8 ms·

There is a whole network of fake reviewers, agents and sellers that pump up products on Amazon. It is extremely easy to find those people. A simple search for "

by msoad 6y ago

There is a whole network of fake reviewers, agents and sellers that pump up products on Amazon. It is extremely easy to find those people. A simple search for "Amazon Reviews" on Facebook will take you to a few open Facebook Groups. Here are a few examples: https://www.facebook.com/amazonrrc/ https://www.facebook.com/amazonrrc/ https://www.facebook.com/AmReSe/ https://www.facebook.com/AmReSe/ I was curious and contacted one of them. They sent proof screenshots that they indeed refund you if you buy a products and leave a good review. They instructed me to search for specific term to find the product instead of giving me a link to click on. For Amazon, this is easy to prevent because it is so easy to find sellers that are engaging in that sort of activity. As always, if you follow the money, Amazon has little interest in doing so...

kbenson 6y ago
> As always, if you follow the money, Amazon has little interest in doing so... They had little short-term interest in doing so. Now people know the reviews are fake, and Amazon's reputation WRT finding good products and believing you'll get an authentic product is edging towards the gutter. I know I'm very careful of what I'm buying from whom on Amazon now. Combined with them not always being the cheapest for a long time now, and there's less and less reason for me to give them first consideration.
- iwasakabukiman 6y ago
  Same here. Recently, if it's anything that's health related, I absolutely avoid Amazon because of the mass of fake products out there. I needed some vitamins recently and my first thought was that I'm better off paying CVS or Walgreens prices and being practically guaranteed that the product is legit, versus trying to weed through the fake reviews and counterfeit products on Amazon. That thought has occurred with increasing frequency over the past few years as Amazon continues to completely ignore the issue.
  - hansvm 6y ago
    Do be aware that CVS and Walgreens stock homeopathic garbage for any symptom that doesn't have a good OTC remedy, and aside from a little fine print and weird units on the "active ingredients" the packaging is identical to real medicine.
- xoa 6y ago
  Interestingly I've found Amazon shipping has gone to the dump too, which was one of the final things they had going for them. At first it was completely understandable with the pandemic, but they seem to have taken that as an excuse to just give up on the Prime shipping promise period indefinitely. I was starting to order everything sensitive, from electronics to health, elsewhere anyway over counterfeit and fraud worries. But now I find other places ship massively faster than Amazon, "Prime" shipping on Amazon routinely takes a week or even weeks, plural, even when it says "in stock". Other places ship right away and have it my rural area in days. So for me at least Amazon has finally exited default territory, because it doesn't even have the "well it's more risky, but it's fast and reliable" rush argument anymore. Of course I don't expect the general population to move instantly, and it's not like I've dumped them entirely either. There are even some manufacturers I like who use them for fulfillment pretty exclusively (at least for small orders). But I do wonder in cases like this whether we'll see a non-linear curve: everything seems to be going swell for a business, right until some tipping point is reached and suddenly things go backwards fairly quickly. And that can be hard to recover from. Of course Amazon does have some moats overall, I don't expect them as a going concern to have any real trouble particularly on the service side, AWS and all that. But the moats actually seem weakest for Amazon-as-a-B2C-market, there isn't really anything inherently sticky there beyond habit.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    The delivery issues may be regional, or maybe it's just certain product categories. Where I live, Prime shipping from March-May was about a week to 10 days, but now it's back up to 1-2 days for almost everything. I'm in the North East though where there's a warehouse about 15 miles away, and at least half a dozen major national shipping hubs within ~100 miles.
    - o-__-o 6y ago
      The north has been waaay more affected by lockdown restrictions than the south. We have not seen a single slow down in prime deliveries
    - Firehawke 6y ago
- philistine 6y ago
  Their reputation is shot. I wanted to buy a NAS, and look at the prices in Canada. I stopped myself from going to Amazon because I was too wary of weird reviews and long discontinued products with completely strange prices. I went to Canada Computers instead.
  - hanklazard 6y ago
    I know what you mean. There’s some category of purchases for which I still look at Amazon—basically <30$ and doesn’t-matter-if-it’s-fake type items. Anything that doesn’t fit those criteria, and especially brand name electronic items, I’m buying elsewhere. Knowing it’s genuine is worth a higher price. This has basically meant that I went from a Prime member making 5-10k$ worth of purchase per year a few years ago, to a non-prime member spending only a few hundred $ per year at Amazon. I suspect I’m not unique in the HN crowd, but I’m shocked at how often I see friends, family, and coworkers continue to trust this company with large, important purchases.
- rgg_32 6y ago
  > Now people know the reviews are fake I am not 100% sure about this, I wish it were so. Maybe it's just that we get this feeling because of the people we usually talk to, the people in our close circle of connections who are likely to be like us in terms of this kind of rasoning/thinking. I think most people may not be aware of it. > They had little short-term interest in doing so I just want to add a possible scenario here and I would like to hear opinions about it: As we all know, people really tend to buy products with 4.5+ stars and we think twice if the product has 3 or even 4 stars. On the other hand, let's suppose that since everyone is selling on Amazon now, worse products are likely to be put on sale, so the average scores start to decrease. Having said the above, if I, as a user, periodically look for products on Amazon, I will probably start seeing/finding bad products, so it may be that in a long period of time, I will start looking for alternatives other than Amazon and may attribute the image of "not high quality products" to Amazon as an e-commerce. [Edit]: So if my two previous scenarios are correct, if you follow the money, they actually have some long-term interest in allowing some fake(good) reviews and eliminating some real bad ones. In the end, most people will not be aware of these fake reviews and the quality of the products will be perceived as higher, resulting in more sales and in a better reputation of Amazon products, thus avoiding the scenario discussed in the second answer.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    > I am not 100% sure about this, I wish it were so. Well, not everyone, but there's growing knowledge about it, and popular media podcasts that do whole episodes on it, etc. > I will probably start seeing/finding bad products, so it may be that in a long period of time, I will start looking for alternatives other than Amazon and may attribute the image of "not high quality products" to Amazon as an e-commerce. I think that depends on whether the ratings are for product quality or product accuracy/authenticness/amazon fulfillment issues. > they actually have some long-term interest in allowing some fake(good) reviews and eliminating some real bad ones. I think the important part of that is some. While it may be in Amazon's interest to manipulate the reviews to some degree, it's definitely not in their best interest to let people know or assume they or anyone else is doing so.
RedditKon 6y ago
Yeah - just go to vipon.com. They run an entire platform for this.
texasbigdata 6y ago
Not just that, but the last 3 things I bought (workout stuff) last week from Amazon each had a little notecard inside with a bait for a review and a hinted at alternative dispute resolution system; and none of the items was particularly expensive which suggests the customer acquisition cost of having a high ranking Amazon item must be so low it makes sense to defend it aggressively with gift cards and such.
ManBlanket 6y ago
Jokes on them, I never look at 5 or 1 star reviews. By convention I think rating systems are fundamentally flawed in that they are anything but a ubiquitous concept. The people struggling to piece together how they feel about something in a binary construct generally have the most insightful comments. There's no way to stop someone from gaming the system though. If the economic incentive is to cheat, cheaters gonna cheat. Eventually plugins like FakeSpot will become as common as ad blockers, imo.
- red2awn 6y ago
  That's my approach as well, the 4 star reviews are usually the most informative.
  - Firehawke 6y ago
    I try to take 1, 4, and 5 into account with mine. I mostly discount 5s but it's still good to see what people are saying. 4 will let you know what issues the product really has, and 1 will give you an idea of how frequently the product breaks or arrives broken.
bentcorner 6y ago
> I have the manufacturer of a product (a @wirecutter pick, no less) that I reviewed 3 stars, who has been emailing me offers of increasing amounts of money to take it down. The most recent offer is well over what I spent on the product. I revised my review down to 1 star. Meta-scam: Buy cheap items that are review-scammed and write a thorough, plausible 1-star review, hold out for profit. Rinse, repeat.
- rasz 6y ago
  Your 1 star review will get auto deleted.
  - 1024core 6y ago
    I've been an Amazon customer for 15 years. Have literally bought $50,000+ worth of stuff from them. In other words: rock solid reputation. Amazon has deleted even my critical reviews. Go figure.
    - damnencryption 6y ago
      While I understand that people find any reason to believe they hold status higher than others but they shouldn't believe that when they are faced with a company with billions of customers worldwide. If you continued to buy from Amazon (racked up $50K in spending for 15 years), it's clear that removing your review didn't matter to their bottom line so no reason to care.
      - ehsankia 6y ago
        Your missing the point. It has nothing to do with their identity, it's the fact that telling apart fake reviews from ones written by real people is a hard problem, but generally you won't find a bot account with 15 years of history. The implication here is that if Amazon truly cared about surfacing legitimate reviews only, they would've kept the one from that account since there's very low probability of it being fake.
bstar77 6y ago
I've made a habit of reading the 2* & 3* reviews first. They are almost always helpful and never paid reviews.
- stronglikedan 6y ago
  And look for patterns of bad product traits being reported. Most people complain about one thing they didn't like, or one thing they wish the product had (even when the description said it didn't, go figure). If everyone is complaining about the same thing, then I know I should probably be wary.
ManBlanket 6y ago
Jokes on them, I never look at 5 or 1 star reviews. By convention I think rating systems are fundamentally flawed in that they are anything but a ubiquitous concept from person to person. Shit, I bet half of the hacker news crowd thinks anything less than an A is a failing grade. The people struggling to piece together how they feel about something in a binary construct generally have the most insightful comments. Kinda like the students who got a couple bad grades in college probably had more interesting lives. ;)
elihu 6y ago
Well, if Amazon were to crack down on this sort of thing, it would incentivize unscrupulous sellers to solicit fake 5-star reviews (through a 3rd party) for their competitors so that they would be punished. The only reason we have to doubt this is happening now is that there's no incentive to do it, since Amazon seems to be turning a blind eye. It's a hard problem. The solutions most likely to work are also expensive. Amazon could create internal product review teams staffed by employees instead of letting users do it all for free, but it's hard to make that scale. It's also less transparent; one of the big appeals of Amazon early on was the novelty that you could go to a retailer and if you don't like one of their products you can say so for the world to see. Now most other retailers do the same thing and we sort of take it for granted now.
- Closi 6y ago
  It's not that hard - look at systems like Fakespot that could automatically verify reviewer credibility (without even access to the internal data that Amazon holds). Or just offer systems for buyers to report suppliers doing exactly this - buying reviews. Or honeypot it, and just put some fake addresses on sites that sell reviews and then ban companies that send you stuff. I mean there are loads of solutions, but all of them involve Amazon taking down 5 star reviews that help them sell crap, so the incentives are obviously conflicting here.
  - LorenPechtel 6y ago
    He's talking about getting your competition banned by false-flagging them. It's much harder to figure out who is placing the fake reviews than that they are fake.
- ypiratex 6y ago
  By that logic Amazon (or any other site) can never crack down on unscrupulous behavior committed by a 3rd party.
dheera 6y ago
I've been contacted several times after leaving negative reviews by sellers that they would refund me 50% or more (and even 100% in one case) if I changed the review to be positive.
- doyouevensunbro 6y ago
  Same here. They used a multitude of email addresses so every time I blocked them they eventually used another one and got through. Refunding me 100% of the cost of the USB cable doesn’t replace the port it broke so no thank you. I’d rather people be warned.
axaxs 6y ago
I don't know, they are doing something, just not anything useful I think. Over the past few weeks, I had found a group that posts 'deals'...on crap I don't need, but usually promo codes to buy things for a dollar or two. I've become a bit prolific reviewer since my wife and I compete for reviews/helpful/ranks(stupid, I know). What do you know...Amazon started deleting my reviews. 20 or so deleted so far, and a lot of helpful votes gone as well. If I try to re-review any of those, it tells me I'm not allowed to review this item from my account. So great, I'm a scammer now. Between fake reviews, and now this - Amazon effectively having wasted my time it took writing reviews, I've been ordering more from Walmart. Sure they aren't great, but they aren't Amazon.
bootcampwhere 6y ago
I buy tons of reviews and have found it to be far and away the best use of my advertising dollars. A close second is buying Reddit upvotes. Classic advertising doesn't come close to the value provided by these services. I'm just one users but I've thrown away enough money on traditional advertising that I'm never going back and would recommend others to stop throwing money at Google and Facebook for good.

by msoad 6y ago

kbenson 6y ago

> As always, if you follow the money, Amazon has little interest in doing so... They had little short-term interest in doing so. Now people know the reviews are fake, and Amazon's reputation WRT finding good products and believing you'll get an authentic product is edging towards the gutter. I know I'm very careful of what I'm buying from whom on Amazon now. Combined with them not always being the cheapest for a long time now, and there's less and less reason for me to give them first consideration.

iwasakabukiman 6y ago
Same here. Recently, if it's anything that's health related, I absolutely avoid Amazon because of the mass of fake products out there. I needed some vitamins recently and my first thought was that I'm better off paying CVS or Walgreens prices and being practically guaranteed that the product is legit, versus trying to weed through the fake reviews and counterfeit products on Amazon. That thought has occurred with increasing frequency over the past few years as Amazon continues to completely ignore the issue.
- hansvm 6y ago
  Do be aware that CVS and Walgreens stock homeopathic garbage for any symptom that doesn't have a good OTC remedy, and aside from a little fine print and weird units on the "active ingredients" the packaging is identical to real medicine.
xoa 6y ago
Interestingly I've found Amazon shipping has gone to the dump too, which was one of the final things they had going for them. At first it was completely understandable with the pandemic, but they seem to have taken that as an excuse to just give up on the Prime shipping promise period indefinitely. I was starting to order everything sensitive, from electronics to health, elsewhere anyway over counterfeit and fraud worries. But now I find other places ship massively faster than Amazon, "Prime" shipping on Amazon routinely takes a week or even weeks, plural, even when it says "in stock". Other places ship right away and have it my rural area in days. So for me at least Amazon has finally exited default territory, because it doesn't even have the "well it's more risky, but it's fast and reliable" rush argument anymore. Of course I don't expect the general population to move instantly, and it's not like I've dumped them entirely either. There are even some manufacturers I like who use them for fulfillment pretty exclusively (at least for small orders). But I do wonder in cases like this whether we'll see a non-linear curve: everything seems to be going swell for a business, right until some tipping point is reached and suddenly things go backwards fairly quickly. And that can be hard to recover from. Of course Amazon does have some moats overall, I don't expect them as a going concern to have any real trouble particularly on the service side, AWS and all that. But the moats actually seem weakest for Amazon-as-a-B2C-market, there isn't really anything inherently sticky there beyond habit.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  The delivery issues may be regional, or maybe it's just certain product categories. Where I live, Prime shipping from March-May was about a week to 10 days, but now it's back up to 1-2 days for almost everything. I'm in the North East though where there's a warehouse about 15 miles away, and at least half a dozen major national shipping hubs within ~100 miles.
  - o-__-o 6y ago
    The north has been waaay more affected by lockdown restrictions than the south. We have not seen a single slow down in prime deliveries
  - Firehawke 6y ago
philistine 6y ago
Their reputation is shot. I wanted to buy a NAS, and look at the prices in Canada. I stopped myself from going to Amazon because I was too wary of weird reviews and long discontinued products with completely strange prices. I went to Canada Computers instead.
- hanklazard 6y ago
  I know what you mean. There’s some category of purchases for which I still look at Amazon—basically <30$ and doesn’t-matter-if-it’s-fake type items. Anything that doesn’t fit those criteria, and especially brand name electronic items, I’m buying elsewhere. Knowing it’s genuine is worth a higher price. This has basically meant that I went from a Prime member making 5-10k$ worth of purchase per year a few years ago, to a non-prime member spending only a few hundred $ per year at Amazon. I suspect I’m not unique in the HN crowd, but I’m shocked at how often I see friends, family, and coworkers continue to trust this company with large, important purchases.
rgg_32 6y ago
> Now people know the reviews are fake I am not 100% sure about this, I wish it were so. Maybe it's just that we get this feeling because of the people we usually talk to, the people in our close circle of connections who are likely to be like us in terms of this kind of rasoning/thinking. I think most people may not be aware of it. > They had little short-term interest in doing so I just want to add a possible scenario here and I would like to hear opinions about it: As we all know, people really tend to buy products with 4.5+ stars and we think twice if the product has 3 or even 4 stars. On the other hand, let's suppose that since everyone is selling on Amazon now, worse products are likely to be put on sale, so the average scores start to decrease. Having said the above, if I, as a user, periodically look for products on Amazon, I will probably start seeing/finding bad products, so it may be that in a long period of time, I will start looking for alternatives other than Amazon and may attribute the image of "not high quality products" to Amazon as an e-commerce. [Edit]: So if my two previous scenarios are correct, if you follow the money, they actually have some long-term interest in allowing some fake(good) reviews and eliminating some real bad ones. In the end, most people will not be aware of these fake reviews and the quality of the products will be perceived as higher, resulting in more sales and in a better reputation of Amazon products, thus avoiding the scenario discussed in the second answer.
- kbenson 6y ago
  > I am not 100% sure about this, I wish it were so. Well, not everyone, but there's growing knowledge about it, and popular media podcasts that do whole episodes on it, etc. > I will probably start seeing/finding bad products, so it may be that in a long period of time, I will start looking for alternatives other than Amazon and may attribute the image of "not high quality products" to Amazon as an e-commerce. I think that depends on whether the ratings are for product quality or product accuracy/authenticness/amazon fulfillment issues. > they actually have some long-term interest in allowing some fake(good) reviews and eliminating some real bad ones. I think the important part of that is some. While it may be in Amazon's interest to manipulate the reviews to some degree, it's definitely not in their best interest to let people know or assume they or anyone else is doing so.

RedditKon 6y ago

Yeah - just go to vipon.com. They run an entire platform for this.

texasbigdata 6y ago

Not just that, but the last 3 things I bought (workout stuff) last week from Amazon each had a little notecard inside with a bait for a review and a hinted at alternative dispute resolution system; and none of the items was particularly expensive which suggests the customer acquisition cost of having a high ranking Amazon item must be so low it makes sense to defend it aggressively with gift cards and such.

ManBlanket 6y ago

Jokes on them, I never look at 5 or 1 star reviews. By convention I think rating systems are fundamentally flawed in that they are anything but a ubiquitous concept. The people struggling to piece together how they feel about something in a binary construct generally have the most insightful comments. There's no way to stop someone from gaming the system though. If the economic incentive is to cheat, cheaters gonna cheat. Eventually plugins like FakeSpot will become as common as ad blockers, imo.

red2awn 6y ago
That's my approach as well, the 4 star reviews are usually the most informative.
- Firehawke 6y ago
  I try to take 1, 4, and 5 into account with mine. I mostly discount 5s but it's still good to see what people are saying. 4 will let you know what issues the product really has, and 1 will give you an idea of how frequently the product breaks or arrives broken.

bentcorner 6y ago

> I have the manufacturer of a product (a @wirecutter pick, no less) that I reviewed 3 stars, who has been emailing me offers of increasing amounts of money to take it down. The most recent offer is well over what I spent on the product. I revised my review down to 1 star. Meta-scam: Buy cheap items that are review-scammed and write a thorough, plausible 1-star review, hold out for profit. Rinse, repeat.

rasz 6y ago
Your 1 star review will get auto deleted.
- 1024core 6y ago
  I've been an Amazon customer for 15 years. Have literally bought $50,000+ worth of stuff from them. In other words: rock solid reputation. Amazon has deleted even my critical reviews. Go figure.
  - damnencryption 6y ago
    While I understand that people find any reason to believe they hold status higher than others but they shouldn't believe that when they are faced with a company with billions of customers worldwide. If you continued to buy from Amazon (racked up $50K in spending for 15 years), it's clear that removing your review didn't matter to their bottom line so no reason to care.
    - ehsankia 6y ago
      Your missing the point. It has nothing to do with their identity, it's the fact that telling apart fake reviews from ones written by real people is a hard problem, but generally you won't find a bot account with 15 years of history. The implication here is that if Amazon truly cared about surfacing legitimate reviews only, they would've kept the one from that account since there's very low probability of it being fake.

bstar77 6y ago

I've made a habit of reading the 2* & 3* reviews first. They are almost always helpful and never paid reviews.

stronglikedan 6y ago
And look for patterns of bad product traits being reported. Most people complain about one thing they didn't like, or one thing they wish the product had (even when the description said it didn't, go figure). If everyone is complaining about the same thing, then I know I should probably be wary.

ManBlanket 6y ago

Jokes on them, I never look at 5 or 1 star reviews. By convention I think rating systems are fundamentally flawed in that they are anything but a ubiquitous concept from person to person. Shit, I bet half of the hacker news crowd thinks anything less than an A is a failing grade. The people struggling to piece together how they feel about something in a binary construct generally have the most insightful comments. Kinda like the students who got a couple bad grades in college probably had more interesting lives. ;)

elihu 6y ago

Well, if Amazon were to crack down on this sort of thing, it would incentivize unscrupulous sellers to solicit fake 5-star reviews (through a 3rd party) for their competitors so that they would be punished. The only reason we have to doubt this is happening now is that there's no incentive to do it, since Amazon seems to be turning a blind eye. It's a hard problem. The solutions most likely to work are also expensive. Amazon could create internal product review teams staffed by employees instead of letting users do it all for free, but it's hard to make that scale. It's also less transparent; one of the big appeals of Amazon early on was the novelty that you could go to a retailer and if you don't like one of their products you can say so for the world to see. Now most other retailers do the same thing and we sort of take it for granted now.

Closi 6y ago
It's not that hard - look at systems like Fakespot that could automatically verify reviewer credibility (without even access to the internal data that Amazon holds). Or just offer systems for buyers to report suppliers doing exactly this - buying reviews. Or honeypot it, and just put some fake addresses on sites that sell reviews and then ban companies that send you stuff. I mean there are loads of solutions, but all of them involve Amazon taking down 5 star reviews that help them sell crap, so the incentives are obviously conflicting here.
- LorenPechtel 6y ago
  He's talking about getting your competition banned by false-flagging them. It's much harder to figure out who is placing the fake reviews than that they are fake.
ypiratex 6y ago
By that logic Amazon (or any other site) can never crack down on unscrupulous behavior committed by a 3rd party.

dheera 6y ago

I've been contacted several times after leaving negative reviews by sellers that they would refund me 50% or more (and even 100% in one case) if I changed the review to be positive.

doyouevensunbro 6y ago
Same here. They used a multitude of email addresses so every time I blocked them they eventually used another one and got through. Refunding me 100% of the cost of the USB cable doesn’t replace the port it broke so no thank you. I’d rather people be warned.

axaxs 6y ago

I don't know, they are doing something, just not anything useful I think. Over the past few weeks, I had found a group that posts 'deals'...on crap I don't need, but usually promo codes to buy things for a dollar or two. I've become a bit prolific reviewer since my wife and I compete for reviews/helpful/ranks(stupid, I know). What do you know...Amazon started deleting my reviews. 20 or so deleted so far, and a lot of helpful votes gone as well. If I try to re-review any of those, it tells me I'm not allowed to review this item from my account. So great, I'm a scammer now. Between fake reviews, and now this - Amazon effectively having wasted my time it took writing reviews, I've been ordering more from Walmart. Sure they aren't great, but they aren't Amazon.

bootcampwhere 6y ago

I buy tons of reviews and have found it to be far and away the best use of my advertising dollars. A close second is buying Reddit upvotes. Classic advertising doesn't come close to the value provided by these services. I'm just one users but I've thrown away enough money on traditional advertising that I'm never going back and would recommend others to stop throwing money at Google and Facebook for good.