is up to you. But for generic household goods, they're probably less biased than the average comparison site. https://www.which.co.uk/ https://www.which.co.uk/

vsskanth 7y ago

Slightly OT, but I noticed I've been banned from posting reviews or asking questions on Amazon. No idea why. I don't review usually and my last review was in 2017! I only noticed it a few days back because I wanted to ask a question on a product. Does anybody know how to get out of their blacklist ? I tried emailing but get no response.