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Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

569 points by _wldu 6y ago

joshuaengler 6y ago
I'm staggered people didn't know this was a thing, anybody surprised must have their eyes closed or possibly be naive. It was obvious years ago, not just Amazon either... But most retailers. Most of what you see in life is fake and/or a scam, sad but true. Use your mind and stay away from scam products.
1-6 6y ago
Some sellers simply give out free units for good reviews.
- bombcar 6y ago
  Lots of them are offering a gift card for a review to purchasers - which seems slightly less scammy as you’re unlikely to leave a good review of a crappy product for a $5 gift card.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    All the gift card offers I have gotten have required a 5* review.
    - bombcar 6y ago
      Sure - but you’re less likely to want to leave a five star review if the product pissed you off.
  - AlexandrB 6y ago
    I had this happen, left a negative review mentioning the pay-for-review scam, and had the review removed by Amazon because it's "off topic". I don't know if it's just aligned incentives, but Amazon doesn't seem to care about this kind of review stuffing at all.
falcolas 6y ago
IMO, Amazon should buy a few on some honeypot products, and train their AI/analytics on it.
coldcode 6y ago
Of course they are, it's not like Amazon really cares much. With all the power of AWS and deep learning etc., identifying fake reviews should be a piece of cake if you are Amazon. It doesn't affect the bottom line, so why bother.
- ncallaway 6y ago
  It does affect the bottom line, though. Amazon used to be the place I went to learn about the quality of a product. If it looked good, well, here I was already on the product page... Now, with the counterfeit product problem I will no longer consider amazing for anything health, safety or food related. With the fake review problem, I no longer look at Amazon to figure out if a product is quality or not. Which leads to more purchases from physical stores or other websites. Between the two of those issues, my use of Amazon has dropped pretty significantly (to the point that I cancelled Amazon Prime during the pandemic).
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    I agree with what you're saying and I use Amazon much less now too, but Amazon definitely monitors the numbers and they're making more money this way. Who knows how much they're trading long-term reputation for short term gains?
    - ncallaway 6y ago
      > Who knows how much they're trading long-term reputation for short term gains? I think this is exactly the risk. Amazon didn’t become huge chasing quarterly or short term gains. The damage they’ve done to their reputation over the last several years may take another 5-10 years to show up in the numbers in a significant way, but by that point it’s much harder to turn around. It’s hard to know what the long term damage will be, if any, though. I’m certainly not their representative median customer.
  - bitsnbytes 6y ago
    I have always found it best to ignore the good reviews and instead look at the negative reviews to identify patterns of complaints. If there is a pattern of failure ,quality, or issues and its not worth dealing with I wont buy the product. Also if the issues are common among vendors or products then I go with the cheapest. Why pay more if they are all crap or just as risky to buy and it sets a more accurate expectation of the product. I also typically ignore the negative reviews complaining about the package arriving damaged or late as that can happen with anything as long as I don't need it by a certain date. I also look for customer pictures of the product if available.
wwww4all 6y ago
It’s similar to rampant doping in competitive sports, where everyone knows what’s going on. When there are millions of dollars at stake in contracts, prize money, and sponsorships, people will cheat and take risks. Even if they’re caught, the payoffs are usually greater than consequences. The incentives and payoffs are far, far greater than any type of consequences to the seller. Worst case, they can shut down and start another shill store.
indigodaddy 6y ago
I usually just vet reviews for the same product from other online retailers, re: BH Photo, Best Buy, Target, Walmart (although not sure about Walmart reviews), Monoprice, maybe Newegg, etc
MattGaiser 6y ago
I’m part of a FB group where you can get free product in exchange for reviews. All I did was join and I was offered my choice for 60 different free items. This is hilariously common.
diveanon 6y ago
I haven't used amazon in years and this was largely the reason why. After getting scammed a few times by products that seemed to have good reviews I decided to just keep shopping local instead where I can actually see the product and speak to human beings who used it. Amazon will forever be the one stop shop for cheap counterfeit shit until they actually address these issues.
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  Same. I canceled Prime two years ago, and haven't bought anything from Amazon in several months. I just buy locally now, and if I can't find something locally, I buy it from the manufacturer's website or a smaller reseller with a better reputation.
- injidup 6y ago
  So easy to say. My local stores all have at least a 25 to 50 percent markup on anything on Amazon. Cameras to drones to computers to auto parts. Amazon beats on price by a huge margin. I'd love to buy tyres and oil from the local shop but the 50 to 100 percent price difference is not worth it.
  - throwawayboise 6y ago
    When your counterfeit Michelins blow out and your engine siezes up on the counterfeit Castrol you may have a different view on prices and value.
    - injidup 6y ago
      You have no way of knowing that the overpriced stuff at the local garage is not fake either. I've had the Austrian consumer affairs department intervene on my behalf a number of times when local garages attempt to overprice on items that were either not required during the service or overpriced. I've had local plumbers try to charge double the price on certain items when they thought I wouldn't notice. Your rose colored glasses are quaint. Everybody is out to make a buck and I wouldn't put it past local shops to buy fake products and charge double for it. I'd rather my fake stuff at a decent price thankyou.
ibraheemdev 6y ago
I recently got an email offering 50% off a seller's products if I left a good review. This is happening on all marketplaces, not just Amazon. The only way I see to truly solve the problem is only allowing verified buyers to leave a review.
- sombremesa 6y ago
  Buyers also get brochures with their product offering gift cards and the like for 5-star reviews, though.
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    Exactly. Crowdsourced reviews are easy to manipulate. On the other hand, a “review commission” isn’t practical either.
- waynesonfire 6y ago
  A verified buyer is nontrivial to determine. The purchaser could be under the influence and financed by the seller.
- keeran 6y ago
  Sellers generate fake orders for their products using real identities, actually send the product to those people, but leave a fake review in their name. I've tried raising the issue repeatedly with Amazon, but I've now given up and look forward to the random crap I get sent almost on a monthly basis.
  - Firerouge 6y ago
    Where do I sign up to get free random stuff sent to me from Amazon review farmers?
    - ibraheemdev 6y ago
      Ideally you don't.
wp381640 6y ago
Reviews are broken. There needs to be a web of trust for reviews. I would weight a review from somebody I know or trust 1000x more than every Amazon or online review ever left. It's not just store reviews that are broken - web search is also completely broken because of affiliate spam I spent far too much time at the moment with each purchase researching and tracking down trusted reviews.
- yojo 6y ago
  Unless it’s a really big ticket item I’ve given up on product research as the investment is just not worth my time. I just buy whatever Wirecutter tells me to; usually they’re not too wrong.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    OMG wire cutter. Affiliate advertising once removed. EDIT: NextDesk scandal aside, when was the last time you saw WireCutter recommend a product that did NOT offer affiliate commissions (let’s just call a spade a spade: these are kickbacks). I don’t use WC anymore so I can’t answer that myself. I stopped using them when I saw some companies completely ignored in 2 different industries with which I’m familiar. Those companies did not have kickbacks.
    - yojo 6y ago
      Yes, they will never recommend something they can’t monetize. But they also do some basic product testing and I’ve yet to get actual crap buying their recommendation. If I’m getting something under $100 they get me a good enough solution and save me a lot of time. It’s just not worth the research cost to do better. I guess the paid alternative is consumer reports, but I feel like they’re not noticeably better.
    - ahepp 6y ago
      Have you found a good alternative to wirecutter? I am sure there are plenty of honest reviews on the internet, tucked into enthusiast sites or on personal blogs. It's hard to find them unless you're a member of their community. Unless they review a lot of products, you have no continued relationship with them. This means you can't evaluate your opinion of their reviews (as to trustworthiness, or even just taste). Surely anyone who devotes a lot of time and money to reviewing products is going to want to be (and deserves to be) paid. That means direct payment has to come from the customer, or the business. The "business pays" model has an incentive to exclude businesses that don't pay, to push you towards more expensive items, and in general to get you to buy shit you don't need. But at least the reviewer has some skin in the game, since you won't continue to buy through their referral links if they recommend too many products that are too bad. The "customer pays" model seems to solve a lot of the incentive problems, but it's always hard to get people to pay for something that others are giving out for free (even if the free ones are occasionally subpar or even harmful!) Ultimately, I'm not really sure I see "buyer pays" review sites as terribly unfair? Surely they'll just pass the cost on to customers. Some of the businesses, like NextDesk, seem to find the process unfair. I have some sympathy for them, but the reality is that the products I've bought based on Wirecutter recommendations tend to be better. I don't have the time, or even the ability these days, to pick through search results trying to figure it out for myself. Maybe I will give Consumer Reports a try, but is the cost of the subscription (of which I don't know the utility), and the lock-in, worth the marginal cost of missing out on great products like NextDesk? Does Consumer Reports even give more complete surveys of options than Wirecutter? Hard to say. I think I would go insane if I spent any more time than I already do looking for "truth" on the internet.
etchalon 6y ago
I don't understand how easy it could be to Google around a bit and find companies offering this service, but its seemingly impossible to stop at scale. Employ a group of people to go undercover with these firms, who are purposefully violating your platforms TOS, and enact draconian measures against the brands your employees encounter. The risk would quickly not be worth the reward.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  > undercover with these firms, who are purposefully violating your platforms TOS These “brands” are sometimes a few guys in a garage in China. Shut them down and they popup with a new name the next day, like whack-a-mole.
  - redisman 6y ago
    Yeah they just buy white label cheap commodities and will slap a new sticker on it if you “crack down” on them somehow
    - nomel 6y ago
      This is ridiculously obvious when searching for basically anything on Amazon now. There will be 10 identical product listings with 10 different brand names, many of which have reviews describing, and pictures showing, completely different products.
harry8 6y ago
Amazon loves fake reviews as long as they are 5 star. The more it looks like people buying stuff using amazon are happy, the better that marketing is for Amazon. Look at all these people who are so happy to be buying stuff on Amazon, so much better than the alternatives. Amazon could clean this up and then watch the average drop. From the removal of the fake fives but also it makes it look more "socially accpetable" to leave 4 and 3 star reviews. So it costs Amazon to do the right thing by the people parting with money for stuff so they don't. Amazon are well aware of /their/ incentives and when their incentives align with what looks to me a lot like fraud they'll play the plausibly deny game. Or perhaps I'm wrong they don't know and there's nothing they can do. Amazon employees will probably confirm that.
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  Disruptive solution proposal: Get rid of the review system entirely. Stars, comments, user pictures; eliminate all of it. For everyone. There. Problem solved.
  - pid_0 6y ago
    That would be very stupid
    - HenryKissinger 6y ago
      I thought this place liked disruption.
      - osrec 6y ago
        Disruption often means to offer an alternative, better solution to a poorly solved problem. You seem to be suggesting we don't try and solve the product validation problem at all!
        bombcar 6y ago
        Replace reviews with raw data - total number of purchases (at this price and version), return rate, etc.
f430 6y ago
Bought a gaming chair that had 5 star reviews. It smelled toxic. Smell didn't dissipate after a month. Returned it and found out buried under all the 5 star reviews of people citing the same issue.
- redisman 6y ago
  Foams can be really smelly. You never really know what they sourced to save a penny
  - f430 6y ago
    the actual seat and back rest was wrapped inside a plastic bag. The fake leather just smelled toxic. Literally the whole room would stink and it would give me headaches until I packed it up for a full refund. In the past 3 months I have ended up returning 80% of my purchases from Amazon because the 5 star reviews did not match with the actual product's performance or quality.
dwighttk 6y ago
What’s the deal with people answering questions completely irrelevantly on Amazon? Do they boost your review karma if you answer a bunch of questions or something?
- astura 6y ago
  When a question is asked Amazon will email blast some small percentage of people who have purchased the product and people selling the product. If a customer who got this email blasts chooses to respond to this email, they may answer the question the only way they know how - completely irrelevantly. Beyond that, I've definitely seen answers where the answerer clearly thinks they are answering a human and not posting to a public page for everyone to read.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  The question is framed something like this: Dwight, as a reviewer of X, can you help this customer? Rene asked <the question> So it's like it's been directed at you. So people will answer with "don't know" or "I didn't buy this" or whatever.
puapuapuq 6y ago
IMO having a made in China filter is good enough
andrewmcwatters 6y ago
I'm surprised you can still write reviews for products and services on Amazon you haven't bought from Amazon. How much of this racket on places like Amazon and Yelp would be killed if you had a unique generated ID assigned to you once you purchased a good or service and it was verified as delivered?
- cdogl 6y ago
  Indeed. Presumably many such IDs exist in Amazon's transaction system. It must be deliberate that they are not used for this purpose.
- ibraheemdev 6y ago
  Amazon does have the concept of "verified reviews", it is just not enforced.
- astura 6y ago
  Scamming verified reviews is already a thing, it's called "Brushing." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushing_(e-commerce) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushing_(e-commerce)
  - TwoBit 6y ago
    And that's taking advantage of another longstanding Amazon loophole.
- KMag 6y ago
  They should definitely package a unique QR code for verified reviews in the delivered package. Right before Christmas this year, my dad got a package of some iWatch bands he didn't order, and some other small accessories. It was addressed to him, from some random name he didn't recognize. He asked around all of his friends and family to see if anyone ordered pseudononymously. Presumably this was done in order for someone to be able to generate a fake "verified review" at the peak of Christmas shopping.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  It also makes for a good honeypot.
blondie9x 6y ago
Amazon needs to stop allowing review to be left by people who do not have a verified purchase of an item on their accounts. If you really think about reviews, without honesty, trust, and verification the entire review system is meaningless.
jaakl 6y ago
I only trust reviews of persons I personally know. At least I know the person exists. However, many of these FB likes seem to be over-motivated by some campign trick, but I also know already who are usual suspects there, so can filter them out.
dharmab 6y ago
I've made it a practice to run ReviewMeta (https://reviewmeta.com https://reviewmeta.com) on any unfamiliar item I'm considering purchasing.
- vievie 6y ago
  neat. Now I'll run that along with https://FakeSpot.com https://FakeSpot.com
tumblewit 6y ago
Right now probably some remote indian village is employing people (like mechanical turk ironically on amazon as well) to write X amount of reviews per day sort of like moderation. In the not so distant future someone will do a GPT3 version of this. Time to reinvent the reviews.
Fwirt 6y ago
Here's an idea that would never work: how about a financial incentive straight from Amazon for leaving negative reviews? Let's imagine a universe where Amazon does away with the star rating system and replaces it with a pro/con "tag" list. (e.g. "high quality" "smells bad" "broke quickly"). They then only allow reviews from verified buyers of an item. Amazon then contacts some percentage of said buyers proportionate to the number of reviews the item has has/how recently it was listed (to establish a baseline) and offers a small account credit for a reviewer to clearly state at least one thing they didn't like about the item, requiring a response other than "nothing". This would identify trends or common failure points. The more negative reviews a product has, the higher the reward that Amazon hands out. Scammy sellers would have to consistently "beat Amazon's offer" to get fake positive reviews. In this hypothetical universe... would sellers setup shell accounts to purchase their own inventory and tank their other products' reviews for Amazon credit? Or would they buy out their own inventory to increase the ratio of positive to negative reviews? Would the cut that Amazon takes for using their platform outweigh the cost of paying off buyers/purchasing their own inventory? Would the cost to Amazon be worth the increased customer engagement?
codecamper 6y ago
I trust Walmart's return policy more than Amazon's reviews. I think Walmart gives you 90 days for a return.
- bombcar 6y ago
  Walmart also lets you (or did before covid) just throw the product at the local store and they’d handle it. Very nice.
jariel 6y ago
Better idea: Fall back to trusting brands. What does Amazon really offer now: 1) Search convenience, which is really not that big of a deal and 2) Fast delivery but everyone is catching up and do we really need that thing in 2 days instead of 3? I never buy on Amazon and I don't feel as though I'm missing out.
- wyre 6y ago
  I haven’t bought anything off of Amazon in 2 years. Granted I use eBay a lot, but the only time I’ve been burned is when I’ve bought something used and the seller never shipped. Otherwise I’ll buy things from Part-express, Vitacost, Target, Best Buy, Sweetwater, etc.
- a254613e 6y ago
  3. Amazing customer support. Living in "Servicewüste" Germany I would still buy from amazon, even without the first two points that you mentioned. Because customer support... isn't a thing here. On top of that there's things like higher prices, and more expensive and slower shipping usually slower by up to a week, not by a day or two. Amazon's customer support goes way and beyond to help you out, I've had hundreds of euros worth of stuff sent to me again right away, no questions asked - because I called them and said that the official delivery information saying that it's been delivered to me personally an hour ago is not true, and I don't have the items. That all being said, I do wish amazon would take care of fake reviews, and mixed inventory from different sellers.
vladmk 6y ago
I know a lot of top sellers who did this, it’s hard for the newbies now
voldemort1968 6y ago
permy.link strikes again
Meekro 6y ago
I'm just spitballing, but what do you guys think about this as a fake-resistant review system? To list your product on Amazon as a seller, you pay $500 per year as a "review incentivization fee." The algorithm randomly selects buyers and emails them 1 month after their purchase. They are offered $10 to write a review. The chance of being randomly selected as a reviewer auto-adjusts to target a goal of 50 reviews per year, and no one except those people is allowed to post reviews. Also, reviewers can update their reviews later if their impression of the product changes. If a seller wanted to keep farming reviews, they would now have to buy up the vast majority of their own inventory in the hopes of being selected. Also, my system prevents people who are experiencing one-in-a-million problems (or who are just habitually disgruntled) from dominating the conversation.
- crazypython 6y ago
  Sellers already pay people to write reviews– and compensate for the product. How is this system any different? > If a seller wanted to keep farming reviews, they would now have to buy up the vast majority of their own inventory in the hopes of being selected. They already have 100 people buy their product and fully pay for it for a review.
  - Meekro 6y ago
    It's different because it has Amazon randomly selecting who gets paid to write a review, and the reviewer doesn't have any incentive to lie since they get the $10 regardless. Sellers are currently paying people (in money and product) for 5 star reviews, which is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve.
    - xxs 6y ago
      The seller merely includes a promotion - leave a good review, receive a gift card (or straight up refund for cheaper products). Your system may have minor chance of success if there was no way for the sellers to contact customers.
- ta8645 6y ago
bobkrusty 6y ago
this is an old story it happens a lot in the past 2017,2018 there's lots of such services sold on marketing forums in my opinion, rating should based on how much products sold whatcha think?
spullara 6y ago
Based on how many people are talking about this stuff, I can't imagine how I have survived since 1997 without buying anything counterfeit off Amazon. What are people buying? How are you searching? Do you have any criteria when you buy something?
- vecinu 6y ago
  > I can't imagine how I have survived since 1997 without buying anything counterfeit off Amazon Did you authenticate everything you ever bought from Amazon? I noticed my SanDisk SD Card was fake when I studied the printed logo closely with a real one I had bought before.
  - dazc 6y ago
    Since SanDisk is such a notorious candidate for fakes om amazon, why do they even tolerate it? Surely, for the sake of brand protection, they should make it clear that you can't buy their products on amazon?
jjjeii3 6y ago
My last review was declined by Amazon and they didn't even bother telling me the reason, why the review was declined...
LeoPanthera 6y ago
Amazon de facto approves of this - reviews of products which mention "this product came with the offer of payment/discount for a positive review" are deleted. So Amazon not only doesn't care, they are encouraging it.
maxpert 6y ago
I use fakespot but I’ve noticed merchants now dogging fakespot as well. I am not sure about other folks here, but merchants selling these gift cards to people should be illegal and I am so sure if Amazon announces a reward for such actions people will themselves report it.
- vievie 6y ago
  > merchants [dodging] fakespot how?
3131s 6y ago
The US needs public identity services which large platforms like Amazon can be made to integrate with. In this case the idea would be to link accounts on Amazon with these services, so that users can filter only by reviews written by individuals that have gone through the necessary steps to verify their identity more concretely. Government should step in here, not necessarily as the only provider of these services, but as an alternative to the current insecure and inefficient model of doing this all ad hoc across any number of companies individually.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  Sellers can still game this system by bribing buyers with money, gift cards and products. Most fake reviews these days are written by real people with similar demographic profiles like your average buyer.
- vievie 6y ago
  Once you write enough popular reviews you will receive email offering a variety of remuneration tactics to whore your dignity - confirming the prior reply. All such email is forwarded through Amazon. They do nothing to stop these solicitations clearly violating seller rules or Amazon Vine. Amazon takes no actions when this behavior is reported. They really don't care. "We want your honest reviews" lies they want lies
robomartin 6y ago
RANT_MODE: ON Nothing new. This has been the case for years. The worst of it was that they used to (I think this might no longer be the case) accept reviews from anyone with an account, whether they bought the product or not. We have direct experience on this. My wife used to sell products on Amazon. People were leaving reviews that tagged as "Verified Review" BEFORE the product was delivered. Often times they would buy an item, leave a review and cancel before it shipped. Even worse, these products required some use before anyone could form an opinion. This did not matter at all. People could leave reviews before buying, right after buying, before receiving and when the package was dropped off, etc. And, of course, 100% of the reviews left before the product shipped or before it arrived were negative. 100% of the review left by non-buyers were negative. In other words, sellers on Amazon have been conducting armed warfare through negative reviews, star ratings and seller feedback. The other thing they are doing is consuming competitor's advertising budget before prime time. Say you have a budget of $1000 per day for click-through-ads on Amazon. That's $30K per month. Competitors would hire people --usually in China or India-- to click on your ads furiously right after midnight US time. By the time people awoke in the US and went to buy on Amazon your $1,000 ad budget was gone and nobody saw your product offerings. We burned through tens of thousands of dollars exactly this way. I had to fight Amazon for months to get them to have a look at the statistical analysis I put in front of them. At the end of that process they refunded us a fraction of our spend. What worse is that we lost all search ratings (some of our products were on page one for applicable keywords) and Amazon absolutely refused to turn back the clock and restore our standing. It was an absolute nightmare. They could not have cared less. This is when my wife decided to stop selling on Amazon. As a doctor she had no patience for that lunacy. The other problem is that Amazon does not preserve advertising records (or they didn't back then). If you did not manually download your statistics with regularity there was no way you could reconstruct what happened six months ago. If I remember correctly you get a few weeks or one month's download and that's it. I don't know if it's true or not, but their seller-no-service people told me the records are not preserved. Even worse, they refused to provide us with the identity of the seller or sellers who attacked our advertising budget and through negative reviews. They told me they identified them and banned them from Amazon. If they were in the US or Europe we wanted to seek legal action against them. Amazon, once again, could not have cared less. Based on my experience and that of others whose lives have been turned upside-down by Amazon product and account suspensions as well as flat out fraud in reviews and ratings, I would not recommend that anyone bet their livelihood on Amazon. They could destroy your existence overnight. I know people who are still trying to recover from daring to think they could "build a business" on Amazon. It's a farce. You own nothing. They control everything. And they can flick you off the platform without consequence because you are less than a rounding error. In our case we both benefited from having careers and a successful tech business, so the Amazon failure didn't hurt us badly. Not so for friends who, quite literally, depended on their "Amazon store" to live, thought they had a shot at improving their lives, risked money they could not afford to lose and actually wanted to own a nice lifestyle business. RANT_MODE: OFF
teraku 6y ago
Wasn't there an app to remove those? Also, I just stopped buying from Amazon a couple of years back. Only purchase in my history for the past 3 years is an Apple charger since when I changed from Android to iOS they didn't deliver them with the device anymore and Amazon had the cheapest price from the actual Apple distributor (no re-distributor).
ycombigator 6y ago
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kioleanu 6y ago
Amazon has a problem with fake reviews and it seems they are ok with it. I bought a replacement screen from Amazon and it wasn’t working properly. I thought I did something wrong so I contacted the seller/manufacturer and they told: oh yeah, it‘s defective, we‘ll just give you your money back. I agreed and then the person said „cool, now in order to process your request, please click these buttons on Amazon” and they sent me a screenshot showing how to leave a 5 star review. wtf. I refused and asked them to process the refund. First they said they can’t process the refund technically without me pressing those buttons and then that their job depends on it. I requested a refund through Amazon and tried leaving a 1-star review saying that the product was defective and the seller tried to condition me into giving them a 5 star review. This review was not accepted by Amazon, saying that seller feedback should be given on the seller page. This does make sense if you have multiple sellers selling the same product, but it was not the case here. These guys were the only ones producing and selling it and if the score of 5-star reviews is from people being coerced to leave a review, then it should be there, not on the seller page where it’s very easily buried. In the end I also contacted Amazon support with screenshots and I had to explain the problem 3 times as the customer representative said they didn’t understand what more can they do since I already received my refund. I’m the end, they said “they forwarded the message to the proper department, have a nice day”
- internetslave 6y ago
  Amazon has a team of like 50 researchers working on solving this problem.
  - andrei_says_ 6y ago
    But whose salaries depend on Amazon selling more stuff.
  - spoonjim 6y ago
    But if their solution results in Amazon making less money, it will never ship.
    - 6y ago
yalogin 6y ago
Amazon actually has no incentive to solve the fake review problem is that it achieved bulk volume. If it were the n the formation stage they would have solved it but now when everyone is conditioned to go to Amazon it’s easier to just refund the money and push the expense onto the seller. That way they get the reviews, have people reasonable happy as they get their money back, and not incur any revenue loss in the process. Sure they cause annoyance to a few but they can live with it as long as their moat is big enough.
melomal 6y ago
It almost feels that sometimes I should/could write a book about all of the shady growth hack's in action (inclusive of what I have and am currently doing) because some of these stories seem old in the grand scheme of things. Amazon reviews/Trustpilot/Google Reviews/Facebook Reviews etc are cheap as chips and ultimately they work. I now remind myself that in order to take on board someone's review, I need to know the person otherwise we could be chalk and cheese in likes and dislikes and they are influencing my decision.
vievie 6y ago
Lifx, people who make "smart" lightbulbs, have gamed the amazon seller system to remove critical reviews -- even those by high rank amazon reviewers. They really don't like their product described as: Hardware Malware. Amazon is Big Data. They could _easily_ identify generated reviews if they wanted. They don't. I myself stopped writing reviews as an emotionally abusive department at Amazon discourages critical reviews _albeit_ 5 star. Community Team is staffed by persons with reprehensibly poor English skills not fit to judge review compliance with vague rules. Don't trust inarticulate reviews. Don't trust articulate reviews without line breaks. Don't trust products with more than 800 reviews. But wait there's more... Amazon will cancel your account for returning "too many" items. Catch 22.
known 6y ago
I buy the Product; I will write Review as Verified Buyer; I will return the product retaining the Review;
keiferski 6y ago
This is the same problem as with journalism / sources of information, except for a different domain. Authoritative sources are considered reliable > newcomers undermine old sources > newcomers become authoritative sources, repeat ad infinitum. When small shops sold most products, you could rely on the owner being connected enough to the community to not rip anyone off. As communities and local social connections broke down, the penalty for being dishonest evaporated. Amazon and other competitors took advantage and became trustworthy. Now they are slipping... My guess: in both journalism and in e-commerce, the next step will be a return to “personable” sources of information that are perceived as reliable. Substack is on the right track here WRT journalism. Something that has real people (with good reputations) review products might be the e-commerce equivalent.
chovybizzass 6y ago
i just bought an old reddit account with karma so i can post on wsb.
heratyian 6y ago
https://j.gifs.com/o2vRzL.gif https://j.gifs.com/o2vRzL.gif I'm shocked that there is gambling in this establishment. Sir here are your winnigs
Aromasin 6y ago
I highly suggest people use https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ for any and all buying through Amazon. Unforuntately it only has a chrome extension but you can manually type in the link through the website. It has saved me from a few purchases, where there were 1000's of fake 5 star reviews but all the real ones were between 2-3 (all of them with comments as to how they couldn't understand how the product was rated so high).
ChrisRR 6y ago
Amazon has become one of the worst online shopping experiences, only redeemed by their 1 day delivery Most of the items are now people selling cheap tat from AliExpress and so many items have a suspiciously high number of reviews for such mundane items
ed_elliott_asc 6y ago
I bought a board game from amazon recently and it was really poor quality and it was only when I checked on the manufacturers website that I realised it was fake. When I went to report it, the seller had been removed and the item was no longer available. I contacted support and of course they refunded me the money without any issue. My problem is that they knew they had shipped me a fake product, why didn't they contact me to to tell me it was fake and either send me a real copy or offer me a refund?
- tmp2345 6y ago
  Because it reduces loss to not tell you. Some number of folks wont know or care
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
r1ch 6y ago
I recently received a mass CCed email from an Amazon seller to 70 other customers (hello GDPR?) offering free products in exchange for 5 star reviews. There's no proper channel to report this. Tried to leave a review with proof of it and it was denied. I really get the feeling Amazon are ok with it.
tern 6y ago
It's probably not perfect, but I use Fakespot <https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/>, which gives items on Amazon a rating for review accuracy.
- estaseuropano 6y ago
  https://www.reviewmeta.com https://www.reviewmeta.com is even better, sadly the owner seems to be on course to sell it.
- joncrane 6y ago
  Shame it's only available for Chrome. Do you know of any plans for a similar Firefox extension?
usrusr 6y ago
Seems like looking at Amazon reviews (and not just Amazon!) has become an art form on its own. I actually feel quite confident (likely far more than I should) in my ability to differentiate between product listings that are likely fake review battlegrounds and those that seem mostly legit. Cheaper bulk availability of fakes only makes that easier. The next meta level would be competitors trying to make each other look bad by sending hordes of fake five stars at each other. Who knows, perhaps this is already happening in some markets?
throw14082020 6y ago
Why don't we make it the law for reviewers to disclose incentives in the reviews/ videos, similar to how youtubers have to disclose it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-x8DYTOv7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-x8DYTOv7w
max_ 6y ago
Can accepting reviews only from a verified purchase reduce this kind of fraud?
An0mammall 6y ago
I hate buying stuff thru amazon. It's really hard to find what you are looking for and I can't trust it really. Only upside they have is that their delivery is fast and service is ok (compared to normal retail offering online store) Can't wait to be able to go somewhere, look at the options and talk to a human. Online shopping is shit
amelius 6y ago
It's quite amazing what Amazon can get away with. They really own the marketplace. We need new laws, fast.
renke1 6y ago
A lot of complaints here. I personally never had any problems with Amazon (Germany). I might not have noticed that I received counterfeits for certain products, though. Does the shady stuff only happen in certain countries?
- adsche 6y ago
  Well, the ratings as displayed cannot be trusted here either. Recently, I saw a product on amazon Germany with 3.5 stars, determined from 4 reviews. The reviews were 2x 5 stars and no text, 2x 1 star with reasonable reviews IMHO (and a high number of 'Users rated this review useful'). Still, amazon weights the 5-star no text reviews higher to arrive at 3.5 stars. (The product now has 7 reviews with at least 3x 1 star text reviews and the weighting still favors the no-text 4/5 star ratings: [1]) [1] https://smile.amazon.de/Lego-Technic-42125-Ferrari-Corse/product-reviews/B08HVZWFTC?reviewerType=all_reviews https://smile.amazon.de/Lego-Technic-42125-Ferrari-Corse/pro...
OakNinja 6y ago
There’s no point in more than two or possible three different scores: Don’t recommend - Do recommend or Don’t recommend - Neutral - Do recommend It’s rather silly when you rate an app with four out of five stars only to get a “Why didn’t you like our app?” question. And, as an app maker, anything other than a five star review feels like a punch in the face.
alangibson 6y ago
Anyone else find Amazon's comingling of stock to be insanity? It must save them a fortune in operational costs to be worth the amount of counterfeit junk they end up shipping.
- yourapostasy 6y ago
  > Anyone else find Amazon's comingling of stock to be insanity? They make so much off of AWS now, the market operations are probably just a massive headache to leadership with comparatively lower margins. Unattractive to pay attention and devote resources to, when the same thrown at AWS yields far more profits per unit thrown. The dynamics that emerge from commingling pushes more buyers to Amazon Basics, which undoubtedly yield much higher profits, so there isn't much incentive to fix it for impacted categories and brands. I've read that there is a feature that allows Amazon sellers to lock down their SKU's so only specific, named ship-from's are allowed to stock Amazon warehouses. If this is true, then I'd like to hear how this works, and rationales on why more sellers aren't using it. There might be a core assumption so deeply embedded into the data fabric of "one instance of an SKU is as good as any other instance" that changing the assumption would yield too little benefit to clear some internal IRR metric. I'd caution against that; ceding the market operations to eager competitors to take it away would deny Amazon extremely valuable data. Data whose value I assert far outstrips the decreased margins to fix the commingling problem. This goes far beyond any kind of shopping data. I further assert if Amazon actually unlocks the real value of that data, they'd evolve way beyond their current positioning as a software-driven logistics company. Even for that current positioning as a software-driven logistics company, this is a curious issue to possess the hot potato upon for so long. Competitors would be well-advised to look and think deeply on what this means on whether they can/should use this to beat Amazon. Amazon likely is not eager (to put it lightly) to enter into many traditional distributor-retailer relationships with manufacturers, which gives negotiating power back to the sellers. Very far from the commoditize the complements strategy they prefer. The current structure is a manufacturer's Panopticon, even more brutal than the Wal-Mart buyer-department-culture-driven model. Amazon wants to vertically integrate to the point they don't need a relationship, and ideally all the way back through into manufacturing, reaching as far back into the supply chain necessary to secure a welded-shut tight integration, thus capturing all available profits.
gertrunde 6y ago
I feel like the fake reviews are merely the tip of the iceberg. Over the last 5-10 years, Amazon's main shopping website seems to have gone from a reasonably reputable location to an internet cesspool to rival ebay or craigslist. For example, looking for an item one is presented with a wide variety of almost identical products from a wide variety of almost identical, completely unknown brands, with no trust or confidence in any of them. Now obviously, these brands/products are most likely nothing to do with Amazon, they're just using Amazon as their storefront, and sometimes fulfilment, but it still reflects upon Amazon, and ultimately taints their brand with the same brush. Maybe Amazon makes more money in this way, by taking a cut of this flow through various service fees, but for me it makes Amazon less useful to go to when I don't know exactly what I want already, and more often pushes me to go direct to a more trusted source.
- piyh 6y ago
  At least with ebay the items are cheaper and I know I'm buying bottom of the barrel stuff.
  - behringer 6y ago
    To be honest, they also sell high end stuff on ebay and you know it's going to be legit just based on the seller feedback and what the item is. Half the time the manufacturer themselves are selling directly on ebay!
dazbradbury 6y ago
For UK users: I'm surprised the BBC are hijacking the back button here when redirecting from .com -> .co.uk. I thought that behaviour was reserved for more, well, scummy websites. This appears to be the offending client-side code: let {isUkCombined: t} = e; const n = new URL(Object(c.a)()) , {protocol: a, host: r, pathname: o} = n; if (Object(m.b)(), t && r.includes(".com")) { const e = r.replace(".com", ".co.uk"); window.location.assign("".concat(a,"//").concat(e).concat(o)) } else if (!t && n.host.includes(".co.uk")) { const e = n.host.replace(".co.uk", ".com"); window.location.assign("".concat(a, "//").concat(e).concat(o)) } Anyone work there / know someone that works there and could fix? Replacing "window.location.assign(...)", with "location.href = ..." should do it.
- dazbradbury 6y ago
  Looks like this comment worked. Thanks for fixing!
TavsiE9s 6y ago
I mostly switched to eBay or the manufacturer directly. I've recently had to buy another pair of Apple Earphones and the Amazon reviews flat out stated "This is a fake, it is not the original product". It is still being sold on Amazon today and I ended up just buying it directly from Apple for a buck of two more and free shipping.
offtop5 6y ago
I think this is an inherent problem with the internet. Amazon has an incentive to show products having tons of five-star reviews, or to push their own branded products. If you buy something and it doesn't work, you can always just send it back. But most of the time it's fine. I found for more expensive items, I feel much safer shopping with Best buy. The prices are generally the same, and there's much more control over what you're actually purchasing. Buying a laptop off Amazon is like reading through a catalog of every laptop ever made in the Last 5 years. Best Buy has a great selection, and I was able to get my laptop within a day or so. To be fair to Amazon, they blunt a lot of the really negative experiences with store credit. For example once I purchased a table, didn't know how to put it together, and sort of broke it. I told Amazon I didn't really feel like sending it back because it was heavy, and I got a full refund. Once you get your money back you're much less likely to complain, I don't have any real incentive to write a negative review about the product now
simoneau 6y ago
Buying on Amazon is becoming a real roll-of-the-dice. Last week I wanted to buy refill cord for my string trimmer (weed whacker, in local parlance). Listed among the third-party options was this apparently OEM part: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015T96KLO/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015T96KLO/ Many reviews say they received a knock off. I ordered from Home Depot instead. I don’t intend to use this right away and don’t want to be bitten later. I reported this listing to Amazon, but it is still up. I assume this just isn’t a priority for them.
eatbitseveryday 6y ago
What’s wrong with only buying products actually sold by Amazon themselves? If only a third party is selling it on their website, maybe go elsewhere?
Jeff_Brown 6y ago
Do you not have to have bought the item in order to leave a review? If you do, then fake reviews should not be economical for anything sufficiently expensive -- judging from the article, maybe $20 or so.
sjg007 6y ago
The problem with fake reviews is that it creates a truly negative customer experience. I am not sure why Amazon who is "obsessed with the customer" does not see this. All I can think of is that there are two customers here, the 3rd party seller and the end retail customer. I guess the 3rd party retailer is higher value. The only way I could see there being a feedback loop is if 3rd party returns take off. Fake reviews will be the death of Amazon if Target/Walmart and others can get their act together. With respect to charging cables, I can buy the same crappy ones at Ace Hardware that I buy on Amazon basically. Ace picks one crappy vendor but Amazon has 100+ of them. The only high quality ones I've found are anker, monoprice and Apple.
AbrahamParangi 6y ago
The problem is that Amazon likely has an incentive to keep fake reviews in that lots of positive fake reviews probably encourage buying. They may or may not be aware that they have this incentive, or they may believe that they don’t- but if fake positive reviews do encourage buying then they will find their way back to inferior content moderation. Once you start looking you see this problem everywhere. Why is the Apple App Store absolutely crap? Why is the Google App Store even worse? Why is social media filled with astroturfing? The problem isn’t just convincing fakes, the problem is also that the platforms have an alignment of incentive with the fakes. While removing fake reviews or fake outrage bait is a tractable problem, wanting to remove it is a harder problem- it just doesn’t make sense for platforms absent more competition. Tl;dr: Fakes/spam can prosper on platforms if they only harm the user and are helpful to the platform.
dfilppi 6y ago
Seems like a good application for GPT-3
danimal88 6y ago
As a manufacturer/seller on amazon, I sure wish I could stop doing business on amazon. Amazon charges me for everything, despite obvious customer abuse, simply because it's their customer not mine. Couple that with high margins and bad reviews sampling for those that don't cheat the system and you get beat up constantly on amazon. The thing is, if you have a shopify stores for your d2c you have an AB test on return rates, customer quality, CSAT etc., and while Amazon dramatically impacts your top line sales, it also really effects your bottom line because customers order carelessly (in our case they buy the wrong size product) which triggers an expensive and wasteful amount of reverse logistics. My customers that buy from my site ask us questions that we help with, get better service, and are better customers because there is a seller/customer relationship. On amazon, we cant even get their email address via the seller/customer messaging so we can't help them if they have configuration questions, troubleshooting, etc. I just wish there was some sort of antiamazon coalition that would help move more e-commerce away and some standard messaging to make this movement known enough. The problem is that the point of sale and the seller credibility are comingled hence why even our shopify customers go to Amazon first. If you aren't on amazon, they wonder if you are a 'real' company. There must be a better way.
- piva00 6y ago
  Anti-Amazon coalition is called "anti-trust". That's why we can't let corporations grow this big, at least not this big in such a far reaching industry (ecommerce retail marketplace). They've captured the market, now they can exert the lever as they please.
amai 6y ago
Why buy fake reviews when you can just create them in bulk with a GPT2 model? see also: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.09177 https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.09177
woeirua 6y ago
At this point people should just accept that all online reviews are fake. Unfortunately, we've found ourselves right back at where we started. There's just no good way to ensure trust at every step in the system.
mikestew 6y ago
Yes, yes, quit buying stuff from Amazon. That's what I said when I went to buy compression socks within the last week. I'll just buy from the vendor (OS1). Hey, they take Apple Pay, too. And, hey, what's this $0.98 that ended up in my cart? "Route package protection"?[0] You mean you're passing on the cost of package insurance to me? Fuck that, you can just cancel that $100 order for that $0.98. If it's not bullshit like that, then my credit card info gets published to the world. So, fake reviews or not, there is a certain appeal to Amazon in that after 20 years I've not had credit card info published nor have I caught them trying to charge me for package insurance. Though I might not trust Amazon reviews, I trust the rest of their process far more than I do some random vendor. Which is why, much as I might wish otherwise, I continue to shop at Amazon. [0]https://route.com https://route.com WTF? Track packages and charge money for it? Who funds this shit?
- ecf 6y ago
  I got an email from route.com the very same day I purchased a package that was handled via shop.app. I can only guess that Shopify sold my email.
  - mikestew 6y ago
    Someone at http://os1st.com http://os1st.com did the same thing, which put me on Route's mailing list. The unsubscribe seems to work, but the whole thing just feels like everybody wanted a piece before passing you to the next vendor in the chain. And now if I see Route's name anywhere near a product, I'll walk out the door to the next vendor that DDG suggests. Too bad, too, as the items I ordered seem to be good quality. They shipped quickly. They take Apple Pay. They were oh, so close, and then pissed it all away because someone at Route told them that if you make the print small enough maybe the customer won't notice the $0.98 you sneak in there. (I didn't notice until after the confirmation email.) Now it becomes "not the money, but the principle".
chiefalchemist 6y ago
Fake reviews, that surely Amazom is aware of. Knock-off products, that again are not a secret. Unless there's viable competition, these things are not going to change. Lied to. Stripped of our privacy. Influenced and manipulated by analysis of our own behaviours. And so on. It's a shame it's come to this.
bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago
I received a bulk mailer recently that looked like an "Amazon postcard" that was essentially recruiting for fake reviewers.
mindvirus 6y ago
Fake reviews and fake products. I wanted to buy turkish cotton bath towels the other day, and it's basically impossible to find (really, try it). Nearly every listing has misleading discriptions in spite of 5 star reviews. I feel like unless I know the specific brand or product, I'm using Amazon less and less. I guess there's a niche for competitors - better search and a high quality filter.
kvhdude 6y ago
I have been bitten by positive amazon reviews buying fake stuff (usually phone/laptop batteries). There is something about seeing two products one bustling with reviews and other not, and the mind biased toward the former. These days i seek outside reviews (wirecutter, reddit etc) before trusting amazon.
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husamia 6y ago
I always check out Amazon reviews. Is there a better system?
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569 points by _wldu 6y ago

I'm staggered people didn't know this was a thing, anybody surprised must have their eyes closed or possibly be naive. It was obvious years ago, not just Amazon either... But most retailers. Most of what you see in life is fake and/or a scam, sad but true. Use your mind and stay away from scam products.

1-6 6y ago

Some sellers simply give out free units for good reviews.

bombcar 6y ago
Lots of them are offering a gift card for a review to purchasers - which seems slightly less scammy as you’re unlikely to leave a good review of a crappy product for a $5 gift card.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  All the gift card offers I have gotten have required a 5* review.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    Sure - but you’re less likely to want to leave a five star review if the product pissed you off.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  I had this happen, left a negative review mentioning the pay-for-review scam, and had the review removed by Amazon because it's "off topic". I don't know if it's just aligned incentives, but Amazon doesn't seem to care about this kind of review stuffing at all.

falcolas 6y ago

IMO, Amazon should buy a few on some honeypot products, and train their AI/analytics on it.

coldcode 6y ago

Of course they are, it's not like Amazon really cares much. With all the power of AWS and deep learning etc., identifying fake reviews should be a piece of cake if you are Amazon. It doesn't affect the bottom line, so why bother.

ncallaway 6y ago
It does affect the bottom line, though. Amazon used to be the place I went to learn about the quality of a product. If it looked good, well, here I was already on the product page... Now, with the counterfeit product problem I will no longer consider amazing for anything health, safety or food related. With the fake review problem, I no longer look at Amazon to figure out if a product is quality or not. Which leads to more purchases from physical stores or other websites. Between the two of those issues, my use of Amazon has dropped pretty significantly (to the point that I cancelled Amazon Prime during the pandemic).
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  I agree with what you're saying and I use Amazon much less now too, but Amazon definitely monitors the numbers and they're making more money this way. Who knows how much they're trading long-term reputation for short term gains?
  - ncallaway 6y ago
    > Who knows how much they're trading long-term reputation for short term gains? I think this is exactly the risk. Amazon didn’t become huge chasing quarterly or short term gains. The damage they’ve done to their reputation over the last several years may take another 5-10 years to show up in the numbers in a significant way, but by that point it’s much harder to turn around. It’s hard to know what the long term damage will be, if any, though. I’m certainly not their representative median customer.
- bitsnbytes 6y ago
  I have always found it best to ignore the good reviews and instead look at the negative reviews to identify patterns of complaints. If there is a pattern of failure ,quality, or issues and its not worth dealing with I wont buy the product. Also if the issues are common among vendors or products then I go with the cheapest. Why pay more if they are all crap or just as risky to buy and it sets a more accurate expectation of the product. I also typically ignore the negative reviews complaining about the package arriving damaged or late as that can happen with anything as long as I don't need it by a certain date. I also look for customer pictures of the product if available.

wwww4all 6y ago

It’s similar to rampant doping in competitive sports, where everyone knows what’s going on. When there are millions of dollars at stake in contracts, prize money, and sponsorships, people will cheat and take risks. Even if they’re caught, the payoffs are usually greater than consequences. The incentives and payoffs are far, far greater than any type of consequences to the seller. Worst case, they can shut down and start another shill store.

indigodaddy 6y ago

I usually just vet reviews for the same product from other online retailers, re: BH Photo, Best Buy, Target, Walmart (although not sure about Walmart reviews), Monoprice, maybe Newegg, etc

MattGaiser 6y ago

I’m part of a FB group where you can get free product in exchange for reviews. All I did was join and I was offered my choice for 60 different free items. This is hilariously common.

diveanon 6y ago

I haven't used amazon in years and this was largely the reason why. After getting scammed a few times by products that seemed to have good reviews I decided to just keep shopping local instead where I can actually see the product and speak to human beings who used it. Amazon will forever be the one stop shop for cheap counterfeit shit until they actually address these issues.

throwawayboise 6y ago
Same. I canceled Prime two years ago, and haven't bought anything from Amazon in several months. I just buy locally now, and if I can't find something locally, I buy it from the manufacturer's website or a smaller reseller with a better reputation.
injidup 6y ago
So easy to say. My local stores all have at least a 25 to 50 percent markup on anything on Amazon. Cameras to drones to computers to auto parts. Amazon beats on price by a huge margin. I'd love to buy tyres and oil from the local shop but the 50 to 100 percent price difference is not worth it.
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  When your counterfeit Michelins blow out and your engine siezes up on the counterfeit Castrol you may have a different view on prices and value.
  - injidup 6y ago
    You have no way of knowing that the overpriced stuff at the local garage is not fake either. I've had the Austrian consumer affairs department intervene on my behalf a number of times when local garages attempt to overprice on items that were either not required during the service or overpriced. I've had local plumbers try to charge double the price on certain items when they thought I wouldn't notice. Your rose colored glasses are quaint. Everybody is out to make a buck and I wouldn't put it past local shops to buy fake products and charge double for it. I'd rather my fake stuff at a decent price thankyou.

ibraheemdev 6y ago

I recently got an email offering 50% off a seller's products if I left a good review. This is happening on all marketplaces, not just Amazon. The only way I see to truly solve the problem is only allowing verified buyers to leave a review.

sombremesa 6y ago
Buyers also get brochures with their product offering gift cards and the like for 5-star reviews, though.
- gabereiser 6y ago
  Exactly. Crowdsourced reviews are easy to manipulate. On the other hand, a “review commission” isn’t practical either.
waynesonfire 6y ago
A verified buyer is nontrivial to determine. The purchaser could be under the influence and financed by the seller.
keeran 6y ago
Sellers generate fake orders for their products using real identities, actually send the product to those people, but leave a fake review in their name. I've tried raising the issue repeatedly with Amazon, but I've now given up and look forward to the random crap I get sent almost on a monthly basis.
- Firerouge 6y ago
  Where do I sign up to get free random stuff sent to me from Amazon review farmers?
  - ibraheemdev 6y ago
    Ideally you don't.

wp381640 6y ago

Reviews are broken. There needs to be a web of trust for reviews. I would weight a review from somebody I know or trust 1000x more than every Amazon or online review ever left. It's not just store reviews that are broken - web search is also completely broken because of affiliate spam I spent far too much time at the moment with each purchase researching and tracking down trusted reviews.

yojo 6y ago
Unless it’s a really big ticket item I’ve given up on product research as the investment is just not worth my time. I just buy whatever Wirecutter tells me to; usually they’re not too wrong.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  OMG wire cutter. Affiliate advertising once removed. EDIT: NextDesk scandal aside, when was the last time you saw WireCutter recommend a product that did NOT offer affiliate commissions (let’s just call a spade a spade: these are kickbacks). I don’t use WC anymore so I can’t answer that myself. I stopped using them when I saw some companies completely ignored in 2 different industries with which I’m familiar. Those companies did not have kickbacks.
  - yojo 6y ago
    Yes, they will never recommend something they can’t monetize. But they also do some basic product testing and I’ve yet to get actual crap buying their recommendation. If I’m getting something under $100 they get me a good enough solution and save me a lot of time. It’s just not worth the research cost to do better. I guess the paid alternative is consumer reports, but I feel like they’re not noticeably better.
  - ahepp 6y ago
    Have you found a good alternative to wirecutter? I am sure there are plenty of honest reviews on the internet, tucked into enthusiast sites or on personal blogs. It's hard to find them unless you're a member of their community. Unless they review a lot of products, you have no continued relationship with them. This means you can't evaluate your opinion of their reviews (as to trustworthiness, or even just taste). Surely anyone who devotes a lot of time and money to reviewing products is going to want to be (and deserves to be) paid. That means direct payment has to come from the customer, or the business. The "business pays" model has an incentive to exclude businesses that don't pay, to push you towards more expensive items, and in general to get you to buy shit you don't need. But at least the reviewer has some skin in the game, since you won't continue to buy through their referral links if they recommend too many products that are too bad. The "customer pays" model seems to solve a lot of the incentive problems, but it's always hard to get people to pay for something that others are giving out for free (even if the free ones are occasionally subpar or even harmful!) Ultimately, I'm not really sure I see "buyer pays" review sites as terribly unfair? Surely they'll just pass the cost on to customers. Some of the businesses, like NextDesk, seem to find the process unfair. I have some sympathy for them, but the reality is that the products I've bought based on Wirecutter recommendations tend to be better. I don't have the time, or even the ability these days, to pick through search results trying to figure it out for myself. Maybe I will give Consumer Reports a try, but is the cost of the subscription (of which I don't know the utility), and the lock-in, worth the marginal cost of missing out on great products like NextDesk? Does Consumer Reports even give more complete surveys of options than Wirecutter? Hard to say. I think I would go insane if I spent any more time than I already do looking for "truth" on the internet.

etchalon 6y ago

I don't understand how easy it could be to Google around a bit and find companies offering this service, but its seemingly impossible to stop at scale. Employ a group of people to go undercover with these firms, who are purposefully violating your platforms TOS, and enact draconian measures against the brands your employees encounter. The risk would quickly not be worth the reward.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
> undercover with these firms, who are purposefully violating your platforms TOS These “brands” are sometimes a few guys in a garage in China. Shut them down and they popup with a new name the next day, like whack-a-mole.
- redisman 6y ago
  Yeah they just buy white label cheap commodities and will slap a new sticker on it if you “crack down” on them somehow
  - nomel 6y ago
    This is ridiculously obvious when searching for basically anything on Amazon now. There will be 10 identical product listings with 10 different brand names, many of which have reviews describing, and pictures showing, completely different products.

harry8 6y ago

Amazon loves fake reviews as long as they are 5 star. The more it looks like people buying stuff using amazon are happy, the better that marketing is for Amazon. Look at all these people who are so happy to be buying stuff on Amazon, so much better than the alternatives. Amazon could clean this up and then watch the average drop. From the removal of the fake fives but also it makes it look more "socially accpetable" to leave 4 and 3 star reviews. So it costs Amazon to do the right thing by the people parting with money for stuff so they don't. Amazon are well aware of /their/ incentives and when their incentives align with what looks to me a lot like fraud they'll play the plausibly deny game. Or perhaps I'm wrong they don't know and there's nothing they can do. Amazon employees will probably confirm that.

HenryKissinger 6y ago
Disruptive solution proposal: Get rid of the review system entirely. Stars, comments, user pictures; eliminate all of it. For everyone. There. Problem solved.
- pid_0 6y ago
  That would be very stupid
  - HenryKissinger 6y ago
    I thought this place liked disruption.
    - osrec 6y ago
      Disruption often means to offer an alternative, better solution to a poorly solved problem. You seem to be suggesting we don't try and solve the product validation problem at all!
      - bombcar 6y ago
        Replace reviews with raw data - total number of purchases (at this price and version), return rate, etc.

f430 6y ago

Bought a gaming chair that had 5 star reviews. It smelled toxic. Smell didn't dissipate after a month. Returned it and found out buried under all the 5 star reviews of people citing the same issue.

redisman 6y ago
Foams can be really smelly. You never really know what they sourced to save a penny
- f430 6y ago
  the actual seat and back rest was wrapped inside a plastic bag. The fake leather just smelled toxic. Literally the whole room would stink and it would give me headaches until I packed it up for a full refund. In the past 3 months I have ended up returning 80% of my purchases from Amazon because the 5 star reviews did not match with the actual product's performance or quality.

dwighttk 6y ago

What’s the deal with people answering questions completely irrelevantly on Amazon? Do they boost your review karma if you answer a bunch of questions or something?

astura 6y ago
When a question is asked Amazon will email blast some small percentage of people who have purchased the product and people selling the product. If a customer who got this email blasts chooses to respond to this email, they may answer the question the only way they know how - completely irrelevantly. Beyond that, I've definitely seen answers where the answerer clearly thinks they are answering a human and not posting to a public page for everyone to read.
renewiltord 6y ago
The question is framed something like this: Dwight, as a reviewer of X, can you help this customer? Rene asked <the question> So it's like it's been directed at you. So people will answer with "don't know" or "I didn't buy this" or whatever.

puapuapuq 6y ago

IMO having a made in China filter is good enough

andrewmcwatters 6y ago

I'm surprised you can still write reviews for products and services on Amazon you haven't bought from Amazon. How much of this racket on places like Amazon and Yelp would be killed if you had a unique generated ID assigned to you once you purchased a good or service and it was verified as delivered?

cdogl 6y ago
Indeed. Presumably many such IDs exist in Amazon's transaction system. It must be deliberate that they are not used for this purpose.
ibraheemdev 6y ago
Amazon does have the concept of "verified reviews", it is just not enforced.
astura 6y ago
Scamming verified reviews is already a thing, it's called "Brushing." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushing_(e-commerce) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushing_(e-commerce)
- TwoBit 6y ago
  And that's taking advantage of another longstanding Amazon loophole.
KMag 6y ago
They should definitely package a unique QR code for verified reviews in the delivered package. Right before Christmas this year, my dad got a package of some iWatch bands he didn't order, and some other small accessories. It was addressed to him, from some random name he didn't recognize. He asked around all of his friends and family to see if anyone ordered pseudononymously. Presumably this was done in order for someone to be able to generate a fake "verified review" at the peak of Christmas shopping.
dehrmann 6y ago
It also makes for a good honeypot.

blondie9x 6y ago

Amazon needs to stop allowing review to be left by people who do not have a verified purchase of an item on their accounts. If you really think about reviews, without honesty, trust, and verification the entire review system is meaningless.

jaakl 6y ago

I only trust reviews of persons I personally know. At least I know the person exists. However, many of these FB likes seem to be over-motivated by some campign trick, but I also know already who are usual suspects there, so can filter them out.

dharmab 6y ago

I've made it a practice to run ReviewMeta (https://reviewmeta.com https://reviewmeta.com) on any unfamiliar item I'm considering purchasing.

vievie 6y ago
neat. Now I'll run that along with https://FakeSpot.com https://FakeSpot.com

tumblewit 6y ago

Right now probably some remote indian village is employing people (like mechanical turk ironically on amazon as well) to write X amount of reviews per day sort of like moderation. In the not so distant future someone will do a GPT3 version of this. Time to reinvent the reviews.

Fwirt 6y ago

Here's an idea that would never work: how about a financial incentive straight from Amazon for leaving negative reviews? Let's imagine a universe where Amazon does away with the star rating system and replaces it with a pro/con "tag" list. (e.g. "high quality" "smells bad" "broke quickly"). They then only allow reviews from verified buyers of an item. Amazon then contacts some percentage of said buyers proportionate to the number of reviews the item has has/how recently it was listed (to establish a baseline) and offers a small account credit for a reviewer to clearly state at least one thing they didn't like about the item, requiring a response other than "nothing". This would identify trends or common failure points. The more negative reviews a product has, the higher the reward that Amazon hands out. Scammy sellers would have to consistently "beat Amazon's offer" to get fake positive reviews. In this hypothetical universe... would sellers setup shell accounts to purchase their own inventory and tank their other products' reviews for Amazon credit? Or would they buy out their own inventory to increase the ratio of positive to negative reviews? Would the cut that Amazon takes for using their platform outweigh the cost of paying off buyers/purchasing their own inventory? Would the cost to Amazon be worth the increased customer engagement?

codecamper 6y ago

I trust Walmart's return policy more than Amazon's reviews. I think Walmart gives you 90 days for a return.

bombcar 6y ago
Walmart also lets you (or did before covid) just throw the product at the local store and they’d handle it. Very nice.

jariel 6y ago

Better idea: Fall back to trusting brands. What does Amazon really offer now: 1) Search convenience, which is really not that big of a deal and 2) Fast delivery but everyone is catching up and do we really need that thing in 2 days instead of 3? I never buy on Amazon and I don't feel as though I'm missing out.

wyre 6y ago
I haven’t bought anything off of Amazon in 2 years. Granted I use eBay a lot, but the only time I’ve been burned is when I’ve bought something used and the seller never shipped. Otherwise I’ll buy things from Part-express, Vitacost, Target, Best Buy, Sweetwater, etc.
a254613e 6y ago
3. Amazing customer support. Living in "Servicewüste" Germany I would still buy from amazon, even without the first two points that you mentioned. Because customer support... isn't a thing here. On top of that there's things like higher prices, and more expensive and slower shipping usually slower by up to a week, not by a day or two. Amazon's customer support goes way and beyond to help you out, I've had hundreds of euros worth of stuff sent to me again right away, no questions asked - because I called them and said that the official delivery information saying that it's been delivered to me personally an hour ago is not true, and I don't have the items. That all being said, I do wish amazon would take care of fake reviews, and mixed inventory from different sellers.

vladmk 6y ago

I know a lot of top sellers who did this, it’s hard for the newbies now

voldemort1968 6y ago

permy.link strikes again

Meekro 6y ago

I'm just spitballing, but what do you guys think about this as a fake-resistant review system? To list your product on Amazon as a seller, you pay $500 per year as a "review incentivization fee." The algorithm randomly selects buyers and emails them 1 month after their purchase. They are offered $10 to write a review. The chance of being randomly selected as a reviewer auto-adjusts to target a goal of 50 reviews per year, and no one except those people is allowed to post reviews. Also, reviewers can update their reviews later if their impression of the product changes. If a seller wanted to keep farming reviews, they would now have to buy up the vast majority of their own inventory in the hopes of being selected. Also, my system prevents people who are experiencing one-in-a-million problems (or who are just habitually disgruntled) from dominating the conversation.

crazypython 6y ago
Sellers already pay people to write reviews– and compensate for the product. How is this system any different? > If a seller wanted to keep farming reviews, they would now have to buy up the vast majority of their own inventory in the hopes of being selected. They already have 100 people buy their product and fully pay for it for a review.
- Meekro 6y ago
  It's different because it has Amazon randomly selecting who gets paid to write a review, and the reviewer doesn't have any incentive to lie since they get the $10 regardless. Sellers are currently paying people (in money and product) for 5 star reviews, which is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve.
  - xxs 6y ago
    The seller merely includes a promotion - leave a good review, receive a gift card (or straight up refund for cheaper products). Your system may have minor chance of success if there was no way for the sellers to contact customers.
ta8645 6y ago

bobkrusty 6y ago

this is an old story it happens a lot in the past 2017,2018 there's lots of such services sold on marketing forums in my opinion, rating should based on how much products sold whatcha think?

spullara 6y ago

Based on how many people are talking about this stuff, I can't imagine how I have survived since 1997 without buying anything counterfeit off Amazon. What are people buying? How are you searching? Do you have any criteria when you buy something?

vecinu 6y ago
> I can't imagine how I have survived since 1997 without buying anything counterfeit off Amazon Did you authenticate everything you ever bought from Amazon? I noticed my SanDisk SD Card was fake when I studied the printed logo closely with a real one I had bought before.
- dazc 6y ago
  Since SanDisk is such a notorious candidate for fakes om amazon, why do they even tolerate it? Surely, for the sake of brand protection, they should make it clear that you can't buy their products on amazon?

jjjeii3 6y ago

My last review was declined by Amazon and they didn't even bother telling me the reason, why the review was declined...

LeoPanthera 6y ago

Amazon de facto approves of this - reviews of products which mention "this product came with the offer of payment/discount for a positive review" are deleted. So Amazon not only doesn't care, they are encouraging it.

maxpert 6y ago

I use fakespot but I’ve noticed merchants now dogging fakespot as well. I am not sure about other folks here, but merchants selling these gift cards to people should be illegal and I am so sure if Amazon announces a reward for such actions people will themselves report it.

vievie 6y ago
> merchants [dodging] fakespot how?

3131s 6y ago

The US needs public identity services which large platforms like Amazon can be made to integrate with. In this case the idea would be to link accounts on Amazon with these services, so that users can filter only by reviews written by individuals that have gone through the necessary steps to verify their identity more concretely. Government should step in here, not necessarily as the only provider of these services, but as an alternative to the current insecure and inefficient model of doing this all ad hoc across any number of companies individually.

arkitaip 6y ago
Sellers can still game this system by bribing buyers with money, gift cards and products. Most fake reviews these days are written by real people with similar demographic profiles like your average buyer.
vievie 6y ago
Once you write enough popular reviews you will receive email offering a variety of remuneration tactics to whore your dignity - confirming the prior reply. All such email is forwarded through Amazon. They do nothing to stop these solicitations clearly violating seller rules or Amazon Vine. Amazon takes no actions when this behavior is reported. They really don't care. "We want your honest reviews" lies they want lies

robomartin 6y ago

RANT_MODE: ON Nothing new. This has been the case for years. The worst of it was that they used to (I think this might no longer be the case) accept reviews from anyone with an account, whether they bought the product or not. We have direct experience on this. My wife used to sell products on Amazon. People were leaving reviews that tagged as "Verified Review" BEFORE the product was delivered. Often times they would buy an item, leave a review and cancel before it shipped. Even worse, these products required some use before anyone could form an opinion. This did not matter at all. People could leave reviews before buying, right after buying, before receiving and when the package was dropped off, etc. And, of course, 100% of the reviews left before the product shipped or before it arrived were negative. 100% of the review left by non-buyers were negative. In other words, sellers on Amazon have been conducting armed warfare through negative reviews, star ratings and seller feedback. The other thing they are doing is consuming competitor's advertising budget before prime time. Say you have a budget of $1000 per day for click-through-ads on Amazon. That's $30K per month. Competitors would hire people --usually in China or India-- to click on your ads furiously right after midnight US time. By the time people awoke in the US and went to buy on Amazon your $1,000 ad budget was gone and nobody saw your product offerings. We burned through tens of thousands of dollars exactly this way. I had to fight Amazon for months to get them to have a look at the statistical analysis I put in front of them. At the end of that process they refunded us a fraction of our spend. What worse is that we lost all search ratings (some of our products were on page one for applicable keywords) and Amazon absolutely refused to turn back the clock and restore our standing. It was an absolute nightmare. They could not have cared less. This is when my wife decided to stop selling on Amazon. As a doctor she had no patience for that lunacy. The other problem is that Amazon does not preserve advertising records (or they didn't back then). If you did not manually download your statistics with regularity there was no way you could reconstruct what happened six months ago. If I remember correctly you get a few weeks or one month's download and that's it. I don't know if it's true or not, but their seller-no-service people told me the records are not preserved. Even worse, they refused to provide us with the identity of the seller or sellers who attacked our advertising budget and through negative reviews. They told me they identified them and banned them from Amazon. If they were in the US or Europe we wanted to seek legal action against them. Amazon, once again, could not have cared less. Based on my experience and that of others whose lives have been turned upside-down by Amazon product and account suspensions as well as flat out fraud in reviews and ratings, I would not recommend that anyone bet their livelihood on Amazon. They could destroy your existence overnight. I know people who are still trying to recover from daring to think they could "build a business" on Amazon. It's a farce. You own nothing. They control everything. And they can flick you off the platform without consequence because you are less than a rounding error. In our case we both benefited from having careers and a successful tech business, so the Amazon failure didn't hurt us badly. Not so for friends who, quite literally, depended on their "Amazon store" to live, thought they had a shot at improving their lives, risked money they could not afford to lose and actually wanted to own a nice lifestyle business. RANT_MODE: OFF

teraku 6y ago

Wasn't there an app to remove those? Also, I just stopped buying from Amazon a couple of years back. Only purchase in my history for the past 3 years is an Apple charger since when I changed from Android to iOS they didn't deliver them with the device anymore and Amazon had the cheapest price from the actual Apple distributor (no re-distributor).

ycombigator 6y ago

ShockedPikachu.Jpg

kioleanu 6y ago

Amazon has a problem with fake reviews and it seems they are ok with it. I bought a replacement screen from Amazon and it wasn’t working properly. I thought I did something wrong so I contacted the seller/manufacturer and they told: oh yeah, it‘s defective, we‘ll just give you your money back. I agreed and then the person said „cool, now in order to process your request, please click these buttons on Amazon” and they sent me a screenshot showing how to leave a 5 star review. wtf. I refused and asked them to process the refund. First they said they can’t process the refund technically without me pressing those buttons and then that their job depends on it. I requested a refund through Amazon and tried leaving a 1-star review saying that the product was defective and the seller tried to condition me into giving them a 5 star review. This review was not accepted by Amazon, saying that seller feedback should be given on the seller page. This does make sense if you have multiple sellers selling the same product, but it was not the case here. These guys were the only ones producing and selling it and if the score of 5-star reviews is from people being coerced to leave a review, then it should be there, not on the seller page where it’s very easily buried. In the end I also contacted Amazon support with screenshots and I had to explain the problem 3 times as the customer representative said they didn’t understand what more can they do since I already received my refund. I’m the end, they said “they forwarded the message to the proper department, have a nice day”

internetslave 6y ago
Amazon has a team of like 50 researchers working on solving this problem.
- andrei_says_ 6y ago
  But whose salaries depend on Amazon selling more stuff.
- spoonjim 6y ago
  But if their solution results in Amazon making less money, it will never ship.
  - 6y ago

yalogin 6y ago

Amazon actually has no incentive to solve the fake review problem is that it achieved bulk volume. If it were the n the formation stage they would have solved it but now when everyone is conditioned to go to Amazon it’s easier to just refund the money and push the expense onto the seller. That way they get the reviews, have people reasonable happy as they get their money back, and not incur any revenue loss in the process. Sure they cause annoyance to a few but they can live with it as long as their moat is big enough.

melomal 6y ago

It almost feels that sometimes I should/could write a book about all of the shady growth hack's in action (inclusive of what I have and am currently doing) because some of these stories seem old in the grand scheme of things. Amazon reviews/Trustpilot/Google Reviews/Facebook Reviews etc are cheap as chips and ultimately they work. I now remind myself that in order to take on board someone's review, I need to know the person otherwise we could be chalk and cheese in likes and dislikes and they are influencing my decision.

vievie 6y ago

Lifx, people who make "smart" lightbulbs, have gamed the amazon seller system to remove critical reviews -- even those by high rank amazon reviewers. They really don't like their product described as: Hardware Malware. Amazon is Big Data. They could _easily_ identify generated reviews if they wanted. They don't. I myself stopped writing reviews as an emotionally abusive department at Amazon discourages critical reviews _albeit_ 5 star. Community Team is staffed by persons with reprehensibly poor English skills not fit to judge review compliance with vague rules. Don't trust inarticulate reviews. Don't trust articulate reviews without line breaks. Don't trust products with more than 800 reviews. But wait there's more... Amazon will cancel your account for returning "too many" items. Catch 22.

known 6y ago

I buy the Product; I will write Review as Verified Buyer; I will return the product retaining the Review;

keiferski 6y ago

This is the same problem as with journalism / sources of information, except for a different domain. Authoritative sources are considered reliable > newcomers undermine old sources > newcomers become authoritative sources, repeat ad infinitum. When small shops sold most products, you could rely on the owner being connected enough to the community to not rip anyone off. As communities and local social connections broke down, the penalty for being dishonest evaporated. Amazon and other competitors took advantage and became trustworthy. Now they are slipping... My guess: in both journalism and in e-commerce, the next step will be a return to “personable” sources of information that are perceived as reliable. Substack is on the right track here WRT journalism. Something that has real people (with good reputations) review products might be the e-commerce equivalent.

chovybizzass 6y ago

i just bought an old reddit account with karma so i can post on wsb.

heratyian 6y ago

https://j.gifs.com/o2vRzL.gif https://j.gifs.com/o2vRzL.gif I'm shocked that there is gambling in this establishment. Sir here are your winnigs

Aromasin 6y ago

I highly suggest people use https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ for any and all buying through Amazon. Unforuntately it only has a chrome extension but you can manually type in the link through the website. It has saved me from a few purchases, where there were 1000's of fake 5 star reviews but all the real ones were between 2-3 (all of them with comments as to how they couldn't understand how the product was rated so high).

ChrisRR 6y ago

Amazon has become one of the worst online shopping experiences, only redeemed by their 1 day delivery Most of the items are now people selling cheap tat from AliExpress and so many items have a suspiciously high number of reviews for such mundane items

ed_elliott_asc 6y ago

I bought a board game from amazon recently and it was really poor quality and it was only when I checked on the manufacturers website that I realised it was fake. When I went to report it, the seller had been removed and the item was no longer available. I contacted support and of course they refunded me the money without any issue. My problem is that they knew they had shipped me a fake product, why didn't they contact me to to tell me it was fake and either send me a real copy or offer me a refund?

tmp2345 6y ago
Because it reduces loss to not tell you. Some number of folks wont know or care

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

r1ch 6y ago

I recently received a mass CCed email from an Amazon seller to 70 other customers (hello GDPR?) offering free products in exchange for 5 star reviews. There's no proper channel to report this. Tried to leave a review with proof of it and it was denied. I really get the feeling Amazon are ok with it.

tern 6y ago

It's probably not perfect, but I use Fakespot <https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/>, which gives items on Amazon a rating for review accuracy.

estaseuropano 6y ago
https://www.reviewmeta.com https://www.reviewmeta.com is even better, sadly the owner seems to be on course to sell it.
joncrane 6y ago
Shame it's only available for Chrome. Do you know of any plans for a similar Firefox extension?

usrusr 6y ago

Seems like looking at Amazon reviews (and not just Amazon!) has become an art form on its own. I actually feel quite confident (likely far more than I should) in my ability to differentiate between product listings that are likely fake review battlegrounds and those that seem mostly legit. Cheaper bulk availability of fakes only makes that easier. The next meta level would be competitors trying to make each other look bad by sending hordes of fake five stars at each other. Who knows, perhaps this is already happening in some markets?

throw14082020 6y ago

Why don't we make it the law for reviewers to disclose incentives in the reviews/ videos, similar to how youtubers have to disclose it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-x8DYTOv7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-x8DYTOv7w

max_ 6y ago

Can accepting reviews only from a verified purchase reduce this kind of fraud?

An0mammall 6y ago

I hate buying stuff thru amazon. It's really hard to find what you are looking for and I can't trust it really. Only upside they have is that their delivery is fast and service is ok (compared to normal retail offering online store) Can't wait to be able to go somewhere, look at the options and talk to a human. Online shopping is shit

amelius 6y ago

It's quite amazing what Amazon can get away with. They really own the marketplace. We need new laws, fast.

renke1 6y ago

A lot of complaints here. I personally never had any problems with Amazon (Germany). I might not have noticed that I received counterfeits for certain products, though. Does the shady stuff only happen in certain countries?

adsche 6y ago
Well, the ratings as displayed cannot be trusted here either. Recently, I saw a product on amazon Germany with 3.5 stars, determined from 4 reviews. The reviews were 2x 5 stars and no text, 2x 1 star with reasonable reviews IMHO (and a high number of 'Users rated this review useful'). Still, amazon weights the 5-star no text reviews higher to arrive at 3.5 stars. (The product now has 7 reviews with at least 3x 1 star text reviews and the weighting still favors the no-text 4/5 star ratings: [1]) [1] https://smile.amazon.de/Lego-Technic-42125-Ferrari-Corse/product-reviews/B08HVZWFTC?reviewerType=all_reviews https://smile.amazon.de/Lego-Technic-42125-Ferrari-Corse/pro...

OakNinja 6y ago

There’s no point in more than two or possible three different scores: Don’t recommend - Do recommend or Don’t recommend - Neutral - Do recommend It’s rather silly when you rate an app with four out of five stars only to get a “Why didn’t you like our app?” question. And, as an app maker, anything other than a five star review feels like a punch in the face.

alangibson 6y ago

Anyone else find Amazon's comingling of stock to be insanity? It must save them a fortune in operational costs to be worth the amount of counterfeit junk they end up shipping.

yourapostasy 6y ago
> Anyone else find Amazon's comingling of stock to be insanity? They make so much off of AWS now, the market operations are probably just a massive headache to leadership with comparatively lower margins. Unattractive to pay attention and devote resources to, when the same thrown at AWS yields far more profits per unit thrown. The dynamics that emerge from commingling pushes more buyers to Amazon Basics, which undoubtedly yield much higher profits, so there isn't much incentive to fix it for impacted categories and brands. I've read that there is a feature that allows Amazon sellers to lock down their SKU's so only specific, named ship-from's are allowed to stock Amazon warehouses. If this is true, then I'd like to hear how this works, and rationales on why more sellers aren't using it. There might be a core assumption so deeply embedded into the data fabric of "one instance of an SKU is as good as any other instance" that changing the assumption would yield too little benefit to clear some internal IRR metric. I'd caution against that; ceding the market operations to eager competitors to take it away would deny Amazon extremely valuable data. Data whose value I assert far outstrips the decreased margins to fix the commingling problem. This goes far beyond any kind of shopping data. I further assert if Amazon actually unlocks the real value of that data, they'd evolve way beyond their current positioning as a software-driven logistics company. Even for that current positioning as a software-driven logistics company, this is a curious issue to possess the hot potato upon for so long. Competitors would be well-advised to look and think deeply on what this means on whether they can/should use this to beat Amazon. Amazon likely is not eager (to put it lightly) to enter into many traditional distributor-retailer relationships with manufacturers, which gives negotiating power back to the sellers. Very far from the commoditize the complements strategy they prefer. The current structure is a manufacturer's Panopticon, even more brutal than the Wal-Mart buyer-department-culture-driven model. Amazon wants to vertically integrate to the point they don't need a relationship, and ideally all the way back through into manufacturing, reaching as far back into the supply chain necessary to secure a welded-shut tight integration, thus capturing all available profits.

gertrunde 6y ago

I feel like the fake reviews are merely the tip of the iceberg. Over the last 5-10 years, Amazon's main shopping website seems to have gone from a reasonably reputable location to an internet cesspool to rival ebay or craigslist. For example, looking for an item one is presented with a wide variety of almost identical products from a wide variety of almost identical, completely unknown brands, with no trust or confidence in any of them. Now obviously, these brands/products are most likely nothing to do with Amazon, they're just using Amazon as their storefront, and sometimes fulfilment, but it still reflects upon Amazon, and ultimately taints their brand with the same brush. Maybe Amazon makes more money in this way, by taking a cut of this flow through various service fees, but for me it makes Amazon less useful to go to when I don't know exactly what I want already, and more often pushes me to go direct to a more trusted source.

piyh 6y ago
At least with ebay the items are cheaper and I know I'm buying bottom of the barrel stuff.
- behringer 6y ago
  To be honest, they also sell high end stuff on ebay and you know it's going to be legit just based on the seller feedback and what the item is. Half the time the manufacturer themselves are selling directly on ebay!

dazbradbury 6y ago

For UK users: I'm surprised the BBC are hijacking the back button here when redirecting from .com -> .co.uk. I thought that behaviour was reserved for more, well, scummy websites. This appears to be the offending client-side code: let {isUkCombined: t} = e; const n = new URL(Object(c.a)()) , {protocol: a, host: r, pathname: o} = n; if (Object(m.b)(), t && r.includes(".com")) { const e = r.replace(".com", ".co.uk"); window.location.assign("".concat(a,"//").concat(e).concat(o)) } else if (!t && n.host.includes(".co.uk")) { const e = n.host.replace(".co.uk", ".com"); window.location.assign("".concat(a, "//").concat(e).concat(o)) } Anyone work there / know someone that works there and could fix? Replacing "window.location.assign(...)", with "location.href = ..." should do it.

dazbradbury 6y ago
Looks like this comment worked. Thanks for fixing!

TavsiE9s 6y ago

I mostly switched to eBay or the manufacturer directly. I've recently had to buy another pair of Apple Earphones and the Amazon reviews flat out stated "This is a fake, it is not the original product". It is still being sold on Amazon today and I ended up just buying it directly from Apple for a buck of two more and free shipping.

offtop5 6y ago

I think this is an inherent problem with the internet. Amazon has an incentive to show products having tons of five-star reviews, or to push their own branded products. If you buy something and it doesn't work, you can always just send it back. But most of the time it's fine. I found for more expensive items, I feel much safer shopping with Best buy. The prices are generally the same, and there's much more control over what you're actually purchasing. Buying a laptop off Amazon is like reading through a catalog of every laptop ever made in the Last 5 years. Best Buy has a great selection, and I was able to get my laptop within a day or so. To be fair to Amazon, they blunt a lot of the really negative experiences with store credit. For example once I purchased a table, didn't know how to put it together, and sort of broke it. I told Amazon I didn't really feel like sending it back because it was heavy, and I got a full refund. Once you get your money back you're much less likely to complain, I don't have any real incentive to write a negative review about the product now

simoneau 6y ago

Buying on Amazon is becoming a real roll-of-the-dice. Last week I wanted to buy refill cord for my string trimmer (weed whacker, in local parlance). Listed among the third-party options was this apparently OEM part: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015T96KLO/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015T96KLO/ Many reviews say they received a knock off. I ordered from Home Depot instead. I don’t intend to use this right away and don’t want to be bitten later. I reported this listing to Amazon, but it is still up. I assume this just isn’t a priority for them.

eatbitseveryday 6y ago

What’s wrong with only buying products actually sold by Amazon themselves? If only a third party is selling it on their website, maybe go elsewhere?

Jeff_Brown 6y ago

Do you not have to have bought the item in order to leave a review? If you do, then fake reviews should not be economical for anything sufficiently expensive -- judging from the article, maybe $20 or so.

sjg007 6y ago

The problem with fake reviews is that it creates a truly negative customer experience. I am not sure why Amazon who is "obsessed with the customer" does not see this. All I can think of is that there are two customers here, the 3rd party seller and the end retail customer. I guess the 3rd party retailer is higher value. The only way I could see there being a feedback loop is if 3rd party returns take off. Fake reviews will be the death of Amazon if Target/Walmart and others can get their act together. With respect to charging cables, I can buy the same crappy ones at Ace Hardware that I buy on Amazon basically. Ace picks one crappy vendor but Amazon has 100+ of them. The only high quality ones I've found are anker, monoprice and Apple.

AbrahamParangi 6y ago

The problem is that Amazon likely has an incentive to keep fake reviews in that lots of positive fake reviews probably encourage buying. They may or may not be aware that they have this incentive, or they may believe that they don’t- but if fake positive reviews do encourage buying then they will find their way back to inferior content moderation. Once you start looking you see this problem everywhere. Why is the Apple App Store absolutely crap? Why is the Google App Store even worse? Why is social media filled with astroturfing? The problem isn’t just convincing fakes, the problem is also that the platforms have an alignment of incentive with the fakes. While removing fake reviews or fake outrage bait is a tractable problem, wanting to remove it is a harder problem- it just doesn’t make sense for platforms absent more competition. Tl;dr: Fakes/spam can prosper on platforms if they only harm the user and are helpful to the platform.

dfilppi 6y ago

Seems like a good application for GPT-3

danimal88 6y ago

As a manufacturer/seller on amazon, I sure wish I could stop doing business on amazon. Amazon charges me for everything, despite obvious customer abuse, simply because it's their customer not mine. Couple that with high margins and bad reviews sampling for those that don't cheat the system and you get beat up constantly on amazon. The thing is, if you have a shopify stores for your d2c you have an AB test on return rates, customer quality, CSAT etc., and while Amazon dramatically impacts your top line sales, it also really effects your bottom line because customers order carelessly (in our case they buy the wrong size product) which triggers an expensive and wasteful amount of reverse logistics. My customers that buy from my site ask us questions that we help with, get better service, and are better customers because there is a seller/customer relationship. On amazon, we cant even get their email address via the seller/customer messaging so we can't help them if they have configuration questions, troubleshooting, etc. I just wish there was some sort of antiamazon coalition that would help move more e-commerce away and some standard messaging to make this movement known enough. The problem is that the point of sale and the seller credibility are comingled hence why even our shopify customers go to Amazon first. If you aren't on amazon, they wonder if you are a 'real' company. There must be a better way.

piva00 6y ago
Anti-Amazon coalition is called "anti-trust". That's why we can't let corporations grow this big, at least not this big in such a far reaching industry (ecommerce retail marketplace). They've captured the market, now they can exert the lever as they please.

amai 6y ago

Why buy fake reviews when you can just create them in bulk with a GPT2 model? see also: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.09177 https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.09177

woeirua 6y ago

At this point people should just accept that all online reviews are fake. Unfortunately, we've found ourselves right back at where we started. There's just no good way to ensure trust at every step in the system.

mikestew 6y ago

Yes, yes, quit buying stuff from Amazon. That's what I said when I went to buy compression socks within the last week. I'll just buy from the vendor (OS1). Hey, they take Apple Pay, too. And, hey, what's this $0.98 that ended up in my cart? "Route package protection"?[0] You mean you're passing on the cost of package insurance to me? Fuck that, you can just cancel that $100 order for that $0.98. If it's not bullshit like that, then my credit card info gets published to the world. So, fake reviews or not, there is a certain appeal to Amazon in that after 20 years I've not had credit card info published nor have I caught them trying to charge me for package insurance. Though I might not trust Amazon reviews, I trust the rest of their process far more than I do some random vendor. Which is why, much as I might wish otherwise, I continue to shop at Amazon. [0]https://route.com https://route.com WTF? Track packages and charge money for it? Who funds this shit?

ecf 6y ago
I got an email from route.com the very same day I purchased a package that was handled via shop.app. I can only guess that Shopify sold my email.
- mikestew 6y ago
  Someone at http://os1st.com http://os1st.com did the same thing, which put me on Route's mailing list. The unsubscribe seems to work, but the whole thing just feels like everybody wanted a piece before passing you to the next vendor in the chain. And now if I see Route's name anywhere near a product, I'll walk out the door to the next vendor that DDG suggests. Too bad, too, as the items I ordered seem to be good quality. They shipped quickly. They take Apple Pay. They were oh, so close, and then pissed it all away because someone at Route told them that if you make the print small enough maybe the customer won't notice the $0.98 you sneak in there. (I didn't notice until after the confirmation email.) Now it becomes "not the money, but the principle".

chiefalchemist 6y ago

Fake reviews, that surely Amazom is aware of. Knock-off products, that again are not a secret. Unless there's viable competition, these things are not going to change. Lied to. Stripped of our privacy. Influenced and manipulated by analysis of our own behaviours. And so on. It's a shame it's come to this.

bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago

I received a bulk mailer recently that looked like an "Amazon postcard" that was essentially recruiting for fake reviewers.

mindvirus 6y ago

Fake reviews and fake products. I wanted to buy turkish cotton bath towels the other day, and it's basically impossible to find (really, try it). Nearly every listing has misleading discriptions in spite of 5 star reviews. I feel like unless I know the specific brand or product, I'm using Amazon less and less. I guess there's a niche for competitors - better search and a high quality filter.

kvhdude 6y ago

I have been bitten by positive amazon reviews buying fake stuff (usually phone/laptop batteries). There is something about seeing two products one bustling with reviews and other not, and the mind biased toward the former. These days i seek outside reviews (wirecutter, reddit etc) before trusting amazon.

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husamia 6y ago

I always check out Amazon reviews. Is there a better system?

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