13 ms·

Amazon is filled with fake reviews and it’s getting harder to spot them

181 points by admiralspoo 6y ago

mdorazio 6y ago
This topic comes up quite frequently on HN. It boils down to the risk-reward ratio. If you've never tried to sell anything on Amazon it's probably not obvious how ridiculously important positive reviews are to your product sales. I cannot overstate how important they are in the beginning, given the way your average online shopper decides what to buy. What this means is that sellers are faced with an absolute imperative to get positive reviews at any cost, otherwise they die, while the flip side is that if they get caught manipulating reviews they maybe get de-listed and start over again. This imbalance leads to exactly what you see now, and it at least seems like as long as positive reviews are so important (in the absence of curation) this will be an arms race.
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  I agree with you and it makes sense. As a noob to this, have you happened to have read up on any legit alternatives to the review treadmill?
  - mdorazio 6y ago
    From which side? The obvious alternative for consumers is to go back to curation, which is what brick and mortar retailers have done since forever. Costco, for example, has a giant team of people that test, verify, and give approval on the few products that go on shelves so that shoppers know they are getting something legitimate and of reasonable quality. On the marketplace seller side I haven't come across anything that really strikes me as a better alternative. Review culture is pretty ingrained at this point.
- AniseAbyss 6y ago
  Amazon feels to me just a place that continues to exist because of its name recognition. Most of the stuff doesn't even come from Amazon's own warehouses anymore.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    I’d be surprised if less than 75% of gross merchandise sales don’t come from Amazon FCs. I’d be incredibly surprised if it was less than 60%.
    - TAForObvReasons 6y ago
      I found out recently that there are actually a few levels of "Amazon Prime" sales! The "Shipped and sold by Amazon" is what we normally expect, but there's also "Fulfilled by Amazon" and a third tier that's effectively "Prime Shipping" but is treated as a third-party seller. That third tier is particularly deceptive because the sidebar display doesn't distinguish between the second and third case but the return policies are very different.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        That third category is “Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP)”. If my orders from Amazon are in any way representative, SFP is well under 10% of volume (probably under 5%). I get way more non-Prime orders than SFP.
  - foresto 6y ago
    I suspect many people buy from Amazon because they can't find what they want anywhere else, or don't want to be stuck with shipping and restocking fees if something is wrong with it, or both. Sadly, there aren't many vendors with a wide selection and a hassle-free return policy. On Amazon, even third-party sellers often have a return policy that matches Amazon's.
2bluesc 6y ago
Not just fake reviews (where fake means no product was ever bought), but also reimbursed 5-star reviews. Instagram + Facebook are blasting sites like Rebatest[0] in my face for some reason. I'm shocked Amazon lets such sites exist. I'm not opposed to people asking for reviews, but insisting they are 5-star reviews seems terribly unethical. Not surprisingly, they have a referral program as well... Intrigued by this several hours earlier today, I signed-up because who wouldn't want a reimbursement for a _good_ product they would have bought otherwise? Let's see how this goes, low expectations. Searching Google for "rebatest vs" naturally yields competitors Rebaid[1] [0] https://www.rebatest.com/ https://www.rebatest.com/ [1] https://www.rebaid.com/ https://www.rebaid.com/
- axaxs 6y ago
  Yep. I've bought two things in the last week that each offer $15 for a five star review. The weird thing is, both were truly great products, so there wasn't an ethical dilemma for me, but it's kinda gross it exists.
dvduval 6y ago
Maybe I'll get down voted, but I think it's a legitimate question to ask: if someone offers me a refund in exchange for my review, and the product would benefit me, why shouldn't I accept it? Is it my duty to protect Amazon or other consumers? Perhaps it's a small merchant trying to get started in the face of big corporations doing other things to cheat the system (ex. pricing out competition to capture the market). Could it be that I'm helping a small business get started by getting a free product in exchange for a review? There's no way to know for sure. But I can imagine that some people would indeed take this offer and I don't necessarily blame them. Should I?
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Is it my duty to protect Amazon or other consumers? If you follow Kant, the argument is pretty much this: if everyone would do that, nobody could trust any reviews. The right choice, according to Kant, is that which you can want to be made into law for everyone. You don't want reviews to lose all meaning as they're important information for people to learn about the products, ergo you mustn't fake it. Should you blame them? Yeah, but it's a pretty small infraction and they're a small cog in a large machine, so don't be too harsh.
  - dvduval 6y ago
    Yes, thank you for entertaining this idea at least. There is a certain amount of logic that people who post a review, which is optional, have some sort of motivation for doing it in the first place. And then there's also the idea that the seller, in this case Amazon, is relieving themselves or their own responsibility to review the products that they sell before putting them on the market.
- fluffernutter 6y ago
  The issue is not whether you should accept a situation which appears to be mutually beneficial to you and the entity soliciting the review. Corporations are typically going to make decisions about the things they do based on income to to corporate entity. While this usually aligns to consumer need and demand (for happiness even), it usually doesn't as a whole. Facebook seems to give people what they want, but actually they figured out how to progressively remove choices from users to get EXACTLY what they want without the users realizing what had been lost (time, attention, focus, desire for a unique product vs. the product resulting from the software driven dogma of the crowd, etc.) The question should be whether or not the embodied process is fair, in whole, to the users? As much as we worry about "right" API design here (or what is the perfect framework for CSS?), you'd think we'd worry about how bad we are screwing users with all this software optimized to make startups, founders, VCs and private equity firms more an dmore money with less and less effort.
ilamont 6y ago
I'd like to know how it's possible for third-party sites such as https://www.fakespot.com https://www.fakespot.com to more effectively identify fake Amazon reviews while Amazon (with presumably better data) fails so miserably. Same question applies to Twitter. Regularly we see researchers uncovering evidence of fake accounts and bot networks pushing spam, conspiracy theories, and misinformation (https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/20/859814085/researchers-nearly-half-of-accounts-tweeting-about-coronavirus-are-likely-bots https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...) while Twitter struggles to identify the fakes. ETA: Regarding comments along the lines of, "it's in their best interest to let fake reviews continue as it boosts Amazon's sales." I think this argument is getting a bit old, as Amazon's growing reputation for fake reviews (and fake products) is turning off even mainstream shoppers and giving a huge boost to big & small competitors. Amazon now has a very big financial incentive to move beyond whack-a-mole and truly tackle these problems, which requires A) doing at least as good as Fakespot at identifying the bad actors and B) implementing technologies and policies that discourage buying or posting fake reviews.
- surfmike 6y ago
  It Is Difficult to Get Someone to Understand Something When Their Salary Depends Upon Their Not Understanding It
  - ajmurmann 6y ago
    That seems like short-sighted thinking on the part of Amazon though. If I can I am now ordering anything expensive from the vendor directly and avoid Amazon. Just two years ago, I'd have even paid a little extra to have the purchase go through Amazon due to their fast shipping, easy returns and my Amazon store card given me 5% back on purchases. Just the last three months, I probably spent $2k-3k buying directly instead of via Amazon. That was 100% driven by not wanting to get fakes
    - BlueScreenDeath 6y ago
      Amazon knows that products with no or bad reviews don't sell well. By not policing they allow more reviews and more sales.
Havoc 6y ago
Yeah the only time it’s any use is on ebooks to determine roughly how popular the book is. Ie review count rather than content
Simulacra 6y ago
There's a great app you can get called FakeSpot analyzes the reviews, and provides some clarity to the reviews on Amazon, and Best Buy.
strombofulous 6y ago
I swear I see an article like this on HN at least once a month (actually, according to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=amazon&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., it's probably closer to about once a week) and the comments are always the same, let me save you (the person reading this) some time and summarize what these comments are going to look like: > I've lost all faith in Amazon, now I use Walmart, where I get cheap junk but at least I know it's real cheap junk > Amazon has so much data! How have they failed so hard to stop this? > I swear I see this type of article posted every other week on HN > I was recently hit by this! They even shipped it in totally real looking packing and outer shell, but the serial number wasn't valid/the company selling it had no record of my purchase/when I dropped it and the casing popped open I could see it was not authentic/etc > This is largely because of comingling > Check out fakespot/reviewmeta, they can analyze the comments and tell you which ones are fake > This is Amazon's fault for making reviews so important for the seller
- gilrain 6y ago
  You forgot to make a point...
hinkley 6y ago
I have a weird selection mechanism for purchases. It’s not my only mechanism, but it informs the decision. As much as I enjoy a well made item, what really upsets me is something that should be much better than it is. Buyer’s remorse is a huge issue for me. So I look at the people who are panning it in their reviews. If they are coherent and reasonable, I’m going to think twice about it. If they are incoherent, shrill Karens, then everyone has those and it’s no big deal. I do the same for development tools and libraries. It doesn’t catch everything, and I may see their point but am willing to deal with a consequence they couldn’t stomach. It does seem to help, especially with biased reporting.
- deepsun 6y ago
  Thanks for your feedback! We'll take a look at it, and improve our fake comment generation algorithms.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I should rephrase. It’s not the ratio of Karens it’s the quantity of people with legitimate gripes. Flood with all caps as much as you want, Bob in Ohio who couldn’t get them on the phone when his product caught on fire and burned down his garage is going to have me asking a lot of questions.
- pavel_lishin 6y ago
  Yup - people love leaving a bad review when they're mad about something, but rarely leave a positive review. This skews almost most reviews towards the negative.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Please don't use "Karen" as a slur like that. It makes your writing lose credibility.
AniseAbyss 6y ago
If you can't spot the difference are they really fake?
- Andrex 6y ago
  https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312 https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312
- uniqueid 6y ago
  You can spot the difference, once you own the product.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Sometimes you can't; you just get quietly poisoned or assume the real product is bad.
mschuster91 6y ago
The "old analog" world has solved this problem long ago: Consumer review magazines and NGOs (e.g. "Stiftung Warentest" in Germany) that review and rank products on objectively measurable criteria, with dedicated niche magazines (especially in computing) going on deep dives for reviews. Why can't Amazon do it like Facebook and have a set of publicly trusted reviewers organizations whose reviews are shown with a "trusted review" mark and ranked higher? Also: why can't regulators step in and demand that: a) Amazon does not commingle inventory from different sellers to prevent fraudulent product from entering the system and being "washed" in the process, as well as provide end-to-end (from ingestion in the warehouse to the parcel at delivery) for each and every product they ship b) Amazon employees have to manually review changes to product descriptions, varieties etc. so that "switch-a-roo" schemes where a vendor sells, let's say, plant seeds and then shifts the product description to laptop chargers while retaining the reviews. This is the advantage that physical retail stores have: they at least know what they are selling and that it is reasonably free from fraudulent product. Amazon is the unregulated Wild West, and frankly this has to stop.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  How do you which reviewers to trust? How do you get reviews for the long tail?
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > How do you which reviewers to trust? That is up for Amazon to decide, but generally many countries already have established organizations. It should not be that hard for Amazon to hire one of the global market research networks to gather a suitable list. > How do you get reviews for the long tail? You mean for new products? Why not mandate that all products that are sold on Amazon have to pass review by two or three of the trusted organizations as a condition of listing?
paul7986 6y ago
Ive always thought (noted here a bit ago) that the Internet needs a verified government ID. Each time you use it to comment on Facebook or any website you are helping verify the veracity of what your saying is true. If you don't use it then what your saying is socially/culturally in question, which I think either a minority or majority are already doing in terms believing what they read on the Internet. Of course I dont think anyone here likes the sound of the above, which i thought of after seeing deepfakes videos (was downvoted heavily). If downvoting love to understand the negatives of such a system?
- brandon272 6y ago
  Government validated identification online sounds like pure hell to me and the antithesis of an open and free internet, which is already under assault in many different ways. I don’t think that Amazon needs government backed identification to be able to weed out fake reviews. They could start by allowing only reviews from actual purchasers of the product. (I assumed this was already a restriction they had in place, but I just checked now and, of course, they appear to allow reviews from any registered user). They could also only allow reviews from accounts over a certain age or with a minimum number of purchases or who have completed additional identity validation, either themselves or through some other third party. Point is, it’s not an insurmountable problem for them. It’s just either not a priority or something they actively and intentionally do not wish to stop.
  - paul7986 6y ago
    Sure, but this idea was prompted after seeing deepfakes. What's another way to fight the insanity and further erosion of veracity on the Internet/fight deepfakes. You note and seem to agree there's an issue with it the Internet too. Also and as I note above it isn't anything you are mandated to use... only use when you want to ensure veracity to what your saying, posting, publishing, etc.
mmhsieh 6y ago
this might be part of the Return of the Brand. friend working at Bose tells me: yeah, i know our IP is getting ripped off and we are getting either outright faked or clone-faked; but we are confident that people will continue to buy Bose because they trust the brand. brand loyalty might cut through whatever consumer preferences are shaped by the likes of reviews.
- jsperson 6y ago
  OT, but The Bose brand does exactly the opposite for me. I bought a pair of 700 headphones, started having problems THEN read the forums. Ooh boy do they need to work harder on the firmware. They can’t mute anything on Windows. This is after the version that temporarily bricked thousands of headphones for several months. Also support was abysmal. I guess the brand advantage is that at least you know what you’re getting.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    That's a side issue where a lot of good hardware companies never made a successful jump to software-integrated products.
- throwaway123x2 6y ago
  Definitely. We don't buy any off-brand cookware any more, for example, and are now extending that out to other categories. I'd sooner trust walmart's discount brands (eg mainstays) than most chinese brands.
satya71 6y ago
Something I want from a store is curation. I want them to do the hard work of evaluating whether the product is worthy of the customer's money. Amazon (also copycats like Walmart) is failing at this basic task. That's why more of my online dollars are going to Costco, Target, and others who do the work.
- takeda 6y ago
  Same, and it really helps to not pay for prime. The prime service not only costs extra, it also encourages impulse buying. When you have to pay for shipping (or purchase at least $25 prime with stuff) and you have to wait a week for delivery it really makes you look for alternatives, and those aren't actually that bad, you also discover that the many of the items have better prices outside of Amazon.
- cnst 6y ago
  How's Target any different? The issue is basically whether the store has opened up itself as the marketplace for third-party-sellers, and how much they push these third-party sellers compared to their own products. It seems like Target may be more conservative with their Target Plus compared to Walmart and Amazon. However, even Newegg and many other stores have gotten on the third-party bandwagon.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Even Target has completely fraudulent bait-and-switch 3rd-partty listings, of the sort Covid-19 made popular (paper towels and cleaners, buy a 24-pack but only 1 shows up), mixed in with legit 1st-party listings.
  - satya71 6y ago
    Wait, I don't recall seeing third-party products on Target. When did that change? I see some mention of it online, but cursory search for products doesn't bring it up. Edit: Looks like Target even hides that the product is third-party!
tmpz22 6y ago
The scarey corollary is that all fake user-generated content is becoming harder to spot, from Yelp reviews, Youtube comments, Tinder profiles, News stories, Facebook posts, etc. And this is before the wide adoption of deep fakes by these outfits.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
perl4ever 6y ago
If all that's happening is fake good reviews and bots upvoting bad ones, it's not a problem if you take the approach I do and think is the only correct one: 1. Only read the bad reviews 2. Ignore the fake or irrelevant bad reviews 3. Ignore the good/bad ratio Of course, if people are good enough at faking bad reviews, then there is a problem, but I like to think I can tell, and it isn't something that is practical to scale. The whole idea of treating reviews as some sort of voting mechanism that determines what you should buy makes no sense. The way I look at it is, is there something non-obvious that is a dealbreaker? That's what reviews are for. If I was running an e-commerce site, I'd simply not allow good reviews at all. Maybe have a sales counter that would serve to show how many people didn't complain.
- lashkari 6y ago
  I've taken the approach of only reading the 3-star reviews. In most cases, a 3-star review will provide a pretty thorough assessment of the pros and cons, and it's generally easier to determine the authenticity of the review.
tempsy 6y ago
I've just given up on buying anything from Amazon that isn't sold directly by them or isn't a brand name I recognize. That eliminates a solid 80% of things that I deem "eligible" to buy.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  They'll still happily ship you commingled or counterfeit product in the remaining 20%.
jwdunne 6y ago
I was looking for books on “dark psychology” (don’t, they’re garbage). One book I found had great reviews. So good, in fact, two different verified purchasers were compelled to write the exact same review verbatim. I mean if you’re gonna write a book on “dark psychology”, make sure you don’t screw up when you’re using it on your readers.
raphlinus 6y ago
An ultra reliable query for scammy products is "1TB USB flash drive." This product does exist in legit versions for about $200, but almost all of the (relevant to the query; many are for smaller capacities) hits are scams in the $30-40 price range. I believe these are mostly lower capacity thumb drives that have been hacked to report 1TB; this tactic has high danger for data corruption. The fact that these listings are so easily gamed is to me a sign of something seriously wrong at Amazon. I know from experience how hard the abuse problem is (it was my job for a couple years at Google), but this should be Amazon's bread and butter.
- cnst 6y ago
  Can anyone explain why search is still broken on Amazon after so many years?! Why do you get completely unrelated products, even though there should already be plenty of relevant products? Why is the option to sort-by-price is more like sort-by-random-order?
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    "Sort-by-price" is "sort-by-price minus whatever arbitrary "shipping" fee the seller put in to cheat the sort, with paid placements mixed in at the top, bottom, and middle of every page".
  - reportgunner 6y ago
    Amazon doesn't get more money from you finding what you want. They get more money from you buying more. If you don't buy anything they don't care one bit since there is 10 greater fools who don't understand that the search is bad.
harshulpandav 6y ago
I’m having this idea — Amazon should allow only bad reviews or reviews that speak negative points about a product. In addition to that amazon should show only the number of purchases made. Fake (paid) reviewers usually write good about the product to support sales As a user after reading the description of the product i would be interested to know where the product fails. With this model, fake reviewers will have to write fake bad reviews on other rival products which is expensive to do and easier to spot them based on patterns.
techbio 6y ago
Caveat Emptor - Buyer Beware Nothing new under the sun.
badrchoubai 6y ago
A family member of mine recently ordered some wireless headphones, in the box was a card asking for a 5-star review in exchange for another pair of the headphones. They also ordered some school supplies with a similar offer in the box.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Please write a review and report that.
- sanitycheck 6y ago
  I've seen people post photos of these kind of messages along with their 5-star reviews. Once I actually bothered to report it to Amazon (I was about to buy the damn thing until I noticed the image.) The customer support person seemed genuinely confused - the conversation went back and forth a few times; "We can see that you haven't bought this product", "No, but I'm reporting a problem", "We cannot give you a refund if you didn't purchase it", "I don't want a refund, but this is apparently against your seller ToS", etc. I gave up. These days I won't buy anything from 3rd-party sellers, and I ignore all 5-star reviews.
dmalvarado 6y ago
I've stopped judging a product on 5-star reviews. Between two products, I will chose the product with the _least_ 1-star reviews. But obviously, this method breaks down when a product only has 50 reviews. Also, I would expect a somewhat normal distribution of reviews for a quality product. More 5s, than 4s, more 4s than 3s, etc. 4, 3 and 2 are where the most honest reviews are. High 1 count is indicative of quality control issue. 5 star reviews is either a customer who was immediately excited about product or a fake review.
coronadisaster 6y ago
I haven't bought fron Amazon in a couple months...Ebay is usually cheaper for the stuff that needs to be bought online (or hard to find in stores).
fortran77 6y ago
Nearly every time I order things like small kitchen gadgets, barware, office accessories/supplies, I get a card saying that if I write a 5-star review, and send them a link to it, they'll send me a "free gift." I suspect there are a lot of reviews like this that aren't 100% fake (they're from different people who actually paid full price for the product) but are solicited and therefore not accurate. (I'll never review a product where the vendor makes an offer like this. I used to report it to Amazon, but I don't think they care.)
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  You should write a 1-star review
  - fortran77 6y ago
    That wouldn't be ethical either.
crazygringo 6y ago
It's funny -- a lot of products are 90% 5-star reviews, but nearly all the top reviews on a page are 1-star (the ones that get voted up as "most helpful"). This actually seems to solve the problem. You read through a bunch of them, and use your critical thinking to figure out if the problems are real are not. Because the first couple are often just "this product broke after using it once!" which you can just ignore, because that's always going to happen to somebody and for some reason people love to upvote it. But then you'll either start to notice a theme, or not. If there's a theme (8 of the 10 top reviews complain that the handle breaks, or that it's not compatible with Macs), then you can be pretty sure it's legitimate and probably want to look for a different product. But if there isn't any theme except "it broke immediately/arrived damaged" and then you start seeing reviews where people are like "it works fine", then you're good. I dunno, but that seems to work for me. So thank goodness Amazon has the upvote button -- if it didn't it would make finding meaningful reviews a lot harder.
- sjtindell 6y ago
  Yeah along these lines one I’ve noticed a lot lately is “this thing doesn’t fit like it used to” or “something has changed since March” where it is 90% 5 star like you said but the recent or most helpful reviews show something has changed, that can be useful.
RockmanX 6y ago
funny, I thought AI/DL has been ready to save the world for a while since everyone is bragging its power but until now Amazon still faces fake reviews problem.
gandalfian 6y ago
The FT article that kicked off this flurry suggests a guy was making £5000 a month from selling his free stuff. It must be an extreme example but with that much temptation...
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
Simple solution: combine it with ubiquitious social scoring, and make real names/government issued IDs mandatory for any review. See the graph lighten up with the fakers. Shun. Done.
switch11 6y ago
People don't understand the whole reason behind fake reviews not being removed Let's go through a series of questions A) Will lower review ratings lead to less sales at Amazon or more sales at Amazon? B) will clear division between 'best in class' products and inferior products give Amazon more monopoly control over the market, or less? C) Will the difficulty in getting easy fake reviews get more people to jump into selling things at Amazon or less? Amazon needs a Tragedy of the Commons type of situation That more and more small businesses jump in, generate sales using fake reviews, and give Amazon its cut This in terms makes existing businesses smaller and more dependent on Amazon They basically want 1 million companies each making $100,000 to $1 million a year at Amazon Commoditization, so whoever Pays Amazon the most, can be boosted And these 'pay to play' businesses are INDISTINGUISHABLE from the actual best businesses * Their aim is NOT 1) The best companies and the best products sell very well and get the best reviews 2) Customers buy more and more of those products 3) Those companies (providing the best products) become bigger and bigger Their aim is 'Glorification of the Mediocre' - Commodification and Mediocritization of EVERYTHING 1) Every company's products sell almost the same 2) Companies are dependent more and more on 'advertising' at Amazon 3) Amazon's cut becomes higher and higher 4) An end point where Amazon can take 50% to 75% of what customers pay Look at Audible and what terms they have there after becoming a monopoly Same for ebooks where they are close to becoming a monopoly in US and UK They first want 65% cut (if you don't give them exclusivity) Then they want ebook and audiobook authors to spend out of their paltry 35% cut - to advertise their product on Amazon So they are, in effect, asking for a 75% to 90% cut of what customers pay
robotron 6y ago
I've lost all trust in Amazon and competitors. I try to buy direct from the company producing the product when I can. The shipping times aren't much different. Maybe no same or next day.
tmaly 6y ago
I still think companies like Consumer Reports serve a valuable service at least for bigger ticket items. Fakespot it definitely useful and I use it quite a bit. There seems to be a gap for lower priced items. I mean I don’t want to spend all day pasting in urls into fakespot for a $10 item.

181 points by admiralspoo 6y ago

This topic comes up quite frequently on HN. It boils down to the risk-reward ratio. If you've never tried to sell anything on Amazon it's probably not obvious how ridiculously important positive reviews are to your product sales. I cannot overstate how important they are in the beginning, given the way your average online shopper decides what to buy. What this means is that sellers are faced with an absolute imperative to get positive reviews at any cost, otherwise they die, while the flip side is that if they get caught manipulating reviews they maybe get de-listed and start over again. This imbalance leads to exactly what you see now, and it at least seems like as long as positive reviews are so important (in the absence of curation) this will be an arms race.

nickthemagicman 6y ago
I agree with you and it makes sense. As a noob to this, have you happened to have read up on any legit alternatives to the review treadmill?
- mdorazio 6y ago
  From which side? The obvious alternative for consumers is to go back to curation, which is what brick and mortar retailers have done since forever. Costco, for example, has a giant team of people that test, verify, and give approval on the few products that go on shelves so that shoppers know they are getting something legitimate and of reasonable quality. On the marketplace seller side I haven't come across anything that really strikes me as a better alternative. Review culture is pretty ingrained at this point.
AniseAbyss 6y ago
Amazon feels to me just a place that continues to exist because of its name recognition. Most of the stuff doesn't even come from Amazon's own warehouses anymore.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I’d be surprised if less than 75% of gross merchandise sales don’t come from Amazon FCs. I’d be incredibly surprised if it was less than 60%.
  - TAForObvReasons 6y ago
    I found out recently that there are actually a few levels of "Amazon Prime" sales! The "Shipped and sold by Amazon" is what we normally expect, but there's also "Fulfilled by Amazon" and a third tier that's effectively "Prime Shipping" but is treated as a third-party seller. That third tier is particularly deceptive because the sidebar display doesn't distinguish between the second and third case but the return policies are very different.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      That third category is “Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP)”. If my orders from Amazon are in any way representative, SFP is well under 10% of volume (probably under 5%). I get way more non-Prime orders than SFP.
- foresto 6y ago
  I suspect many people buy from Amazon because they can't find what they want anywhere else, or don't want to be stuck with shipping and restocking fees if something is wrong with it, or both. Sadly, there aren't many vendors with a wide selection and a hassle-free return policy. On Amazon, even third-party sellers often have a return policy that matches Amazon's.

2bluesc 6y ago

Not just fake reviews (where fake means no product was ever bought), but also reimbursed 5-star reviews. Instagram + Facebook are blasting sites like Rebatest[0] in my face for some reason. I'm shocked Amazon lets such sites exist. I'm not opposed to people asking for reviews, but insisting they are 5-star reviews seems terribly unethical. Not surprisingly, they have a referral program as well... Intrigued by this several hours earlier today, I signed-up because who wouldn't want a reimbursement for a _good_ product they would have bought otherwise? Let's see how this goes, low expectations. Searching Google for "rebatest vs" naturally yields competitors Rebaid[1] [0] https://www.rebatest.com/ https://www.rebatest.com/ [1] https://www.rebaid.com/ https://www.rebaid.com/

axaxs 6y ago
Yep. I've bought two things in the last week that each offer $15 for a five star review. The weird thing is, both were truly great products, so there wasn't an ethical dilemma for me, but it's kinda gross it exists.

dvduval 6y ago

Maybe I'll get down voted, but I think it's a legitimate question to ask: if someone offers me a refund in exchange for my review, and the product would benefit me, why shouldn't I accept it? Is it my duty to protect Amazon or other consumers? Perhaps it's a small merchant trying to get started in the face of big corporations doing other things to cheat the system (ex. pricing out competition to capture the market). Could it be that I'm helping a small business get started by getting a free product in exchange for a review? There's no way to know for sure. But I can imagine that some people would indeed take this offer and I don't necessarily blame them. Should I?

luckylion 6y ago
> Is it my duty to protect Amazon or other consumers? If you follow Kant, the argument is pretty much this: if everyone would do that, nobody could trust any reviews. The right choice, according to Kant, is that which you can want to be made into law for everyone. You don't want reviews to lose all meaning as they're important information for people to learn about the products, ergo you mustn't fake it. Should you blame them? Yeah, but it's a pretty small infraction and they're a small cog in a large machine, so don't be too harsh.
- dvduval 6y ago
  Yes, thank you for entertaining this idea at least. There is a certain amount of logic that people who post a review, which is optional, have some sort of motivation for doing it in the first place. And then there's also the idea that the seller, in this case Amazon, is relieving themselves or their own responsibility to review the products that they sell before putting them on the market.
fluffernutter 6y ago
The issue is not whether you should accept a situation which appears to be mutually beneficial to you and the entity soliciting the review. Corporations are typically going to make decisions about the things they do based on income to to corporate entity. While this usually aligns to consumer need and demand (for happiness even), it usually doesn't as a whole. Facebook seems to give people what they want, but actually they figured out how to progressively remove choices from users to get EXACTLY what they want without the users realizing what had been lost (time, attention, focus, desire for a unique product vs. the product resulting from the software driven dogma of the crowd, etc.) The question should be whether or not the embodied process is fair, in whole, to the users? As much as we worry about "right" API design here (or what is the perfect framework for CSS?), you'd think we'd worry about how bad we are screwing users with all this software optimized to make startups, founders, VCs and private equity firms more an dmore money with less and less effort.

ilamont 6y ago

I'd like to know how it's possible for third-party sites such as https://www.fakespot.com https://www.fakespot.com to more effectively identify fake Amazon reviews while Amazon (with presumably better data) fails so miserably. Same question applies to Twitter. Regularly we see researchers uncovering evidence of fake accounts and bot networks pushing spam, conspiracy theories, and misinformation (https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/20/859814085/researchers-nearly-half-of-accounts-tweeting-about-coronavirus-are-likely-bots https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...) while Twitter struggles to identify the fakes. ETA: Regarding comments along the lines of, "it's in their best interest to let fake reviews continue as it boosts Amazon's sales." I think this argument is getting a bit old, as Amazon's growing reputation for fake reviews (and fake products) is turning off even mainstream shoppers and giving a huge boost to big & small competitors. Amazon now has a very big financial incentive to move beyond whack-a-mole and truly tackle these problems, which requires A) doing at least as good as Fakespot at identifying the bad actors and B) implementing technologies and policies that discourage buying or posting fake reviews.

surfmike 6y ago
It Is Difficult to Get Someone to Understand Something When Their Salary Depends Upon Their Not Understanding It
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  That seems like short-sighted thinking on the part of Amazon though. If I can I am now ordering anything expensive from the vendor directly and avoid Amazon. Just two years ago, I'd have even paid a little extra to have the purchase go through Amazon due to their fast shipping, easy returns and my Amazon store card given me 5% back on purchases. Just the last three months, I probably spent $2k-3k buying directly instead of via Amazon. That was 100% driven by not wanting to get fakes
  - BlueScreenDeath 6y ago
    Amazon knows that products with no or bad reviews don't sell well. By not policing they allow more reviews and more sales.

Havoc 6y ago

Yeah the only time it’s any use is on ebooks to determine roughly how popular the book is. Ie review count rather than content

Simulacra 6y ago

There's a great app you can get called FakeSpot analyzes the reviews, and provides some clarity to the reviews on Amazon, and Best Buy.

strombofulous 6y ago

I swear I see an article like this on HN at least once a month (actually, according to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=amazon&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., it's probably closer to about once a week) and the comments are always the same, let me save you (the person reading this) some time and summarize what these comments are going to look like: > I've lost all faith in Amazon, now I use Walmart, where I get cheap junk but at least I know it's real cheap junk > Amazon has so much data! How have they failed so hard to stop this? > I swear I see this type of article posted every other week on HN > I was recently hit by this! They even shipped it in totally real looking packing and outer shell, but the serial number wasn't valid/the company selling it had no record of my purchase/when I dropped it and the casing popped open I could see it was not authentic/etc > This is largely because of comingling > Check out fakespot/reviewmeta, they can analyze the comments and tell you which ones are fake > This is Amazon's fault for making reviews so important for the seller

gilrain 6y ago
You forgot to make a point...

hinkley 6y ago

I have a weird selection mechanism for purchases. It’s not my only mechanism, but it informs the decision. As much as I enjoy a well made item, what really upsets me is something that should be much better than it is. Buyer’s remorse is a huge issue for me. So I look at the people who are panning it in their reviews. If they are coherent and reasonable, I’m going to think twice about it. If they are incoherent, shrill Karens, then everyone has those and it’s no big deal. I do the same for development tools and libraries. It doesn’t catch everything, and I may see their point but am willing to deal with a consequence they couldn’t stomach. It does seem to help, especially with biased reporting.

deepsun 6y ago
Thanks for your feedback! We'll take a look at it, and improve our fake comment generation algorithms.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I should rephrase. It’s not the ratio of Karens it’s the quantity of people with legitimate gripes. Flood with all caps as much as you want, Bob in Ohio who couldn’t get them on the phone when his product caught on fire and burned down his garage is going to have me asking a lot of questions.
pavel_lishin 6y ago
Yup - people love leaving a bad review when they're mad about something, but rarely leave a positive review. This skews almost most reviews towards the negative.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
Please don't use "Karen" as a slur like that. It makes your writing lose credibility.

AniseAbyss 6y ago

If you can't spot the difference are they really fake?

Andrex 6y ago
https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312 https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312
uniqueid 6y ago
You can spot the difference, once you own the product.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Sometimes you can't; you just get quietly poisoned or assume the real product is bad.

mschuster91 6y ago

The "old analog" world has solved this problem long ago: Consumer review magazines and NGOs (e.g. "Stiftung Warentest" in Germany) that review and rank products on objectively measurable criteria, with dedicated niche magazines (especially in computing) going on deep dives for reviews. Why can't Amazon do it like Facebook and have a set of publicly trusted reviewers organizations whose reviews are shown with a "trusted review" mark and ranked higher? Also: why can't regulators step in and demand that: a) Amazon does not commingle inventory from different sellers to prevent fraudulent product from entering the system and being "washed" in the process, as well as provide end-to-end (from ingestion in the warehouse to the parcel at delivery) for each and every product they ship b) Amazon employees have to manually review changes to product descriptions, varieties etc. so that "switch-a-roo" schemes where a vendor sells, let's say, plant seeds and then shifts the product description to laptop chargers while retaining the reviews. This is the advantage that physical retail stores have: they at least know what they are selling and that it is reasonably free from fraudulent product. Amazon is the unregulated Wild West, and frankly this has to stop.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
How do you which reviewers to trust? How do you get reviews for the long tail?
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > How do you which reviewers to trust? That is up for Amazon to decide, but generally many countries already have established organizations. It should not be that hard for Amazon to hire one of the global market research networks to gather a suitable list. > How do you get reviews for the long tail? You mean for new products? Why not mandate that all products that are sold on Amazon have to pass review by two or three of the trusted organizations as a condition of listing?

paul7986 6y ago

Ive always thought (noted here a bit ago) that the Internet needs a verified government ID. Each time you use it to comment on Facebook or any website you are helping verify the veracity of what your saying is true. If you don't use it then what your saying is socially/culturally in question, which I think either a minority or majority are already doing in terms believing what they read on the Internet. Of course I dont think anyone here likes the sound of the above, which i thought of after seeing deepfakes videos (was downvoted heavily). If downvoting love to understand the negatives of such a system?

brandon272 6y ago
Government validated identification online sounds like pure hell to me and the antithesis of an open and free internet, which is already under assault in many different ways. I don’t think that Amazon needs government backed identification to be able to weed out fake reviews. They could start by allowing only reviews from actual purchasers of the product. (I assumed this was already a restriction they had in place, but I just checked now and, of course, they appear to allow reviews from any registered user). They could also only allow reviews from accounts over a certain age or with a minimum number of purchases or who have completed additional identity validation, either themselves or through some other third party. Point is, it’s not an insurmountable problem for them. It’s just either not a priority or something they actively and intentionally do not wish to stop.
- paul7986 6y ago
  Sure, but this idea was prompted after seeing deepfakes. What's another way to fight the insanity and further erosion of veracity on the Internet/fight deepfakes. You note and seem to agree there's an issue with it the Internet too. Also and as I note above it isn't anything you are mandated to use... only use when you want to ensure veracity to what your saying, posting, publishing, etc.

mmhsieh 6y ago

this might be part of the Return of the Brand. friend working at Bose tells me: yeah, i know our IP is getting ripped off and we are getting either outright faked or clone-faked; but we are confident that people will continue to buy Bose because they trust the brand. brand loyalty might cut through whatever consumer preferences are shaped by the likes of reviews.

jsperson 6y ago
OT, but The Bose brand does exactly the opposite for me. I bought a pair of 700 headphones, started having problems THEN read the forums. Ooh boy do they need to work harder on the firmware. They can’t mute anything on Windows. This is after the version that temporarily bricked thousands of headphones for several months. Also support was abysmal. I guess the brand advantage is that at least you know what you’re getting.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  That's a side issue where a lot of good hardware companies never made a successful jump to software-integrated products.
throwaway123x2 6y ago
Definitely. We don't buy any off-brand cookware any more, for example, and are now extending that out to other categories. I'd sooner trust walmart's discount brands (eg mainstays) than most chinese brands.

satya71 6y ago

Something I want from a store is curation. I want them to do the hard work of evaluating whether the product is worthy of the customer's money. Amazon (also copycats like Walmart) is failing at this basic task. That's why more of my online dollars are going to Costco, Target, and others who do the work.

takeda 6y ago
Same, and it really helps to not pay for prime. The prime service not only costs extra, it also encourages impulse buying. When you have to pay for shipping (or purchase at least $25 prime with stuff) and you have to wait a week for delivery it really makes you look for alternatives, and those aren't actually that bad, you also discover that the many of the items have better prices outside of Amazon.
cnst 6y ago
How's Target any different? The issue is basically whether the store has opened up itself as the marketplace for third-party-sellers, and how much they push these third-party sellers compared to their own products. It seems like Target may be more conservative with their Target Plus compared to Walmart and Amazon. However, even Newegg and many other stores have gotten on the third-party bandwagon.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Even Target has completely fraudulent bait-and-switch 3rd-partty listings, of the sort Covid-19 made popular (paper towels and cleaners, buy a 24-pack but only 1 shows up), mixed in with legit 1st-party listings.
- satya71 6y ago
  Wait, I don't recall seeing third-party products on Target. When did that change? I see some mention of it online, but cursory search for products doesn't bring it up. Edit: Looks like Target even hides that the product is third-party!

tmpz22 6y ago

The scarey corollary is that all fake user-generated content is becoming harder to spot, from Yelp reviews, Youtube comments, Tinder profiles, News stories, Facebook posts, etc. And this is before the wide adoption of deep fakes by these outfits.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

perl4ever 6y ago

If all that's happening is fake good reviews and bots upvoting bad ones, it's not a problem if you take the approach I do and think is the only correct one: 1. Only read the bad reviews 2. Ignore the fake or irrelevant bad reviews 3. Ignore the good/bad ratio Of course, if people are good enough at faking bad reviews, then there is a problem, but I like to think I can tell, and it isn't something that is practical to scale. The whole idea of treating reviews as some sort of voting mechanism that determines what you should buy makes no sense. The way I look at it is, is there something non-obvious that is a dealbreaker? That's what reviews are for. If I was running an e-commerce site, I'd simply not allow good reviews at all. Maybe have a sales counter that would serve to show how many people didn't complain.

lashkari 6y ago
I've taken the approach of only reading the 3-star reviews. In most cases, a 3-star review will provide a pretty thorough assessment of the pros and cons, and it's generally easier to determine the authenticity of the review.

tempsy 6y ago

I've just given up on buying anything from Amazon that isn't sold directly by them or isn't a brand name I recognize. That eliminates a solid 80% of things that I deem "eligible" to buy.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
They'll still happily ship you commingled or counterfeit product in the remaining 20%.

jwdunne 6y ago

I was looking for books on “dark psychology” (don’t, they’re garbage). One book I found had great reviews. So good, in fact, two different verified purchasers were compelled to write the exact same review verbatim. I mean if you’re gonna write a book on “dark psychology”, make sure you don’t screw up when you’re using it on your readers.

raphlinus 6y ago

An ultra reliable query for scammy products is "1TB USB flash drive." This product does exist in legit versions for about $200, but almost all of the (relevant to the query; many are for smaller capacities) hits are scams in the $30-40 price range. I believe these are mostly lower capacity thumb drives that have been hacked to report 1TB; this tactic has high danger for data corruption. The fact that these listings are so easily gamed is to me a sign of something seriously wrong at Amazon. I know from experience how hard the abuse problem is (it was my job for a couple years at Google), but this should be Amazon's bread and butter.

cnst 6y ago
Can anyone explain why search is still broken on Amazon after so many years?! Why do you get completely unrelated products, even though there should already be plenty of relevant products? Why is the option to sort-by-price is more like sort-by-random-order?
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  "Sort-by-price" is "sort-by-price minus whatever arbitrary "shipping" fee the seller put in to cheat the sort, with paid placements mixed in at the top, bottom, and middle of every page".
- reportgunner 6y ago
  Amazon doesn't get more money from you finding what you want. They get more money from you buying more. If you don't buy anything they don't care one bit since there is 10 greater fools who don't understand that the search is bad.

harshulpandav 6y ago

I’m having this idea — Amazon should allow only bad reviews or reviews that speak negative points about a product. In addition to that amazon should show only the number of purchases made. Fake (paid) reviewers usually write good about the product to support sales As a user after reading the description of the product i would be interested to know where the product fails. With this model, fake reviewers will have to write fake bad reviews on other rival products which is expensive to do and easier to spot them based on patterns.

techbio 6y ago

Caveat Emptor - Buyer Beware Nothing new under the sun.

badrchoubai 6y ago

A family member of mine recently ordered some wireless headphones, in the box was a card asking for a 5-star review in exchange for another pair of the headphones. They also ordered some school supplies with a similar offer in the box.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
Please write a review and report that.
sanitycheck 6y ago
I've seen people post photos of these kind of messages along with their 5-star reviews. Once I actually bothered to report it to Amazon (I was about to buy the damn thing until I noticed the image.) The customer support person seemed genuinely confused - the conversation went back and forth a few times; "We can see that you haven't bought this product", "No, but I'm reporting a problem", "We cannot give you a refund if you didn't purchase it", "I don't want a refund, but this is apparently against your seller ToS", etc. I gave up. These days I won't buy anything from 3rd-party sellers, and I ignore all 5-star reviews.

dmalvarado 6y ago

I've stopped judging a product on 5-star reviews. Between two products, I will chose the product with the _least_ 1-star reviews. But obviously, this method breaks down when a product only has 50 reviews. Also, I would expect a somewhat normal distribution of reviews for a quality product. More 5s, than 4s, more 4s than 3s, etc. 4, 3 and 2 are where the most honest reviews are. High 1 count is indicative of quality control issue. 5 star reviews is either a customer who was immediately excited about product or a fake review.

coronadisaster 6y ago

I haven't bought fron Amazon in a couple months...Ebay is usually cheaper for the stuff that needs to be bought online (or hard to find in stores).

fortran77 6y ago

Nearly every time I order things like small kitchen gadgets, barware, office accessories/supplies, I get a card saying that if I write a 5-star review, and send them a link to it, they'll send me a "free gift." I suspect there are a lot of reviews like this that aren't 100% fake (they're from different people who actually paid full price for the product) but are solicited and therefore not accurate. (I'll never review a product where the vendor makes an offer like this. I used to report it to Amazon, but I don't think they care.)

srtjstjsj 6y ago
You should write a 1-star review
- fortran77 6y ago
  That wouldn't be ethical either.

crazygringo 6y ago

It's funny -- a lot of products are 90% 5-star reviews, but nearly all the top reviews on a page are 1-star (the ones that get voted up as "most helpful"). This actually seems to solve the problem. You read through a bunch of them, and use your critical thinking to figure out if the problems are real are not. Because the first couple are often just "this product broke after using it once!" which you can just ignore, because that's always going to happen to somebody and for some reason people love to upvote it. But then you'll either start to notice a theme, or not. If there's a theme (8 of the 10 top reviews complain that the handle breaks, or that it's not compatible with Macs), then you can be pretty sure it's legitimate and probably want to look for a different product. But if there isn't any theme except "it broke immediately/arrived damaged" and then you start seeing reviews where people are like "it works fine", then you're good. I dunno, but that seems to work for me. So thank goodness Amazon has the upvote button -- if it didn't it would make finding meaningful reviews a lot harder.

sjtindell 6y ago
Yeah along these lines one I’ve noticed a lot lately is “this thing doesn’t fit like it used to” or “something has changed since March” where it is 90% 5 star like you said but the recent or most helpful reviews show something has changed, that can be useful.

RockmanX 6y ago

funny, I thought AI/DL has been ready to save the world for a while since everyone is bragging its power but until now Amazon still faces fake reviews problem.

gandalfian 6y ago

The FT article that kicked off this flurry suggests a guy was making £5000 a month from selling his free stuff. It must be an extreme example but with that much temptation...

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

Simple solution: combine it with ubiquitious social scoring, and make real names/government issued IDs mandatory for any review. See the graph lighten up with the fakers. Shun. Done.

switch11 6y ago

People don't understand the whole reason behind fake reviews not being removed Let's go through a series of questions A) Will lower review ratings lead to less sales at Amazon or more sales at Amazon? B) will clear division between 'best in class' products and inferior products give Amazon more monopoly control over the market, or less? C) Will the difficulty in getting easy fake reviews get more people to jump into selling things at Amazon or less? Amazon needs a Tragedy of the Commons type of situation That more and more small businesses jump in, generate sales using fake reviews, and give Amazon its cut This in terms makes existing businesses smaller and more dependent on Amazon They basically want 1 million companies each making $100,000 to $1 million a year at Amazon Commoditization, so whoever Pays Amazon the most, can be boosted And these 'pay to play' businesses are INDISTINGUISHABLE from the actual best businesses * Their aim is NOT 1) The best companies and the best products sell very well and get the best reviews 2) Customers buy more and more of those products 3) Those companies (providing the best products) become bigger and bigger Their aim is 'Glorification of the Mediocre' - Commodification and Mediocritization of EVERYTHING 1) Every company's products sell almost the same 2) Companies are dependent more and more on 'advertising' at Amazon 3) Amazon's cut becomes higher and higher 4) An end point where Amazon can take 50% to 75% of what customers pay Look at Audible and what terms they have there after becoming a monopoly Same for ebooks where they are close to becoming a monopoly in US and UK They first want 65% cut (if you don't give them exclusivity) Then they want ebook and audiobook authors to spend out of their paltry 35% cut - to advertise their product on Amazon So they are, in effect, asking for a 75% to 90% cut of what customers pay

robotron 6y ago

I've lost all trust in Amazon and competitors. I try to buy direct from the company producing the product when I can. The shipping times aren't much different. Maybe no same or next day.

tmaly 6y ago

I still think companies like Consumer Reports serve a valuable service at least for bigger ticket items. Fakespot it definitely useful and I use it quite a bit. There seems to be a gap for lower priced items. I mean I don’t want to spend all day pasting in urls into fakespot for a $10 item.