23 ms·

Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews

506 points by Carducci 6y ago

PaulHoule 6y ago
The worst of it is that if you report an obviously fraudulent product listing nobody at AMZN cares if you didn't buy it. Years ago I quit buying things at staples and started buying at AMZN because staples only stocked crap brands like vtech. Now the crap product listings on AMZN really stink.
- freeAgent 6y ago
  They don’t care even if you DID buy it. I once reordered some toothbrush heads that I liked only to find a completely different, inferior product. It turned out that the product page had been completely redone since my initial order, but it kept all the old reviews. I reported it to Amazon and they did nothing for months. I think the page changed yet again and was no longer even selling toothbrush heads while still keeping the old reviews. After I reported it a few ore times Amazon finally removed the old reviews.
  - Bedon292 6y ago
    How did you actually report this? I can't even figure out how to report some I found.
    - freeAgent 6y ago
      I don’t remember exactly since it was a while ago, sorry.
tomrod 6y ago
Note that I am not for Section 230's removal (mostly because it makes sense to me that platforms should be able to host negative content). However, if it were removed, would that mean bogus reviews become a liability for Amazon?
- Out_of_Characte 6y ago
  I would argue that reviews aren't content. a review is implicitly understood as an opinion of someone without ties to the company and of someone who actually owns or have 'reviewed' the product. In the case of amazon I think ownership of a product should be mandatory to leave a review.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    While this can help the seller can so radically change the listing that it doesn't always stop review hijacking. As I understand it they sell something simple and cheap then repurpose the listing for something else entirely.
    - Out_of_Characte 6y ago
      Strange that something like this is possible, I've always believed that the likes of amazon/ebay had better fraud detection. changing listings seems like an obvious door to fraudulent behaviour. Being able to track packets around the world nowadays should also help detect fake customers for the sake of reviews. (Since the quantity of legit adresses is better known than the quantity of shady adresses.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  Now you know why Section 230 has to go. Comcast, TWC & so on is just a series of pipes, but Facebook & co has editorial control or at least should have.
  - MichaelApproved 6y ago
    Editorial control over every single post on the site? That's impossible. Without 230, social media sites like Facebook would cease to exist.
    - HarryHirsch 6y ago
      Facebook already has armies of moderators for child porn and gore, which shows that they have control over what's on their site. The bigger question is of course: are we safe with Facebook?
meowzero 6y ago
This is why I use tools like fakespot and reviewmeta to make sure Amazons reviews are somewhat accurate. Sure, it's not fool proof, but these tools attempt to filter the obvious bad reviews.
Raed667 6y ago
From the article listed (a toy drone) [1], reviews range from talking about car oil, stickers for kids, a plaque for finishing a race, honey, something about horses (?).. What is this mess !? And how is this not Amazon's top priority? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08P14T1Z2 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08P14T1Z2
- smitty1110 6y ago
  Because they take a percent off the top as the payment processor. And even if you return an item, they're not going to return that fee. When the seller fulfills the order it's even better ,amazon has almost no cost for the entire transaction. They won't care until people start ditching them in large numbers, not the trickle the dissatisfied in these comments (myself included) represent.
  - Raed667 6y ago
    I'm assuming through their (in)famous hiring process, that they have smart/competent people around. They for sure know that this kind of thing will turn people off the platform long term. Devil advocate: Could it be that the problem is actually quite complex due to whatever reason?
    - AdrianB1 6y ago
      Their hiring process works well for a very limited number of people, especially in core IT positions. I am working with Amazon (they are my supplier in an IT project) and I have friends who work for Amazon, core IT people are very good, project managers are a mixed bag, the "business oriented" people are hit or miss, some are good and some are plain incompetent. This is because they are probably too large and hire too many people and they cannot always be too picky (a friend is a hiring manager and he is complaining how hard is to find competent people). That being said, the problem is not very complex to solve, but the motivation is fairly low: they get a percentage of everything is sold, at some point that income can be a lot larger than the damage a few news articles usually do.
    - raunakdag 6y ago
alkonaut 6y ago
Amazon reviews are about as useful as Youtube comments. You can read them for entertainment but don't expect anything useful about the product, and don't base a purchase decision on them.
- tjoff 6y ago
  Youtube comments are actually decent now, with a very low bar for decent at least. Also depending on the type of video/target audience of course. That google managed to improve them so much is likely their biggest achievement I can think of in many years.
  - oblio 6y ago
    It's a very low bar. The original, unfiltered ones were Chernobyl + WW1 trenches. Now they've just manure.
- MichaelApproved 6y ago
  Not entirely true. Yes, Amazon is flooded with fake reviews but I still look through them. Photos and videos in reviews are extremely helpful. There are also many in-depth reviews that are trustworthy.
  - alkonaut 6y ago
    You implictly assume that you'll receive a similar product to the one people reviewed or photographed. Without that assumption, a lot is lost. Under that assumption, I agree. If you trust the seller, then you can probably also trust the reviews of the kind you mention (e.g. product photos). The problem occurs when you want to use the reviews to determine whether to trust the seller, not the product.
- jmeister 6y ago
  Hyperbole. I’ve been reading book reviews on Amazon before buying, on-site or somewhere else, for ~15 years. I’ve almost never seen an item with unhelpful reviews.
djohnston 6y ago
Perhaps I'm in the minority of frequent amazon users, but I don't buy anything from 3rd party sellers anymore. There is simply too much fraud. In practice, this means that I often need to skip past amazon entirely and go straight to the product manufacturer, sometimes paying more, just to be sure I'm not being screwed.
- eganist 6y ago
  This is probably the right way to do it since AFAICR Amazon also still commingles products sourced by themselves as well as sourced from FBA sellers.
- MichaelApproved 6y ago
  Even stuff sold directly by Amazon could be co-mingled with counterfeit inventory from 3rd party sellers.
  - Bedon292 6y ago
    Has this changed? My understanding is that Amazon only comingles 3rd parties and keeps their stuff completely separate. Of course my only source for that appears to be here / reddit so not sure how true it is. https://www.reddit.com/r/FulfillmentByAmazon/comments/dmrri4/does_amazon_commingle_their_own_inventory_with/f5c0bma https://www.reddit.com/r/FulfillmentByAmazon/comments/dmrri4...
    - PaulKeeble 6y ago
      I have seen it three times this year and the last time was November so I would say no its not been fixed and its still happening. If they aren't commingling third party product then they are directly sourcing counterfeit products and that is so much worse and clearly illegal.
  - GloriousKoji 6y ago
    I've fallen victim to scammer merchants who use Amazon in their name. Before I would just check "Ships from / Sold by" under the Add to Cart button but it's not obvious if it's Amazon official. For example which one of these "Ships from / Sold by" is legit? * Amazon * Amazon Inc * Amazon LLC * Amazon Services * Amazon.com * Amazon.com LLC * Amazon.com Inc * Amazon.com Services LLC * Amazon Warehouse
intricatedetail 6y ago
I keep getting items I have not ordered, I presume sellers use fake accounts to be able to review their products. I reported that to Amazon but they only say "they are working on it" in a dismissive way. They even assumed I wanted to ask if I can keep the products and only seemed to take more seriously when I mentioned reporting it to the police. But nothing has changed.
jimkri 6y ago
Was running into this when I was looking for an apple watch band. When filtering by Avg Customer review, all the bands had thousands of fake reviews. Had to go directly to Apple to buy one.
TravisLS 6y ago
There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself. But increasingly we seem a long way from achieving this. Amazon reviews have become such garbage, I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality. There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Brands can afford widespread advertising because they have thriving businesses that generate lots of cash. Brands can get stocked in major retailers because you need decent products to make it through Walmart's buying process. These are signals that are harder to fake, and they're kind of the best we've got right now.
- pjc50 6y ago
  If anything, the last few years of politics have convinced me that objective information is more likely to die out, replaced by advertising, brand recognition, and coercive tools.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    I feel like this could be said any time over the past 100 years, at a minimum.
  - Grimm1 6y ago
    An older friend of mine made the observation that really before the few large news networks and papers in the last 40-50 years objective information that everyone roughly agreed upon was not the norm. Yellow journalism, hearsay and rumors dominated common conversation. He observed that with the internet we're returning to what was this "normal" state with anybody being able to post something and gain widespread recognition, the difference of course being the rate at which this non-objective information travels and the better ability to weaponize it. I think, after looking into it a bit more, I agree with him and that our period of fairly objective news and political information and the general consensus that brought was the anomaly. This raises the question then how do we as society re-learn to cope with that and filter out non objective information because clearly we're not doing so well with it now. So, I don't think so much as it will die out as much as I think we need to develop abilities to separate wheat from chaff, stronger societal bullshit filters because truth will have a weaker signal.
lesinski 6y ago
Here’s why Wirecutter can make an entire business out of credibly reviewing products
- loloquwowndueo 6y ago
  And then wreck it by putting most reviews behind a login wall (sure it’s free but I don’t want another account). Reader mode to the rescue!
  - symlinkk 6y ago
    I have never seen a paywall for Wirecutter
    - Marsymars 6y ago
      It's not consistent. It only seems to trigger after a few site visits. (So I don't see it if using a private mode browser, Safari, or temporary containers in Firefox.) Obnoxiously, if you're configured to visit in a fresh browser/container, you have to click away the dickbars on every visit. (And they use similar html obfuscation as facebook, so the dickbar element can't be blocked with uBlock.)
    - loloquwowndueo 6y ago
      Login wall != paywall.
- s0rce 6y ago
  Other sites like Outdoorgearlab do this as well, although, I could be wrong, it seems like they strongly favor items that can use affiliate links to make them money, which makes sense.
ricardobeat 6y ago
I had this problem literally half an hour ago. Looking for power strips, and the top rated one (average > 4.5 stars) thankfully has customer pictures showing extremely flimsy connections and soldering, a huge fire hazard.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  I had a power strip catch fire. Posted photos and the seller tried desperately to get me to take them down. Monetary offers transitioned to creepy comments about my social media activity to try and freak me out.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    Brennenstuhl? Da brennt der Stuhl! (There the chair is catching fire!) Had this many years ago, but not via Amazon, may have been a case of fake product, though. OTOH I came across reviews of this brand many years later, also on Amazon, stating similar. So either they are faked much, or their brand name is program.
- LoSboccacc 6y ago
  Looking for smart Christmas tree light for next year and the listing go from sketchy Chinese stuff with clearly manufactured reviews to outright fraudulent products that use images straight off name brand advertisement for their knock-off lights
- devinplatt 6y ago
  Ugh, I had this problem looking for power strips on Amazon too. I wanted something with lots of reviews (to verify quality), but every product with a high number of reviews had at least one scary customer picture. I ended up relying on brand trust: I looked up reputable brands and bought some Tripp Lite power strips.
cambalache 6y ago
I was a heavy Amazon customer 8-10 years ago. I only bought stuff sold directly by Amazon, and that was not hard to do, since +90% of the products had that option. The other day I was just checking the price of an article for my mom and I was shocked how different is now, the proportion has totally changed, +90% of the articles are not sold by Amazon and by the "stores" name it looks they are barely better than random dropshippers. So if you buy 3-4 articles instead of dealing with a single established company you are dealing with many unknown vendors. The probability of getting lemons rises up dramatically. Amazon has gotten complacent due to its quasi-monopoly. I think now it is the time for a serious competition to take business out from them. One of those brick-and-mortar ex-giants, the ones who were displaced could make a comeback. If I buy online I want to deal with recognized companies who have a track record of shipping real products and honoring the warranties, not with some randoms hidden behind not recognizable names.
- bombcar 6y ago
  The same thing happened to Ebay and Etsy - once they reached a certain level of popularity based on the original premise it turned into a outlet for cheap junk. I've taken to finding as much as I can at places that DO NOT have a "marketplace" such as Target or Home Depot.
  - s0rce 6y ago
    Ebay has lots of junk (the worst being the people who drop ship items from Amazon marked up or just outright scams) but its also a source of really good deals that you really can't find elsewhere. Refurbished PCs, obscure electronics, mechanical and pneumatic fittings, lots of stuff I order for work to test/prototype which can save $100s-$1000s. I also use ebay for various antique/vintage stuff (only <$100). Seems like overall a positive experience and the few times I've had issues I've always got my money back and the scammers account was closed, although I'm sure they just pop up again under a new name.
  - birdyrooster 6y ago
    Quick counter: eBay is legit and has so much non-junk that its one of my top 10 visited sites. I've only once received a counterfeit item and it was a Sandisk branded sd card, but everything else in my three-hundred-and-counting auction history has arrived as described by the seller.
S_A_P 6y ago
I think the review system is good for generalities as long as you toss out the hyperbole. Very few products are hyperbolically good. Once you weed that out you can find trends so long as the company is not engaging in fraud or other deception. I also try not to buy anything on impulse so that I can spend enough time researching my purchase. So far I’ve been pretty lucky in that I have not gotten a fraudulent product or something that is not as advertised. How often is the fakery happening? What types of products are commonly fake/bootleg? It may just be that I don’t ever buy the de sorts of things.
natex 6y ago
Not mentioned in the article, but Amazon also hasn't fixed its problem with fake reviews at Audible either. Thousands of 5-star ratings are similarly worded blurbs by accounts with 1 or 2 book reviews.
tvanantwerp 6y ago
Even when Amazon reviews are legitimate, keep in mind that the reviewer may have been looking for something different than you are. Plenty of times I've bought stuff expecting one level of quality based on review scores, but got something less--all because I had a higher standard of what should be a 5 than most of the people who bought that.
- detaro 6y ago
  one of the reasons why reading negative reviews is often helpful: there you often can figure out if the complaints about quality are from people with your standards or from people with higher ones. (after you filter out all the people who don't understand the difference between a product review and a review of their local postal service of course...)
  - vidarh 6y ago
    It's almost always the negative reviews which convinces me to buy a product. The positive reviews rarely have much information. The negative reviews far more often will tell me where the weaknesses and problems are so I can determine if they are things that matter to me.
    - PaulKeeble 6y ago
      It has become the same with game reviews on Steam as well. I think most people just aren't very discerning or critical with their reviews. Those with negative reviews however have at least one complaint about the product and determining those as a combination matter to you is a big part of finding the right product. It marks the death of high quality reviews however because professional reviews can be done in context weighing things up better, where as most customers just don't have the experience with alternatives to say if its a good example or not.
ProAm 6y ago
It's not a problem for Amazon, it's a net positive feature monetarily speaking.
- kevincox 6y ago
  Is it? I regularly look elsewhere because I can't be confident that I am getting what I want. I guess if they expect that the products are worse than they appear then making reviews useless would be helpful. But if they have some good products and good reviews I would be more inclined to buy. It seems that there is the a low area what bad quality reviews help more purchases but for the middle quality and good quality products I would expect low review quality to drive sales elsewhere.
  - ProAm 6y ago
    Oh its extremely user hostile, but Amazon makes money either way. Counterfeit, bait and switch, commingling inventory, all of that doesn't matter because the transaction volume going out is still greater than the refunds and unhappy users. Way past the point of return for that to hurt business. I agree with you though, I only shop amazon for simple stupid things I cant find local, I don't even buy name brand there anymore.
sdflhasjd 6y ago
Bait-and-switch doesn't matter if Amazon doesn't care about fake and paid-for reviews. I was looking for dashcams and came across this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/iiwey-Channels-included-Dashboard-Detection/dp/B08L7HZF3Z/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/iiwey-Channels-included-Dashboard-D... 91% 5-star reviews, a lot of the reviews are from "Top XXX reviewer", and almost every one seems to be reading off a script. If you check out all the profiles of these "Top XX" reviewers, they all seem to be non-stop purchasers of chinese tat... curiously all rated 5 starts. I'm sure Amazon is perfectly capable of detecting and handling this, what incentive do they have to allow all these fake reviews?
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  > what incentive do they have to allow all these fake reviews? People buy the tat from Amazon instead of buying a name brand from a competitor.
  - sdflhasjd 6y ago
    Surely customers will still buy from respected brands on Amazon though.
- Zizizizz 6y ago
  I was looking at webcams and the Amazon recommended one is 1000+ five star reviews some of which say that you only get a lifetime warranty if you leave a five star review
- xxs 6y ago
  A simple test for quality - if the clam shell/body is made of ABS (instead of polycarbonate or nylon), it's very likely bad. The dashcam appears ABS, judging from the pics. You can return stuff back when bought online in 14days, I think this part remains after the 1st of Jan.
  - 0xffff2 6y ago
    How can you tell the difference? It seems like you're making a judgement based on just the product pictures, what specific things make it looks like ABS to you? What would a polycarbonate or nylon plastic look like?
IAmWorried 6y ago
I don't know about you folks, but I've received so many "new" items from Amazon that were clearly used that I have largely stopped shopping there for expensive items. I think it's still fine for small gifts, plastic utensils, etc. But anything over 100 bucks I try to buy directly off the manufacturer's website. I think Amazon needs to get a handle on their sellers and reviews ASAP because I am rapidly losing faith in the store.
- prepend 6y ago
  Same here. I wonder if Amazon employees stopped eating their own dog food, and would be interesting to be a fly on the wall for how they are trying to solve this problem. I fear that they’ve done the math and decided that they make more money this way than a quality way.
- hbt 6y ago
  same I bought a cpu from Amazon 700$ and sold by AMD they shipped me a used one where the paste was already partially applied on the socket. it works but still payed full price for a "new" item when it was a returned item. it's just scummy all around
dathinab 6y ago
It's not just reviews. Recently I have often seen FAQ answers and similar for other products of the same vendor listed below the product.
duxup 6y ago
Originally the reason I liked Amazon was that I grew up in an area that didn't have access to stores with higher quality goods. Wal-Mart's price sensitive nature and similar stores meant that most of what was offered was 10% less in price, but 30% less in quality / how long it might last. Now on Amazon everything is a race to the bottom on price and quality and, it is really hard to find something that is good quality and if you do ... someone is probably willing to sell you a fake. I've gotten a few items I thought were fakes, and when I post a less than glowing review (not even mentioning my fake suspicions) I'm often contacted and offered a free product for removing my review.... I refuse to take these offers, but I wonder how many people do. Rather than what I sort of expected, Wal-Mart trying to be Amazon... Amazon seems desperate to BE Wal-Mart...
tangoalpha 6y ago
This is how the seller can do it, atleast on Amazon India. Swapping the details completely triggers AI based flags and often causes the change to be manually reviewed. But the seller can add a variant of the product (like size or color). But the seller instead adds a completely different product he intends to swap the original product with. Now the listing will show two completely different products as variants on a single product listing. Then the seller removes the old variant. Nothing gets flagged. No manual review. This has been around for long and a very popular trick with shady sellers on Amazon in India. I don't think Amazon never figured it out. For whatever reason, Amazon turns a blind eye to this practice.
- Bedon292 6y ago
  I was just seeing something like this the other day on US Amazon. I was looking at 'nano tape' to stick some stuff in place. And came across the top reviewed one, with 11k reviews [1] but all of the reviews are for a guitar wall mount. I was very confused as to how they achieved it. [1] Example: https://smile.amazon.com/Double-Sided-Tape-Walls-Decoration/dp/B08KXVN3F9/ https://smile.amazon.com/Double-Sided-Tape-Walls-Decoration/...
- kevincox 6y ago
  This is a huge problem. Or a single "product page" with "variants" that are completely different products. I just outright refuse to buy from these sellers but it is clearly a successful model.
- PoignardAzur 6y ago
  This feels like the kind of tricks Amazon should actively be defending against, with red teams trying to come up with angles of attacks, people looking for forums discussing possible approaches to game the system, etc.
Zelphyr 6y ago
The only way this changes is when more people stop buying from Amazon. The incentives otherwise are too great for Amazon to do anything about it.
- maya24 6y ago
  Yep. I found Amazon pretty useless these days and rarely use it. I buy household essentials from Target their service and delivery is good and I have an option of in-store pickup within a day or delivery within a couple of days. At least they have a stable set of brands that they sell it's not the highest quality but it's good enough for most things. The things I care about quality I will buy directly from the seller.
  - Zelphyr 6y ago
    I've actually found, to my surprise, Walmart to be somewhat comparable to Target in the sense of feeling like I'm getting what I ordered instead of a knockoff like with Amazon. I had avoided them for years because of the terrible customer service I have received in their stores in the past but their online service is noticeably better. Their grocery Pick Up system is far superior to the competitor grocery stores in my area.
epistasis 6y ago
> As a result of Amazon's action, the top-ranking drone, which previously had more than 6,000 reviews, now has only about 50 reviews and its star rating has dropped to three and a half stars. But the other two listings I mentioned above—both of which I also mentioned in a Monday email to Amazon—still have thousands of positive reviews, including a bunch of obviously bogus ones. The result of blatant fraud and manipulation is simply removing the fraud? Why is Amazon continuing business with this shady company as if nothing happened? I consider their "corrective" action far worse and damming than their inaction on other pages. Inaction could be from an inability to police everything. But merely covering up fraud when it happens is nearly as bad as taking no action.
- jquery 6y ago
  This is the core of the problem. Amazon simply doesn’t understand how trust works.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
What I like, are the companies that create a separate listing for every variant of a product, within a price range, so searches get overwhelmed. A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a Mag-Safe stand for my new iPhone 12 Mini. When I searched for it on Amazon, look at what the search returned[0]. Now, scroll down, until you get to the "Cheetah" pop stand. Keep scrolling. But don't touch that dial! It goes on for 400 pages![1] Note they raise the price slightly, so they "sort." I ended up giving up, and getting one straight from the manufacturer. Oh...BTW. Those stands have this little gem in their description: > (Not compatible with Apple MagSafe wireless charger or MagSafe wallet.) Great that they overwhelm a search that is, explicitly: magsafe iPhone stand [0] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=magsafe+iPhone+stand&i=mobile&s=price-asc-rank https://www.amazon.com/s?k=magsafe+iPhone+stand&i=mobile&s=p... [1] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=magsafe+iPhone+stand&i=mobile&s=price-asc-rank&page=400 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=magsafe+iPhone+stand&i=mobile&s=p...
- quitethelogic 6y ago
  That is certainly a suboptimal shopping experience. One page with variants wouldn't seem to work very well for this either, with nearly 10,000 variations. Interestingly, they are all sold by amazon directly and are printed on demand so it doesn't seem to be a case of a 3rd party trying to game the site.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    > Interestingly, they are all sold by amazon directly and are printed on demand so it doesn't seem to be a case of a 3rd party trying to game the site. Eek. I didn't even notice. That makes it even worse.
ilamont 6y ago
Other bait-and-switch problems on Amazon are manufacturers and "brands" launching a product with high production standards, then switching them out with cheap, low-grade junk made with inferior components or materials later on. This is often coupled with rampant paid review scams, as discussed on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459434) A twist on bait and switch is another manufacturer or reseller taking over the "buy box". This is how pirated items or used items sold as new get dumped on customers, with Amazon's full encouragement (lower prices for customers!) and non-enforcement/honor system for sellers. Legitimate manufacturers and brands can scream to the high heavens that they and customers are being ripped off, but Amazon does next to nothing to stop the bad guys let alone compensate customers and brands who were cheated. Case in point: Bill Pollock's experience having his Python books repeatedly pirated (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19199135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19199135)
umvi 6y ago
I bought magnetic tiles for my kids for christmas, and in the box was a card promising me money if I left a 5 star review and forwarded proof that I left a 5 star review to the company's email.
- cratermoon 6y ago
  A friend of mine got a no-name brand spotting telescope as a Christmas present, and it had one of those cards in the box. Not the shipping box, the actual package. Someone had to have unsealed the box, put the card in, and closed it back up. It's an OK scope, nothing special, and I have no idea how much the giver paid.
_Microft 6y ago
I refuse to believe that Amazon, Google/Youtube, Facebook,... have actually "solved scale" unless they can deal with problems like this reliably and automatically.
ve55 6y ago
>Clicking on the names of these "brands" takes you to a search result with no additional information on who made these products. This in particular bugs me quite a bit on Amazon. The link for the 'brand' appears as if you can click it and then see information about who you are buying from, but instead it just performs a search for the word and you often get zero useful results. Instead I'd like to see basic information about the seller: what items do they sell, how many have they sold, what country are they based in, what is their average review, and so on.
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
Here's one solution: don't buy cheap garbage. Yes, someone makes a $23 drone. It is cheap plastic shit from China. Do you really need to buy it, and then throw it in landfill a week (or two days) later after it breaks? Did OP reeeeeally expect a $23 drone to be on the up-and-up and NOT end up as landfill? OP is a bit oblivious to his impact on the environment. This race to the bottom for the cheapest crap is what inspires these tactics.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  ... Except that Amazon also has a problem with counterfeiting, especially for known brands.
  - SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
    Absolutely agreed. It's a different topic though. Amazon even steals top sellers, copies them, and pushes out the originator! (I think there was a radiolab about a guy who invented a bunch of grill tools that Amazon duplicated, and bottom-listed him). There are lots of problems with Amazon, but in hindsight, perhaps my original comment was a bit offtopic...
- omginternets 6y ago
  I've heard this phrased as "buy once, cry once". A few years ago my New Year's resolution was to stop buying cheap crap, and to consciously save up for nice things. This had a few unexpected consequences: 1. I accumulate less junk and produce less waste. 2. I buy less stuff and end up spending less money in the long run, since there's only so much you can save up for at once. 3. My purchases bring me much more pleasure; the anticipation and research heightens the joy of actually getting the thing. Number 3 was the most surprising to me, most likely because I have a rather strong anti-materialism streak. I'm not the kind of person who "goes shopping", but even I must admit that deliberately saving up for something makes its purchase a bit more meaningful, and loads more satisfying. Oh, and I basically don't experience buyer's remorse anymore, which is nice.
  - ptmcc 6y ago
throwaway894345 6y ago
Does anyone know of an alternative to Amazon that addresses quality and environmental issues (ideally something that isn't trying to sell me the latest hot garbage from whatever country is willing to trash the environment and enslave its citizens for a quick buck)?
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  https://www.manufactum.com https://www.manufactum.com ? The real site is manufactum.de nowadays a daughter of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_GmbH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_GmbH , the last remaining general catalog/online retailer, like Sears once was in the US.
cbanek 6y ago
Somewhat related due to comments / reviews being for a product, but sometimes on Amazon one page has a set of different options (with the little boxes). So you can pick like a color or model. But then they group all the reviews together despite what buttons you've picked. This is so frustrating! At least they've added a little thing that says which SKU the review is for. But I wish they would just separate out the reviews for different models / colors. It just seems another way to get increased review counts and make it look like a clear obvious quality winner from the search results box.
- PaulKeeble 6y ago
  This is especially a problem for things with different flavours. I have run into multiple problems with Protein shakes where the vanilla is amazing and everything else tastes awful. The comments being merged mean you might have to pick through 1000 review comments to work out which flavours are good and which are bad.
  - cbanek 6y ago
    Exactly, same for Amazon pages that decide to sell the "new model" on the same page as the old model to harvest reviews. And then when I'm trying to figure out if it has better support or problems, I'm trying to pick through the reviews to figure out which one is talking about which version. (Mostly a problem when also trying to figure out linux support!)
    - PaulKeeble 6y ago
      I saw that around Black Friday where electric toothbrushes were on sale and they had merged the product pages a bunch of SKUs with just one of them being on sale. Of course the one on sale previously had a bunch of bad reviews, but merged with the reliable SKUs it appeared to have a good average and had a nice star rating. The comments showed an inconsistent story all about that one SKU. What Amazon is doing is just outright dishonest and ought to be against the law. They are certainly intentionally utilising this to sell products with dishonest reviews and star ratings.
- 6y ago
ec109685 6y ago
9th best selling flash disk is totally fake: USB Flash Drive 1TB - Thumb Drive, High Speed USB Drive, Portable Ultra Large Storage USB Memory Stick, Jump Drive Pen Drive Come with Keychain https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N16XZNR/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glc_fabc_Aol7FbZ3MC09M?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N16XZNR/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glc_... Reviews are for Soda and the storage capacity is much less than 1TB so you will lose data if you film it.
mdoms 6y ago
Presumably you've all stopped using Amazon because of this issue, so they're motivated to fix it..?
- PaulKeeble 6y ago
  Right now it doesn't seem to have a competitor. I think the market is now primed for an ethical competitor to come along and steal its business however, a lot of people are getting irritated with Amazon and would happily chose an alternative.
  - mdoms 6y ago
    Amazon's competitor is every other store on Earth. Amazon doesn't even exist in my country but somehow I have made it this far.
- r00fus 6y ago
  My family purchases went from tens of thousands of dollars in 2018 to thousands in 2019 and even less in 2020. Now I'm on the brink of closing my Prime account. So yeah.
hackernewsacct6 6y ago
Used to be a brief period a few years back when you could order quality items on amazon.co.jp. All with free Prime shipping to US. Now it’s equally full of poorly designed and manufactured Chinese products.
prepend 6y ago
Apple and Google require developers to have some info and a persistent profile to publish an app. Every app has a publisher and I can see what else they publish, how long they’ve been around, etc. nothing extensive just letting me know that they exist and at least a mailbox or url for support. Amazon doesn’t do this. Many of the seller pages are bogus or hard to see what they sell. I assume that since it sucks so much Amazon doesn’t care or they specifically don’t want me associating sellers with their own brands.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
This is one of those areas where "breaking up the tech giants" might actually work - Amazon is basically an e-commerce platform, a global post office, a seller in its own right, and a discovery engine. There really is little reason they all need to be together. Putting a discovery engine in place that won't make a profit unless the right and decent thing arrives surely suggests they will have incentives aligned with the customers?
ryanyde 6y ago
Journalists have never operated an ecommerce company. In the same year, they'll publish a story about how requiring manufacturing information enables them to steal secrets from sellers. You can't have it both ways.
- sathackr 6y ago
  If Amazon wasn't directly competing against their sellers, and doing exactly what you said, while lying to Congress about it [1], then maybe journalists wouldn't be writing about Amazon stealing secrets from sellers. 1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its-own-sellers-to-launch-competing-products-11587650015 https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...
- r00fus 6y ago
  > You can't have it both ways. Clearly you have to be a megacorp to get it both ways. Amazon shouldn't be able to evade liability for products sold on their website if they compete against their "sellers" as well.
ada1981 6y ago
I was hoping they would explain how exactly this is happening? What about the amazon seller ecosystem allows this to happen in the first place. Why aren't reviews linked to the SKUs?
cratermoon 6y ago
"just this weekend I was able to pay an extra $3 to get same-day delivery on a $9 item" Spending a third of the price of something cheap to get it NOW is peak Veruca Salt.
acjohnson55 6y ago
I 100% agree with this article. And yet, I still do most of my shopping on Amazon. Unfortunately, when it comes to general merchandise, they're still the best at inventory, discovery, quality, fulfillment, and price. Which is a scathing indictment of the state of the rest of the e-commerce world.
vsskanth 6y ago
Naive question, but can't they just tie the reviews to the product's UPC Code ? I thought Amazon also has their own unique product identifiers.
SMAAART 6y ago
Moral Hazard: same principle why FB/GOOG have not fixed their advertising fraud problems.
wnevets 6y ago
More and more I've been switching my purchases back to brick and mortar. Amazon isn't cheapest, highest quality or the widest selection. Amazon prime makes it the most convenient but if you stop for a minute and break the cycle you'll find better prices at a higher quality else where.
mancerayder 6y ago
The amount of time I've spent lately just looking for one simple thing - honesty - when looking to buy something, is embarrassing to say out loud. One of many, many examples. I wanted to buy a 10k lux light to see whether it improves my winter health. I spent well over an hour on Amazon going through reviews and products. When I found something I liked, on several occasions, Fakespot rated the product a C or D and noted it saw tons of reviews being removed and other heuristics. Then I personally noticed some products from different brands looked almost identical. And sometimes I noticed the same product from the same brand with separate entries. Also, when I wanted to read 3 or lower star reviews, I was told there were some, but I'd click the filter and it'd find no reviews lower than 4 or 5. The other month I posted a review on Amazon for six canning jars where 5 spontaneously cracked in the fridge by themselves, unmolested. My review got removed and Amazon said it failed some guideline. This never used to happen. Look, I'm happy to pay a little more here and there, I rarely look for the cheapest thing or budget item. But why is lying and deception so commonplace and lackadaisically accepted? It's grating. Someone should invent an Honest Amazon competition. Honestly, Ebay vendors are often more trustworthy.
destitude 6y ago
I'm still having issues where my "Amazon Prime" membership results in a delivery usually taking 1 week instead of "2 days".
Animats 6y ago
Skip the Amazon resellers and order direct from China on Alibaba. Their reputation system is less spammy than Amazon's. One of my areas to watch: solid state relays. Here we have yet another fake Fotek solid state relay on Amazon.[1] Note the "Made in China". Here's the real thing.[2] Note the "Taiwan made" from the real Fotek. Costs a lot more. That's because it will actually handle the rated current. The fakes are notorious for overheating and burning out. The real thing has overheat and surge protection, will shut off if it overheats, and can stand a big short term overload for motor starting or when a short is in the process of tripping the circuit breaker upstream. Here's a similar solid state relay from China, from the actual manufacturer. They actually provide a table which shows how much they exaggerate the ratings. They're over-rated by 2X for a resistive load, and 6x for an inductive load. "For a motor with rated current of 15A and the motor is inductive load, the formula is 15A x 6 = 90A, so you should choose to buy 100A solid state relay". For a little extra, you can have your own fake label. Minimum order 200 pcs. Here's a fake Fotek.[4] What's amusing is that this is the actual manufacturer in China selling the fakes. They're in Guangdong, and they're selling under their own name, but with a fake label. No shame. There are legit manufacturers in China selling solid state relays.[5] They put their own name on the product, show pictures of the inside their rather grubby factory, and have realistic numbers on their data sheets, along with pictures of UL certification documents. About 4x more expensive than the fakes. If you're in China and are building industrial equipment which needs these components, you need ones that won't fail and shut down a manufacturing line. Here's a teardown of a fake. [6] The fakes are just solid state switches with power ratings way beyond what their components are good for. UL warning notice about fake Fotek solid state relays.[7] UL issued that notice six years ago, and they're still on Amazon and eBay. [1] https://www.amazon.com/SSR-25-DC-AC-Solid-State-Relay/dp/B07FVR37QN/ https://www.amazon.com/SSR-25-DC-AC-Solid-State-Relay/dp/B07... [2] https://www.fotek.com.tw/en-gb/product-category/143 https://www.fotek.com.tw/en-gb/product-category/143 [3] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/1PCS-SSR-10-DA-DC-Control_1600149635502.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/1PCS-SSR-10-DA-DC-Con... [4] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/High-quality-SSR-25DA-SSR-25DA_1931397677.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/High-quality-SSR-25DA... [5] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/SSR-S25DA-H-DC-TO-AC_1688083866.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/SSR-S25DA-H-DC-TO-AC_... [6] https://youtu.be/DxEhxjvifyY https://youtu.be/DxEhxjvifyY [7] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ul-warns-of-solid-state-relay-with-counterfeit-ul-recognition-mark-release-13pn-52-242919311.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ul-warns-of-solid-s...
charlescarver 6y ago
I run all potential Amazon purchases through fakespot.com. It’s definitely caused me to change my mind on multiple occasions.
notacoward 6y ago
The thing that really annoys me is that when you go to report problems with a listing, none of the options you're given really match this. "Problem with item description" is the closest. Considering that this is one of the top three problems turning Amazon shopping into a garbage-fest, you'd think they'd have a clearer way to report it. That they don't shows that they just don't care.
floatingatoll 6y ago
This problem exposes an aspect of the AI difficulty chasm between Amazon’s dream of assigning a unique barcode (ASIN) to every object under the sun that has been or ever will be sold, and Amazon’s dream of doing so without spending a single dollar on expensive human curators. Amazon is trying to solve a well-known library science problem using AI, and it’s been a miserable failure. Their AI systems can’t detect when sellers bait and switch because there’s no way to detect this that doesn’t have a massive false positive rate, and they aren’t willing to spend a single dollar on ‘app store’ reviewing product changes by third parties. Another demonstration of this chasm can be found by searching for ‘claritin’. There are pages of duplicates, terrible and missing product photos, and a wide array of metadata errors due to human inconsistency by the sellers listing the product on the marketplace. Fixing this would require human curation, since their AI curation is incapable of doing it, and so Amazon simply allows the rot to spread unchecked.
dzdt 6y ago
My Christmas Amazon experience was helping my young daughter search for a doll to buy with a gift card and finding mixed into the results a large number of graphically illustrated sex toys. (She typoed "dolll" as the search term.) The convenience of an everything e-commerce site is not worth the nonsense.
- FireBeyond 6y ago
  And unicode. There are many bütt plugs for sale on Amazon too. Oh, you can also buy suppressors and silencers for guns there too. Except they're usually branded as "lawn mower mufflers". Reviews are ... amusing ... "Makes my 9mm mower sound just like a pop gun".
Rapzid 6y ago
Amazon uses this tactic themselves! They did it with the high capacity Amazon Basics AA batteries. The community pretty much verified they were rebranded Panasonic batteries manufactured in Japan. Then, after a few years and thousands of 5 star reviews they switched the batteries out for Chinese manufactured batteries. Check for yourself: https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-High-Capacity-Rechargeable-Batteries-Pre-charged/dp/B00HZV9WTM https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-High-Capacity-Rechargeab...
toss1 6y ago
This would be pretty simple to solve if Amazon appended a couple new fields to each review logging the string of text in the main headline at the time the review was posted, and the sales category. Using this field could then at least provide a control for us poor customers to filter only reviews for the current version/category of the product And if they really wanted to do it right, they'd scan headlines/categories and reviews for substantial changes. Just a bit of good logic or AI pattern recognition should be able to sift this down to a manageable set of changes for human review and appropriate action, such as demanding a re-listing as a new product, weeding out repeat offenders, etc. The article's point about Amazon failing to show a focus on "customer obsession" in this area is key - Amazon used to be a great place to search for products, and it is now a miserable, long slog to find anything good in the sea of crap with bogus listings & reviews.
frankosaurus 6y ago
> When I sorted the reviews by date ... most recent reviewers actually had bought a drone ... But the older reviews were for honey. I'm definitely going to use this sort-by-date trick for future product research adventures. I do miss the good old days when Amazon reviews were an amazing product research tool. Aside: I have no idea why they bury the "search reviews" feature. It's essential for discovering, say, real-world Linux compatibility for random pieces of hardware.
taurath 6y ago
I bought a plant growing light a few days ago on amazon. It was the #1 seller in the category, and had nearly 15,000 reviews and sat at 4.5 stars. It was cheap. Mine didn't work. The box said it was 80 watts, but the included adaptor could only do 40 watts. In the box was an offer for a $15 amazon gift card to give them a 5 star rating. I wrote a review on amazon, stating this. I got an email from amazon that my review had not been accepted this morning. I called amazon the previous night and the first person told me to "contact the seller". It took a second person to tell me that blatantly bribing customers for reviews was against their policy. Clearly nothing will happen. All I can think of is that the end user is no longer the customer for Amazon. They're a platform for sellers, so the sellers are the new customers. Shame they never told the end users.
- redisman 6y ago
  This is a great encapsulation of the Amazon experience these days. Spot on. You buy the top selling, thousands of five star reviews, Aliexpress piece of junk that doesn't match the description. The seller tries to bribe you to leave them another 5 star review and Amazon customer service tells you to leave them alone and stop messing with their business model. I very much fail to see how this is supposed to fit in with their "customer obsession".
- cjsawyer 6y ago
  You’ve put words to my opinion here. Thank you for stating it so concisely
forgotmysn 6y ago
headline is strange to me. "still" implies amazon had any intention of fixing this problem.
rahimnathwani 6y ago
FYI a drone like the one pictured can easily be found for under $6 in China (retail price, including shipping within China). Amazon in the US sells similar things for under $20, which seems reasonable given the local logistics costs. I wouldn't recommend a toy like that for anyone under 6 years old. You're meant to hold it steady on your outstretched palm, then pull your hand away swiftly. Younger kids can find this too hard, which causes them to resort to tossing it up in the air. The resulting collisions (which are much harder than the collisions during flight) could easily cause the type of damage described.
bradgranath 6y ago
You shouldn't need product reviews, manufacturer name, or country of origin to know that a $23 quadcopter is trash. They sell $50 watches there too. Do you think they compare to a Rolex? If Amazon is at fault here it's for destroying the concept of value in and of itself.
Schnitz 6y ago
There’s really no way around this except avoiding third party sellers, except if it’s the producer themselves selling directly on Amazon. Unless you want the eBay experience, don’t buy in the Amazon marketplace.
unishark 6y ago
> Amazon could easily require sellers to provide some basic transparency about these listings—disclosing where these manufacturers are located, how long they've been in business, and which other brands they own. This might make it easier for Amazon to punish companies that try to mislead customers with fake reviews. In my experience they go out of their way to hide info on who the company really is and especially where it is located. Including deleting reviews that point this out. I suspect they make the most money selling in a position of maximum information asymmetry. If you built up any loyalty to the brand they could sell to you outside amazon.

506 points by Carducci 6y ago

The worst of it is that if you report an obviously fraudulent product listing nobody at AMZN cares if you didn't buy it. Years ago I quit buying things at staples and started buying at AMZN because staples only stocked crap brands like vtech. Now the crap product listings on AMZN really stink.

freeAgent 6y ago
They don’t care even if you DID buy it. I once reordered some toothbrush heads that I liked only to find a completely different, inferior product. It turned out that the product page had been completely redone since my initial order, but it kept all the old reviews. I reported it to Amazon and they did nothing for months. I think the page changed yet again and was no longer even selling toothbrush heads while still keeping the old reviews. After I reported it a few ore times Amazon finally removed the old reviews.
- Bedon292 6y ago
  How did you actually report this? I can't even figure out how to report some I found.
  - freeAgent 6y ago
    I don’t remember exactly since it was a while ago, sorry.

tomrod 6y ago

Note that I am not for Section 230's removal (mostly because it makes sense to me that platforms should be able to host negative content). However, if it were removed, would that mean bogus reviews become a liability for Amazon?

Out_of_Characte 6y ago
I would argue that reviews aren't content. a review is implicitly understood as an opinion of someone without ties to the company and of someone who actually owns or have 'reviewed' the product. In the case of amazon I think ownership of a product should be mandatory to leave a review.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  While this can help the seller can so radically change the listing that it doesn't always stop review hijacking. As I understand it they sell something simple and cheap then repurpose the listing for something else entirely.
  - Out_of_Characte 6y ago
    Strange that something like this is possible, I've always believed that the likes of amazon/ebay had better fraud detection. changing listings seems like an obvious door to fraudulent behaviour. Being able to track packets around the world nowadays should also help detect fake customers for the sake of reviews. (Since the quantity of legit adresses is better known than the quantity of shady adresses.
HarryHirsch 6y ago
Now you know why Section 230 has to go. Comcast, TWC & so on is just a series of pipes, but Facebook & co has editorial control or at least should have.
- MichaelApproved 6y ago
  Editorial control over every single post on the site? That's impossible. Without 230, social media sites like Facebook would cease to exist.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    Facebook already has armies of moderators for child porn and gore, which shows that they have control over what's on their site. The bigger question is of course: are we safe with Facebook?

meowzero 6y ago

This is why I use tools like fakespot and reviewmeta to make sure Amazons reviews are somewhat accurate. Sure, it's not fool proof, but these tools attempt to filter the obvious bad reviews.

Raed667 6y ago

From the article listed (a toy drone) [1], reviews range from talking about car oil, stickers for kids, a plaque for finishing a race, honey, something about horses (?).. What is this mess !? And how is this not Amazon's top priority? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08P14T1Z2 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08P14T1Z2

smitty1110 6y ago
Because they take a percent off the top as the payment processor. And even if you return an item, they're not going to return that fee. When the seller fulfills the order it's even better ,amazon has almost no cost for the entire transaction. They won't care until people start ditching them in large numbers, not the trickle the dissatisfied in these comments (myself included) represent.
- Raed667 6y ago
  I'm assuming through their (in)famous hiring process, that they have smart/competent people around. They for sure know that this kind of thing will turn people off the platform long term. Devil advocate: Could it be that the problem is actually quite complex due to whatever reason?
  - AdrianB1 6y ago
    Their hiring process works well for a very limited number of people, especially in core IT positions. I am working with Amazon (they are my supplier in an IT project) and I have friends who work for Amazon, core IT people are very good, project managers are a mixed bag, the "business oriented" people are hit or miss, some are good and some are plain incompetent. This is because they are probably too large and hire too many people and they cannot always be too picky (a friend is a hiring manager and he is complaining how hard is to find competent people). That being said, the problem is not very complex to solve, but the motivation is fairly low: they get a percentage of everything is sold, at some point that income can be a lot larger than the damage a few news articles usually do.
  - raunakdag 6y ago

alkonaut 6y ago

Amazon reviews are about as useful as Youtube comments. You can read them for entertainment but don't expect anything useful about the product, and don't base a purchase decision on them.

tjoff 6y ago
Youtube comments are actually decent now, with a very low bar for decent at least. Also depending on the type of video/target audience of course. That google managed to improve them so much is likely their biggest achievement I can think of in many years.
- oblio 6y ago
  It's a very low bar. The original, unfiltered ones were Chernobyl + WW1 trenches. Now they've just manure.
MichaelApproved 6y ago
Not entirely true. Yes, Amazon is flooded with fake reviews but I still look through them. Photos and videos in reviews are extremely helpful. There are also many in-depth reviews that are trustworthy.
- alkonaut 6y ago
  You implictly assume that you'll receive a similar product to the one people reviewed or photographed. Without that assumption, a lot is lost. Under that assumption, I agree. If you trust the seller, then you can probably also trust the reviews of the kind you mention (e.g. product photos). The problem occurs when you want to use the reviews to determine whether to trust the seller, not the product.
jmeister 6y ago
Hyperbole. I’ve been reading book reviews on Amazon before buying, on-site or somewhere else, for ~15 years. I’ve almost never seen an item with unhelpful reviews.

djohnston 6y ago

Perhaps I'm in the minority of frequent amazon users, but I don't buy anything from 3rd party sellers anymore. There is simply too much fraud. In practice, this means that I often need to skip past amazon entirely and go straight to the product manufacturer, sometimes paying more, just to be sure I'm not being screwed.

eganist 6y ago
This is probably the right way to do it since AFAICR Amazon also still commingles products sourced by themselves as well as sourced from FBA sellers.
MichaelApproved 6y ago
Even stuff sold directly by Amazon could be co-mingled with counterfeit inventory from 3rd party sellers.
- Bedon292 6y ago
  Has this changed? My understanding is that Amazon only comingles 3rd parties and keeps their stuff completely separate. Of course my only source for that appears to be here / reddit so not sure how true it is. https://www.reddit.com/r/FulfillmentByAmazon/comments/dmrri4/does_amazon_commingle_their_own_inventory_with/f5c0bma https://www.reddit.com/r/FulfillmentByAmazon/comments/dmrri4...
  - PaulKeeble 6y ago
    I have seen it three times this year and the last time was November so I would say no its not been fixed and its still happening. If they aren't commingling third party product then they are directly sourcing counterfeit products and that is so much worse and clearly illegal.
- GloriousKoji 6y ago
  I've fallen victim to scammer merchants who use Amazon in their name. Before I would just check "Ships from / Sold by" under the Add to Cart button but it's not obvious if it's Amazon official. For example which one of these "Ships from / Sold by" is legit? * Amazon * Amazon Inc * Amazon LLC * Amazon Services * Amazon.com * Amazon.com LLC * Amazon.com Inc * Amazon.com Services LLC * Amazon Warehouse

intricatedetail 6y ago

I keep getting items I have not ordered, I presume sellers use fake accounts to be able to review their products. I reported that to Amazon but they only say "they are working on it" in a dismissive way. They even assumed I wanted to ask if I can keep the products and only seemed to take more seriously when I mentioned reporting it to the police. But nothing has changed.

jimkri 6y ago

Was running into this when I was looking for an apple watch band. When filtering by Avg Customer review, all the bands had thousands of fake reviews. Had to go directly to Apple to buy one.

TravisLS 6y ago

There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself. But increasingly we seem a long way from achieving this. Amazon reviews have become such garbage, I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality. There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Brands can afford widespread advertising because they have thriving businesses that generate lots of cash. Brands can get stocked in major retailers because you need decent products to make it through Walmart's buying process. These are signals that are harder to fake, and they're kind of the best we've got right now.

pjc50 6y ago
If anything, the last few years of politics have convinced me that objective information is more likely to die out, replaced by advertising, brand recognition, and coercive tools.
- kube-system 6y ago
  I feel like this could be said any time over the past 100 years, at a minimum.
- Grimm1 6y ago
  An older friend of mine made the observation that really before the few large news networks and papers in the last 40-50 years objective information that everyone roughly agreed upon was not the norm. Yellow journalism, hearsay and rumors dominated common conversation. He observed that with the internet we're returning to what was this "normal" state with anybody being able to post something and gain widespread recognition, the difference of course being the rate at which this non-objective information travels and the better ability to weaponize it. I think, after looking into it a bit more, I agree with him and that our period of fairly objective news and political information and the general consensus that brought was the anomaly. This raises the question then how do we as society re-learn to cope with that and filter out non objective information because clearly we're not doing so well with it now. So, I don't think so much as it will die out as much as I think we need to develop abilities to separate wheat from chaff, stronger societal bullshit filters because truth will have a weaker signal.

lesinski 6y ago

Here’s why Wirecutter can make an entire business out of credibly reviewing products

loloquwowndueo 6y ago
And then wreck it by putting most reviews behind a login wall (sure it’s free but I don’t want another account). Reader mode to the rescue!
- symlinkk 6y ago
  I have never seen a paywall for Wirecutter
  - Marsymars 6y ago
    It's not consistent. It only seems to trigger after a few site visits. (So I don't see it if using a private mode browser, Safari, or temporary containers in Firefox.) Obnoxiously, if you're configured to visit in a fresh browser/container, you have to click away the dickbars on every visit. (And they use similar html obfuscation as facebook, so the dickbar element can't be blocked with uBlock.)
  - loloquwowndueo 6y ago
    Login wall != paywall.
s0rce 6y ago
Other sites like Outdoorgearlab do this as well, although, I could be wrong, it seems like they strongly favor items that can use affiliate links to make them money, which makes sense.

ricardobeat 6y ago

I had this problem literally half an hour ago. Looking for power strips, and the top rated one (average > 4.5 stars) thankfully has customer pictures showing extremely flimsy connections and soldering, a huge fire hazard.

ceejayoz 6y ago
I had a power strip catch fire. Posted photos and the seller tried desperately to get me to take them down. Monetary offers transitioned to creepy comments about my social media activity to try and freak me out.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  Brennenstuhl? Da brennt der Stuhl! (There the chair is catching fire!) Had this many years ago, but not via Amazon, may have been a case of fake product, though. OTOH I came across reviews of this brand many years later, also on Amazon, stating similar. So either they are faked much, or their brand name is program.
LoSboccacc 6y ago
Looking for smart Christmas tree light for next year and the listing go from sketchy Chinese stuff with clearly manufactured reviews to outright fraudulent products that use images straight off name brand advertisement for their knock-off lights
devinplatt 6y ago
Ugh, I had this problem looking for power strips on Amazon too. I wanted something with lots of reviews (to verify quality), but every product with a high number of reviews had at least one scary customer picture. I ended up relying on brand trust: I looked up reputable brands and bought some Tripp Lite power strips.

cambalache 6y ago

I was a heavy Amazon customer 8-10 years ago. I only bought stuff sold directly by Amazon, and that was not hard to do, since +90% of the products had that option. The other day I was just checking the price of an article for my mom and I was shocked how different is now, the proportion has totally changed, +90% of the articles are not sold by Amazon and by the "stores" name it looks they are barely better than random dropshippers. So if you buy 3-4 articles instead of dealing with a single established company you are dealing with many unknown vendors. The probability of getting lemons rises up dramatically. Amazon has gotten complacent due to its quasi-monopoly. I think now it is the time for a serious competition to take business out from them. One of those brick-and-mortar ex-giants, the ones who were displaced could make a comeback. If I buy online I want to deal with recognized companies who have a track record of shipping real products and honoring the warranties, not with some randoms hidden behind not recognizable names.

bombcar 6y ago
The same thing happened to Ebay and Etsy - once they reached a certain level of popularity based on the original premise it turned into a outlet for cheap junk. I've taken to finding as much as I can at places that DO NOT have a "marketplace" such as Target or Home Depot.
- s0rce 6y ago
  Ebay has lots of junk (the worst being the people who drop ship items from Amazon marked up or just outright scams) but its also a source of really good deals that you really can't find elsewhere. Refurbished PCs, obscure electronics, mechanical and pneumatic fittings, lots of stuff I order for work to test/prototype which can save $100s-$1000s. I also use ebay for various antique/vintage stuff (only <$100). Seems like overall a positive experience and the few times I've had issues I've always got my money back and the scammers account was closed, although I'm sure they just pop up again under a new name.
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  Quick counter: eBay is legit and has so much non-junk that its one of my top 10 visited sites. I've only once received a counterfeit item and it was a Sandisk branded sd card, but everything else in my three-hundred-and-counting auction history has arrived as described by the seller.

S_A_P 6y ago

I think the review system is good for generalities as long as you toss out the hyperbole. Very few products are hyperbolically good. Once you weed that out you can find trends so long as the company is not engaging in fraud or other deception. I also try not to buy anything on impulse so that I can spend enough time researching my purchase. So far I’ve been pretty lucky in that I have not gotten a fraudulent product or something that is not as advertised. How often is the fakery happening? What types of products are commonly fake/bootleg? It may just be that I don’t ever buy the de sorts of things.

natex 6y ago

Not mentioned in the article, but Amazon also hasn't fixed its problem with fake reviews at Audible either. Thousands of 5-star ratings are similarly worded blurbs by accounts with 1 or 2 book reviews.

tvanantwerp 6y ago

Even when Amazon reviews are legitimate, keep in mind that the reviewer may have been looking for something different than you are. Plenty of times I've bought stuff expecting one level of quality based on review scores, but got something less--all because I had a higher standard of what should be a 5 than most of the people who bought that.

detaro 6y ago
one of the reasons why reading negative reviews is often helpful: there you often can figure out if the complaints about quality are from people with your standards or from people with higher ones. (after you filter out all the people who don't understand the difference between a product review and a review of their local postal service of course...)
- vidarh 6y ago
  It's almost always the negative reviews which convinces me to buy a product. The positive reviews rarely have much information. The negative reviews far more often will tell me where the weaknesses and problems are so I can determine if they are things that matter to me.
  - PaulKeeble 6y ago
    It has become the same with game reviews on Steam as well. I think most people just aren't very discerning or critical with their reviews. Those with negative reviews however have at least one complaint about the product and determining those as a combination matter to you is a big part of finding the right product. It marks the death of high quality reviews however because professional reviews can be done in context weighing things up better, where as most customers just don't have the experience with alternatives to say if its a good example or not.

ProAm 6y ago

It's not a problem for Amazon, it's a net positive feature monetarily speaking.

kevincox 6y ago
Is it? I regularly look elsewhere because I can't be confident that I am getting what I want. I guess if they expect that the products are worse than they appear then making reviews useless would be helpful. But if they have some good products and good reviews I would be more inclined to buy. It seems that there is the a low area what bad quality reviews help more purchases but for the middle quality and good quality products I would expect low review quality to drive sales elsewhere.
- ProAm 6y ago
  Oh its extremely user hostile, but Amazon makes money either way. Counterfeit, bait and switch, commingling inventory, all of that doesn't matter because the transaction volume going out is still greater than the refunds and unhappy users. Way past the point of return for that to hurt business. I agree with you though, I only shop amazon for simple stupid things I cant find local, I don't even buy name brand there anymore.

sdflhasjd 6y ago

Bait-and-switch doesn't matter if Amazon doesn't care about fake and paid-for reviews. I was looking for dashcams and came across this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/iiwey-Channels-included-Dashboard-Detection/dp/B08L7HZF3Z/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/iiwey-Channels-included-Dashboard-D... 91% 5-star reviews, a lot of the reviews are from "Top XXX reviewer", and almost every one seems to be reading off a script. If you check out all the profiles of these "Top XX" reviewers, they all seem to be non-stop purchasers of chinese tat... curiously all rated 5 starts. I'm sure Amazon is perfectly capable of detecting and handling this, what incentive do they have to allow all these fake reviews?

iamacyborg 6y ago
> what incentive do they have to allow all these fake reviews? People buy the tat from Amazon instead of buying a name brand from a competitor.
- sdflhasjd 6y ago
  Surely customers will still buy from respected brands on Amazon though.
Zizizizz 6y ago
I was looking at webcams and the Amazon recommended one is 1000+ five star reviews some of which say that you only get a lifetime warranty if you leave a five star review
xxs 6y ago
A simple test for quality - if the clam shell/body is made of ABS (instead of polycarbonate or nylon), it's very likely bad. The dashcam appears ABS, judging from the pics. You can return stuff back when bought online in 14days, I think this part remains after the 1st of Jan.
- 0xffff2 6y ago
  How can you tell the difference? It seems like you're making a judgement based on just the product pictures, what specific things make it looks like ABS to you? What would a polycarbonate or nylon plastic look like?

IAmWorried 6y ago

I don't know about you folks, but I've received so many "new" items from Amazon that were clearly used that I have largely stopped shopping there for expensive items. I think it's still fine for small gifts, plastic utensils, etc. But anything over 100 bucks I try to buy directly off the manufacturer's website. I think Amazon needs to get a handle on their sellers and reviews ASAP because I am rapidly losing faith in the store.

prepend 6y ago
Same here. I wonder if Amazon employees stopped eating their own dog food, and would be interesting to be a fly on the wall for how they are trying to solve this problem. I fear that they’ve done the math and decided that they make more money this way than a quality way.
hbt 6y ago
same I bought a cpu from Amazon 700$ and sold by AMD they shipped me a used one where the paste was already partially applied on the socket. it works but still payed full price for a "new" item when it was a returned item. it's just scummy all around

dathinab 6y ago

It's not just reviews. Recently I have often seen FAQ answers and similar for other products of the same vendor listed below the product.

duxup 6y ago

Originally the reason I liked Amazon was that I grew up in an area that didn't have access to stores with higher quality goods. Wal-Mart's price sensitive nature and similar stores meant that most of what was offered was 10% less in price, but 30% less in quality / how long it might last. Now on Amazon everything is a race to the bottom on price and quality and, it is really hard to find something that is good quality and if you do ... someone is probably willing to sell you a fake. I've gotten a few items I thought were fakes, and when I post a less than glowing review (not even mentioning my fake suspicions) I'm often contacted and offered a free product for removing my review.... I refuse to take these offers, but I wonder how many people do. Rather than what I sort of expected, Wal-Mart trying to be Amazon... Amazon seems desperate to BE Wal-Mart...

tangoalpha 6y ago

This is how the seller can do it, atleast on Amazon India. Swapping the details completely triggers AI based flags and often causes the change to be manually reviewed. But the seller can add a variant of the product (like size or color). But the seller instead adds a completely different product he intends to swap the original product with. Now the listing will show two completely different products as variants on a single product listing. Then the seller removes the old variant. Nothing gets flagged. No manual review. This has been around for long and a very popular trick with shady sellers on Amazon in India. I don't think Amazon never figured it out. For whatever reason, Amazon turns a blind eye to this practice.

Bedon292 6y ago
I was just seeing something like this the other day on US Amazon. I was looking at 'nano tape' to stick some stuff in place. And came across the top reviewed one, with 11k reviews [1] but all of the reviews are for a guitar wall mount. I was very confused as to how they achieved it. [1] Example: https://smile.amazon.com/Double-Sided-Tape-Walls-Decoration/dp/B08KXVN3F9/ https://smile.amazon.com/Double-Sided-Tape-Walls-Decoration/...
kevincox 6y ago
This is a huge problem. Or a single "product page" with "variants" that are completely different products. I just outright refuse to buy from these sellers but it is clearly a successful model.
PoignardAzur 6y ago
This feels like the kind of tricks Amazon should actively be defending against, with red teams trying to come up with angles of attacks, people looking for forums discussing possible approaches to game the system, etc.

Zelphyr 6y ago

The only way this changes is when more people stop buying from Amazon. The incentives otherwise are too great for Amazon to do anything about it.

maya24 6y ago
Yep. I found Amazon pretty useless these days and rarely use it. I buy household essentials from Target their service and delivery is good and I have an option of in-store pickup within a day or delivery within a couple of days. At least they have a stable set of brands that they sell it's not the highest quality but it's good enough for most things. The things I care about quality I will buy directly from the seller.
- Zelphyr 6y ago
  I've actually found, to my surprise, Walmart to be somewhat comparable to Target in the sense of feeling like I'm getting what I ordered instead of a knockoff like with Amazon. I had avoided them for years because of the terrible customer service I have received in their stores in the past but their online service is noticeably better. Their grocery Pick Up system is far superior to the competitor grocery stores in my area.

epistasis 6y ago

> As a result of Amazon's action, the top-ranking drone, which previously had more than 6,000 reviews, now has only about 50 reviews and its star rating has dropped to three and a half stars. But the other two listings I mentioned above—both of which I also mentioned in a Monday email to Amazon—still have thousands of positive reviews, including a bunch of obviously bogus ones. The result of blatant fraud and manipulation is simply removing the fraud? Why is Amazon continuing business with this shady company as if nothing happened? I consider their "corrective" action far worse and damming than their inaction on other pages. Inaction could be from an inability to police everything. But merely covering up fraud when it happens is nearly as bad as taking no action.

jquery 6y ago
This is the core of the problem. Amazon simply doesn’t understand how trust works.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

What I like, are the companies that create a separate listing for every variant of a product, within a price range, so searches get overwhelmed. A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a Mag-Safe stand for my new iPhone 12 Mini. When I searched for it on Amazon, look at what the search returned[0]. Now, scroll down, until you get to the "Cheetah" pop stand. Keep scrolling. But don't touch that dial! It goes on for 400 pages![1] Note they raise the price slightly, so they "sort." I ended up giving up, and getting one straight from the manufacturer. Oh...BTW. Those stands have this little gem in their description: > (Not compatible with Apple MagSafe wireless charger or MagSafe wallet.) Great that they overwhelm a search that is, explicitly: magsafe iPhone stand [0] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=magsafe+iPhone+stand&i=mobile&s=price-asc-rank https://www.amazon.com/s?k=magsafe+iPhone+stand&i=mobile&s=p... [1] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=magsafe+iPhone+stand&i=mobile&s=price-asc-rank&page=400 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=magsafe+iPhone+stand&i=mobile&s=p...

quitethelogic 6y ago
That is certainly a suboptimal shopping experience. One page with variants wouldn't seem to work very well for this either, with nearly 10,000 variations. Interestingly, they are all sold by amazon directly and are printed on demand so it doesn't seem to be a case of a 3rd party trying to game the site.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  > Interestingly, they are all sold by amazon directly and are printed on demand so it doesn't seem to be a case of a 3rd party trying to game the site. Eek. I didn't even notice. That makes it even worse.

ilamont 6y ago

Other bait-and-switch problems on Amazon are manufacturers and "brands" launching a product with high production standards, then switching them out with cheap, low-grade junk made with inferior components or materials later on. This is often coupled with rampant paid review scams, as discussed on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459434) A twist on bait and switch is another manufacturer or reseller taking over the "buy box". This is how pirated items or used items sold as new get dumped on customers, with Amazon's full encouragement (lower prices for customers!) and non-enforcement/honor system for sellers. Legitimate manufacturers and brands can scream to the high heavens that they and customers are being ripped off, but Amazon does next to nothing to stop the bad guys let alone compensate customers and brands who were cheated. Case in point: Bill Pollock's experience having his Python books repeatedly pirated (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19199135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19199135)

umvi 6y ago

I bought magnetic tiles for my kids for christmas, and in the box was a card promising me money if I left a 5 star review and forwarded proof that I left a 5 star review to the company's email.

cratermoon 6y ago
A friend of mine got a no-name brand spotting telescope as a Christmas present, and it had one of those cards in the box. Not the shipping box, the actual package. Someone had to have unsealed the box, put the card in, and closed it back up. It's an OK scope, nothing special, and I have no idea how much the giver paid.

_Microft 6y ago

I refuse to believe that Amazon, Google/Youtube, Facebook,... have actually "solved scale" unless they can deal with problems like this reliably and automatically.

ve55 6y ago

>Clicking on the names of these "brands" takes you to a search result with no additional information on who made these products. This in particular bugs me quite a bit on Amazon. The link for the 'brand' appears as if you can click it and then see information about who you are buying from, but instead it just performs a search for the word and you often get zero useful results. Instead I'd like to see basic information about the seller: what items do they sell, how many have they sold, what country are they based in, what is their average review, and so on.

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago

Here's one solution: don't buy cheap garbage. Yes, someone makes a $23 drone. It is cheap plastic shit from China. Do you really need to buy it, and then throw it in landfill a week (or two days) later after it breaks? Did OP reeeeeally expect a $23 drone to be on the up-and-up and NOT end up as landfill? OP is a bit oblivious to his impact on the environment. This race to the bottom for the cheapest crap is what inspires these tactics.

dan-robertson 6y ago
... Except that Amazon also has a problem with counterfeiting, especially for known brands.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
  Absolutely agreed. It's a different topic though. Amazon even steals top sellers, copies them, and pushes out the originator! (I think there was a radiolab about a guy who invented a bunch of grill tools that Amazon duplicated, and bottom-listed him). There are lots of problems with Amazon, but in hindsight, perhaps my original comment was a bit offtopic...
omginternets 6y ago
I've heard this phrased as "buy once, cry once". A few years ago my New Year's resolution was to stop buying cheap crap, and to consciously save up for nice things. This had a few unexpected consequences: 1. I accumulate less junk and produce less waste. 2. I buy less stuff and end up spending less money in the long run, since there's only so much you can save up for at once. 3. My purchases bring me much more pleasure; the anticipation and research heightens the joy of actually getting the thing. Number 3 was the most surprising to me, most likely because I have a rather strong anti-materialism streak. I'm not the kind of person who "goes shopping", but even I must admit that deliberately saving up for something makes its purchase a bit more meaningful, and loads more satisfying. Oh, and I basically don't experience buyer's remorse anymore, which is nice.
- ptmcc 6y ago

throwaway894345 6y ago

Does anyone know of an alternative to Amazon that addresses quality and environmental issues (ideally something that isn't trying to sell me the latest hot garbage from whatever country is willing to trash the environment and enslave its citizens for a quick buck)?

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
https://www.manufactum.com https://www.manufactum.com ? The real site is manufactum.de nowadays a daughter of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_GmbH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_GmbH , the last remaining general catalog/online retailer, like Sears once was in the US.

cbanek 6y ago

Somewhat related due to comments / reviews being for a product, but sometimes on Amazon one page has a set of different options (with the little boxes). So you can pick like a color or model. But then they group all the reviews together despite what buttons you've picked. This is so frustrating! At least they've added a little thing that says which SKU the review is for. But I wish they would just separate out the reviews for different models / colors. It just seems another way to get increased review counts and make it look like a clear obvious quality winner from the search results box.

PaulKeeble 6y ago
This is especially a problem for things with different flavours. I have run into multiple problems with Protein shakes where the vanilla is amazing and everything else tastes awful. The comments being merged mean you might have to pick through 1000 review comments to work out which flavours are good and which are bad.
- cbanek 6y ago
  Exactly, same for Amazon pages that decide to sell the "new model" on the same page as the old model to harvest reviews. And then when I'm trying to figure out if it has better support or problems, I'm trying to pick through the reviews to figure out which one is talking about which version. (Mostly a problem when also trying to figure out linux support!)
  - PaulKeeble 6y ago
    I saw that around Black Friday where electric toothbrushes were on sale and they had merged the product pages a bunch of SKUs with just one of them being on sale. Of course the one on sale previously had a bunch of bad reviews, but merged with the reliable SKUs it appeared to have a good average and had a nice star rating. The comments showed an inconsistent story all about that one SKU. What Amazon is doing is just outright dishonest and ought to be against the law. They are certainly intentionally utilising this to sell products with dishonest reviews and star ratings.
6y ago

ec109685 6y ago

9th best selling flash disk is totally fake: USB Flash Drive 1TB - Thumb Drive, High Speed USB Drive, Portable Ultra Large Storage USB Memory Stick, Jump Drive Pen Drive Come with Keychain https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N16XZNR/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glc_fabc_Aol7FbZ3MC09M?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N16XZNR/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glc_... Reviews are for Soda and the storage capacity is much less than 1TB so you will lose data if you film it.

mdoms 6y ago

Presumably you've all stopped using Amazon because of this issue, so they're motivated to fix it..?

PaulKeeble 6y ago
Right now it doesn't seem to have a competitor. I think the market is now primed for an ethical competitor to come along and steal its business however, a lot of people are getting irritated with Amazon and would happily chose an alternative.
- mdoms 6y ago
  Amazon's competitor is every other store on Earth. Amazon doesn't even exist in my country but somehow I have made it this far.
r00fus 6y ago
My family purchases went from tens of thousands of dollars in 2018 to thousands in 2019 and even less in 2020. Now I'm on the brink of closing my Prime account. So yeah.

hackernewsacct6 6y ago

Used to be a brief period a few years back when you could order quality items on amazon.co.jp. All with free Prime shipping to US. Now it’s equally full of poorly designed and manufactured Chinese products.

prepend 6y ago

Apple and Google require developers to have some info and a persistent profile to publish an app. Every app has a publisher and I can see what else they publish, how long they’ve been around, etc. nothing extensive just letting me know that they exist and at least a mailbox or url for support. Amazon doesn’t do this. Many of the seller pages are bogus or hard to see what they sell. I assume that since it sucks so much Amazon doesn’t care or they specifically don’t want me associating sellers with their own brands.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

This is one of those areas where "breaking up the tech giants" might actually work - Amazon is basically an e-commerce platform, a global post office, a seller in its own right, and a discovery engine. There really is little reason they all need to be together. Putting a discovery engine in place that won't make a profit unless the right and decent thing arrives surely suggests they will have incentives aligned with the customers?

ryanyde 6y ago

Journalists have never operated an ecommerce company. In the same year, they'll publish a story about how requiring manufacturing information enables them to steal secrets from sellers. You can't have it both ways.

sathackr 6y ago
If Amazon wasn't directly competing against their sellers, and doing exactly what you said, while lying to Congress about it [1], then maybe journalists wouldn't be writing about Amazon stealing secrets from sellers. 1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its-own-sellers-to-launch-competing-products-11587650015 https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...
r00fus 6y ago
> You can't have it both ways. Clearly you have to be a megacorp to get it both ways. Amazon shouldn't be able to evade liability for products sold on their website if they compete against their "sellers" as well.

ada1981 6y ago

I was hoping they would explain how exactly this is happening? What about the amazon seller ecosystem allows this to happen in the first place. Why aren't reviews linked to the SKUs?

cratermoon 6y ago

"just this weekend I was able to pay an extra $3 to get same-day delivery on a $9 item" Spending a third of the price of something cheap to get it NOW is peak Veruca Salt.

acjohnson55 6y ago

I 100% agree with this article. And yet, I still do most of my shopping on Amazon. Unfortunately, when it comes to general merchandise, they're still the best at inventory, discovery, quality, fulfillment, and price. Which is a scathing indictment of the state of the rest of the e-commerce world.

vsskanth 6y ago

Naive question, but can't they just tie the reviews to the product's UPC Code ? I thought Amazon also has their own unique product identifiers.

SMAAART 6y ago

Moral Hazard: same principle why FB/GOOG have not fixed their advertising fraud problems.

wnevets 6y ago

More and more I've been switching my purchases back to brick and mortar. Amazon isn't cheapest, highest quality or the widest selection. Amazon prime makes it the most convenient but if you stop for a minute and break the cycle you'll find better prices at a higher quality else where.

mancerayder 6y ago

The amount of time I've spent lately just looking for one simple thing - honesty - when looking to buy something, is embarrassing to say out loud. One of many, many examples. I wanted to buy a 10k lux light to see whether it improves my winter health. I spent well over an hour on Amazon going through reviews and products. When I found something I liked, on several occasions, Fakespot rated the product a C or D and noted it saw tons of reviews being removed and other heuristics. Then I personally noticed some products from different brands looked almost identical. And sometimes I noticed the same product from the same brand with separate entries. Also, when I wanted to read 3 or lower star reviews, I was told there were some, but I'd click the filter and it'd find no reviews lower than 4 or 5. The other month I posted a review on Amazon for six canning jars where 5 spontaneously cracked in the fridge by themselves, unmolested. My review got removed and Amazon said it failed some guideline. This never used to happen. Look, I'm happy to pay a little more here and there, I rarely look for the cheapest thing or budget item. But why is lying and deception so commonplace and lackadaisically accepted? It's grating. Someone should invent an Honest Amazon competition. Honestly, Ebay vendors are often more trustworthy.

destitude 6y ago

I'm still having issues where my "Amazon Prime" membership results in a delivery usually taking 1 week instead of "2 days".

Animats 6y ago

Skip the Amazon resellers and order direct from China on Alibaba. Their reputation system is less spammy than Amazon's. One of my areas to watch: solid state relays. Here we have yet another fake Fotek solid state relay on Amazon.[1] Note the "Made in China". Here's the real thing.[2] Note the "Taiwan made" from the real Fotek. Costs a lot more. That's because it will actually handle the rated current. The fakes are notorious for overheating and burning out. The real thing has overheat and surge protection, will shut off if it overheats, and can stand a big short term overload for motor starting or when a short is in the process of tripping the circuit breaker upstream. Here's a similar solid state relay from China, from the actual manufacturer. They actually provide a table which shows how much they exaggerate the ratings. They're over-rated by 2X for a resistive load, and 6x for an inductive load. "For a motor with rated current of 15A and the motor is inductive load, the formula is 15A x 6 = 90A, so you should choose to buy 100A solid state relay". For a little extra, you can have your own fake label. Minimum order 200 pcs. Here's a fake Fotek.[4] What's amusing is that this is the actual manufacturer in China selling the fakes. They're in Guangdong, and they're selling under their own name, but with a fake label. No shame. There are legit manufacturers in China selling solid state relays.[5] They put their own name on the product, show pictures of the inside their rather grubby factory, and have realistic numbers on their data sheets, along with pictures of UL certification documents. About 4x more expensive than the fakes. If you're in China and are building industrial equipment which needs these components, you need ones that won't fail and shut down a manufacturing line. Here's a teardown of a fake. [6] The fakes are just solid state switches with power ratings way beyond what their components are good for. UL warning notice about fake Fotek solid state relays.[7] UL issued that notice six years ago, and they're still on Amazon and eBay. [1] https://www.amazon.com/SSR-25-DC-AC-Solid-State-Relay/dp/B07FVR37QN/ https://www.amazon.com/SSR-25-DC-AC-Solid-State-Relay/dp/B07... [2] https://www.fotek.com.tw/en-gb/product-category/143 https://www.fotek.com.tw/en-gb/product-category/143 [3] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/1PCS-SSR-10-DA-DC-Control_1600149635502.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/1PCS-SSR-10-DA-DC-Con... [4] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/High-quality-SSR-25DA-SSR-25DA_1931397677.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/High-quality-SSR-25DA... [5] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/SSR-S25DA-H-DC-TO-AC_1688083866.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/SSR-S25DA-H-DC-TO-AC_... [6] https://youtu.be/DxEhxjvifyY https://youtu.be/DxEhxjvifyY [7] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ul-warns-of-solid-state-relay-with-counterfeit-ul-recognition-mark-release-13pn-52-242919311.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ul-warns-of-solid-s...

charlescarver 6y ago

I run all potential Amazon purchases through fakespot.com. It’s definitely caused me to change my mind on multiple occasions.

notacoward 6y ago

The thing that really annoys me is that when you go to report problems with a listing, none of the options you're given really match this. "Problem with item description" is the closest. Considering that this is one of the top three problems turning Amazon shopping into a garbage-fest, you'd think they'd have a clearer way to report it. That they don't shows that they just don't care.

floatingatoll 6y ago

This problem exposes an aspect of the AI difficulty chasm between Amazon’s dream of assigning a unique barcode (ASIN) to every object under the sun that has been or ever will be sold, and Amazon’s dream of doing so without spending a single dollar on expensive human curators. Amazon is trying to solve a well-known library science problem using AI, and it’s been a miserable failure. Their AI systems can’t detect when sellers bait and switch because there’s no way to detect this that doesn’t have a massive false positive rate, and they aren’t willing to spend a single dollar on ‘app store’ reviewing product changes by third parties. Another demonstration of this chasm can be found by searching for ‘claritin’. There are pages of duplicates, terrible and missing product photos, and a wide array of metadata errors due to human inconsistency by the sellers listing the product on the marketplace. Fixing this would require human curation, since their AI curation is incapable of doing it, and so Amazon simply allows the rot to spread unchecked.

dzdt 6y ago

My Christmas Amazon experience was helping my young daughter search for a doll to buy with a gift card and finding mixed into the results a large number of graphically illustrated sex toys. (She typoed "dolll" as the search term.) The convenience of an everything e-commerce site is not worth the nonsense.

FireBeyond 6y ago
And unicode. There are many bütt plugs for sale on Amazon too. Oh, you can also buy suppressors and silencers for guns there too. Except they're usually branded as "lawn mower mufflers". Reviews are ... amusing ... "Makes my 9mm mower sound just like a pop gun".

Rapzid 6y ago

Amazon uses this tactic themselves! They did it with the high capacity Amazon Basics AA batteries. The community pretty much verified they were rebranded Panasonic batteries manufactured in Japan. Then, after a few years and thousands of 5 star reviews they switched the batteries out for Chinese manufactured batteries. Check for yourself: https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-High-Capacity-Rechargeable-Batteries-Pre-charged/dp/B00HZV9WTM https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-High-Capacity-Rechargeab...

toss1 6y ago

This would be pretty simple to solve if Amazon appended a couple new fields to each review logging the string of text in the main headline at the time the review was posted, and the sales category. Using this field could then at least provide a control for us poor customers to filter only reviews for the current version/category of the product And if they really wanted to do it right, they'd scan headlines/categories and reviews for substantial changes. Just a bit of good logic or AI pattern recognition should be able to sift this down to a manageable set of changes for human review and appropriate action, such as demanding a re-listing as a new product, weeding out repeat offenders, etc. The article's point about Amazon failing to show a focus on "customer obsession" in this area is key - Amazon used to be a great place to search for products, and it is now a miserable, long slog to find anything good in the sea of crap with bogus listings & reviews.

frankosaurus 6y ago

> When I sorted the reviews by date ... most recent reviewers actually had bought a drone ... But the older reviews were for honey. I'm definitely going to use this sort-by-date trick for future product research adventures. I do miss the good old days when Amazon reviews were an amazing product research tool. Aside: I have no idea why they bury the "search reviews" feature. It's essential for discovering, say, real-world Linux compatibility for random pieces of hardware.

taurath 6y ago

I bought a plant growing light a few days ago on amazon. It was the #1 seller in the category, and had nearly 15,000 reviews and sat at 4.5 stars. It was cheap. Mine didn't work. The box said it was 80 watts, but the included adaptor could only do 40 watts. In the box was an offer for a $15 amazon gift card to give them a 5 star rating. I wrote a review on amazon, stating this. I got an email from amazon that my review had not been accepted this morning. I called amazon the previous night and the first person told me to "contact the seller". It took a second person to tell me that blatantly bribing customers for reviews was against their policy. Clearly nothing will happen. All I can think of is that the end user is no longer the customer for Amazon. They're a platform for sellers, so the sellers are the new customers. Shame they never told the end users.

redisman 6y ago
This is a great encapsulation of the Amazon experience these days. Spot on. You buy the top selling, thousands of five star reviews, Aliexpress piece of junk that doesn't match the description. The seller tries to bribe you to leave them another 5 star review and Amazon customer service tells you to leave them alone and stop messing with their business model. I very much fail to see how this is supposed to fit in with their "customer obsession".
cjsawyer 6y ago
You’ve put words to my opinion here. Thank you for stating it so concisely

forgotmysn 6y ago

headline is strange to me. "still" implies amazon had any intention of fixing this problem.

rahimnathwani 6y ago

FYI a drone like the one pictured can easily be found for under $6 in China (retail price, including shipping within China). Amazon in the US sells similar things for under $20, which seems reasonable given the local logistics costs. I wouldn't recommend a toy like that for anyone under 6 years old. You're meant to hold it steady on your outstretched palm, then pull your hand away swiftly. Younger kids can find this too hard, which causes them to resort to tossing it up in the air. The resulting collisions (which are much harder than the collisions during flight) could easily cause the type of damage described.

bradgranath 6y ago

You shouldn't need product reviews, manufacturer name, or country of origin to know that a $23 quadcopter is trash. They sell $50 watches there too. Do you think they compare to a Rolex? If Amazon is at fault here it's for destroying the concept of value in and of itself.

Schnitz 6y ago

There’s really no way around this except avoiding third party sellers, except if it’s the producer themselves selling directly on Amazon. Unless you want the eBay experience, don’t buy in the Amazon marketplace.

unishark 6y ago

> Amazon could easily require sellers to provide some basic transparency about these listings—disclosing where these manufacturers are located, how long they've been in business, and which other brands they own. This might make it easier for Amazon to punish companies that try to mislead customers with fake reviews. In my experience they go out of their way to hide info on who the company really is and especially where it is located. Including deleting reviews that point this out. I suspect they make the most money selling in a position of maximum information asymmetry. If you built up any loyalty to the brand they could sell to you outside amazon.