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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

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.
  - asxd 6y ago
    I’d like to believe that they truly see the long term financial value of building more customer trust, but I can see this being a bit of a back burner project due to short term losses
    - nomeddie 6y ago
      They build the customer trust by taking financial hits - if you’ve been a long time prime customer they are good at refunding the purchase when you aren’t happy. It doesn’t protect others from ordering the same bad widget but you are at least satisfied not to make it a bigger issue.
  - syrgian 6y ago
    That's not how Amazon works, they take a lot of 'short term losses in exchange for trust' decisions, like warning you if a product has increased in price since you added it to the wish list, possibly triggering additional research of competitors that might have it cheaper.
    - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      > they take a lot of 'short term losses in exchange for trust' decisions I'm sorry, but I don't believe your statement. They're not doing enough about fake reviews, and definitely aren't doing enough about poor quality products, fake products, and poor products squatting over good / brand products. Their marketplace is not curated enough, and buying a product is a gamble. There are a few posts about that; one I remember is that someone bought a book off Amazon, but got a fake / copy / low quality reproduction instead.
- m463 6y ago
  Why don't they just put a "this review looks fake" button next to the helpful button? Wire it into a neural net, don't make it a way to snipe competitors products. ok, ok... probably not a realistic solution. I've left a few reviews recently and one good thing I have noticed is they seem to be adding some checks (I think they're intentional). Like you review a product and it says "overall rating 1-5" but below it will have subcategories like maybe "true to size 1-5" "value 1-5" or similar (can't recall the real ones). Every once in a while they throw in a curveball like "warmth 1-5" which would make sense for a sweater but is nonsense for something like a plate or ssd. I just press [X] and figure it's a check for a fake reviewer. (either that or a fake reviewer added a nonsense category)
  - gwd 6y ago
    Or how about this: 1. Add a way to report solicitations for fake reviews. Ban companies that pay for fake reviews for a year and all their reviews above 3 stars are removed. Customers who report requests for fake reviews are given a small bonus; maybe a $5 credit or something. 2. Amazon themselves pretend to be sellers and solicit fake reviews from customers. If a customer reports the request for a fake review, they're given the same bonus but told that they were part of a sting operation. If the customer gives the fake review, they're banned from Amazon for a year, and all their reviews are removed. Obviously some details need to be worked out: need to make sure the system can't be abused, need to make sure the fake review solicitation doesn't make real sellers look bad. But if done properly, ti should make the whole fake-review solicitation completely impractical.
    - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      The one with the customers won't work because creating a new account is trivial. Actually, I think so is creating a new company to sell stuff on Amazon. Mind you, if your company is kicked off Marketplace, it has to rebuild its reputation and inventory and stuff. But yeah, they should definitely mark companies that pay for reviews as dodgy. I don't think they would ban them - because ANYONE selling stuff on Amazon is earning them money - but they could do more. I don't think the problem hurts Amazon enough though. It's not like people stop using Amazon because of bad reviews. And I'm sure Amazon is undercutting the market so that any competitor with good reviews is unable to compete. Price beats everything, when it comes down to it.
- baxtr 6y ago
  I can actually confirm, that amazon invest heavily in this. However, they struggle with growing their team and their resources as fast as their (seller) business grows.
  - capableweb 6y ago
    Why actually and not just confirm? Also, investing in something internally means absolutely zero as none of those investments seems to have paid off so far, since there has been absolutely nothing deployed or done by Amazon in public to fight the review spam.
  - matkoniecz 6y ago
    "However, they struggle with growing their team" it means "Amazon considers that unimportant and refuses to pay competitive wages" Amazon had 21$ billion income in 2020, it is not a tiny company struggling for resources. ( per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) )
  - fredophile 6y ago
    I've seen other people say the same thing about fraudulent products but amazon hasn't taken the most obvious step, stopping commingling products, there. This makes me believe that they aren't serious about that issue and I don't see why I should believe they're serious about this one either.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- matkoniecz 6y ago
  It is clearly insufficient and I do not care why Amazon failed. Amazon had 21$ billion income ( per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) ). 50 people is nothing for them, and it is basically ignoring problem. Also, can you provide evidence that they have any people working on the problem?
yrgulation 6y ago
Tangentially, my Amazon account had been compromised. The person hacking my account bought amazon vouchers (fortunately the attached debit card was empty as i always keep cards i use online empty until i actually buy stuff). Four days in a row i was told by different customer support reps that the voucher will be cancelled in a few minutes (oddly enough i couldnt cancel it myself), and none actually did it all the while amazon tried charging my card and asking to update payment details. Since then, around 2 months ago, i stopped buying on amazon all together. Oddly enough i usually get a notification when i login from a new device, but this time i didnt even tho the voucher was bought by someone in Panama (not sure if they used a real name or not but they sure weren't logging in from my device).
_pmf_ 6y ago
> This review was not accepted by Amazon, saying that seller feedback should be given on the seller page. Gold.
lordnacho 6y ago
As an economics grad, I always wondered why online reviews existed at all. There's no skin in the game for anyone. If your neighbor recommends you a crap lawnmower, he'll have to explain to you why he thought it was good. You can ask him questions and compare his motivations to yours. He'll also end up living next to a badly mowed lawn if he doesn't put some work into it. The seller has every reason to pay people to write good reviews. He doesn't even need real people, it's the internet and you can invent people, complete with their own unique photos and profiles. Basically, honesty is expensive and cheating is cheap. Why would we trust it? My personal experience with Amazon is that it's the shop to go to for stuff that is ok if it is broken. If I buy a cable for £10, and there's a 10% chance it's faulty, it's not a huge problem for me. The other use case is where the guarantee comes from the brand. I'm not sure why but I tend to think if I buy an iPhone on Amazon, it will be the genuine thing from Apple, and I have history with Apple apart from Amazon reviews.
- gwd 6y ago
  > My personal experience with Amazon is that it's the shop to go to for stuff that is ok if it is broken. If I buy a cable for £10, and there's a 10% chance it's faulty, it's not a huge problem for me. I'm rather surprised at that, from someone who claims to be an economic grad. First of all, you must realize that that 10% isn't stable: the "Market for Lemons" effect will guarantee that if nothing is done to stop it, that 10% will become 90%. Secondly, you're not factoring in either your time or the opportunity cost of having to buy your second cable. If you order your cable and it arrives the next day but broken, you spend at least an hour figuring out that it's broken, and then have to order another one, and then wait at least another day for it to come.
  - lordnacho 6y ago
    But a cable is such a simple item to find out if it's broken, it takes 5 seconds, plus I can just buy two and be 99% sure I have one that works. Akerlöf doesn't seem to apply here, there's no hidden information that comes out later. With a car there's all sorts of dimensions to it that might annoy you. Perhaps the idea is that all cables will go to crap eventually, but my detection cost is also fairly low on that. Additionally, and this is probably not a great dynamic, I can go to the website of a box-store, which will carry some of the same brands, presumeably vetted more than the junk shop.
bsd44 6y ago
I just thought of something. One way customers can battle fake reviews is by always attaching a picture of the product with the review. So when you see 5* reviews for a shower enclosure and you scroll down through the comment section and see pictures of tennis balls you know something isn't right and you likely won't buy the product since the comments appear to be for something else.
- HorkHunter 6y ago
  There are some FB groups where users can make money by receiving some products, write a review then send it back. then they get something in return. its not super hidden as well
- cfn 6y ago
  Funny enough, I saw two different 5 star reviews of some boots with the same amateur type photo.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
I've stopped purchasing items sold by 3rd party sellers on Amazon and it becomes a much better site. Unfortunately it seems you can no longer filter search results by "Sold and Shipped by Amazon", you have to filter by "Available from Amazon Prime/free shipping" and then filter manually which is a pain.
- corobo 6y ago
  Yeah I wish they'd just let me perma-select prime. Not even risking getting burned. I didn't know they used to have that filter though. That would be super useful to make a comeback
- nomeddie 6y ago
  The 3rd party market place on Amazon has become Aliexpress with higher markups. Unless I have an immediate need and I can not find the item locally, I just order it from Ali.
- depingus 6y ago
  Unfortunately, this is not enough anymore. Amazon commingles their legit inventory with 3rd party inventory that drop ships from their warehouses. They don't differentiate between the two inventories, so you can still end up with a counterfeit product; even when "Sold and Shipped by Amazon". I've actually had better luck with 3rd Party sellers that ship on their own (not from an Amazon Warehouse). If they send you a counterfeit, their store reputation is going to take a hit. Though at this point, eBay might be a better option. Lately, I've started buying direct from the manufacturer when possible, or shipped from B&M store. Their prices are the same, or better.
newswasboring 6y ago
> 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. People who are familiar with phone scam baiting will recognize this as a standard scam tactics. First go for the technical play and then emotional one. They can't scream on text so they don't jump to the angry one.
- agamentium 6y ago
  Was gonna say, "their job depends on it" sounds ike something straight out of a Kitboga scam baiting video.
- mtberatwork 6y ago
  This must be some kind of common sales technique then perhaps because I recently experienced this same playbook at a car dealership with the sales manager. After pulling out technical arguments as to why they couldn't do the price we agreed upon over email anymore, they went the emotional route and bluntly told me that I was hurting the well-being and livelihood of the sales person I was dealing with by not accepting their higher offer. I came in ready to purchase, but at that point, I exited as quickly as possible. This was supposedly a reputable dealership for a major car brand.
  - sjg007 6y ago
    The counter is that your hurting my family etc... but I agree best to leave.
ppf 6y ago
You have very carefully tested the hypothesis that "neither Amazon nor its sellers care about good customer service or quality products". The question is - what are you going to do with that information?
tstrimple 6y ago
Five star garbage sells better than two star garbage. There is absolutely zero incentive for Amazon to fix this.
e40 6y ago
I left a bad review for a returned Taotronics space heater and I got an email from a random gmail account with the offer of $65 ($50 and $15) worth of Amazon gift cards. I contacted Amazon and reported them. The agent claimed they would do something, but obviously I have no idea if they would. The space heater in question had a very high rating. Now I know why.
dawnerd 6y ago
I’ve reported so many of these scams and nothing comes from it. If you really want to go deep into the dark side of amazon search for 2tb usb drives.
ffhhj 6y ago
If someone wants to check how serious this problem can get search Amazon for "laser protection googles", check the prices of cheap googles and compare to their very high ratings. There is no way those cheap pieces of plastic can protect eyes from lasers, and there are tests in youtube to probe it. Amazon is allowing a horrible health problem for their customers, some people will have severe eye issues or can get blind for life.
young_unixer 6y ago
- If something benefits Amazon, it's legitimate. - If somethings doesn't benefit Amazon, it's abuse. Their double standards are disgusting.

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.
- asxd 6y ago
  I’d like to believe that they truly see the long term financial value of building more customer trust, but I can see this being a bit of a back burner project due to short term losses
  - nomeddie 6y ago
    They build the customer trust by taking financial hits - if you’ve been a long time prime customer they are good at refunding the purchase when you aren’t happy. It doesn’t protect others from ordering the same bad widget but you are at least satisfied not to make it a bigger issue.
- syrgian 6y ago
  That's not how Amazon works, they take a lot of 'short term losses in exchange for trust' decisions, like warning you if a product has increased in price since you added it to the wish list, possibly triggering additional research of competitors that might have it cheaper.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    > they take a lot of 'short term losses in exchange for trust' decisions I'm sorry, but I don't believe your statement. They're not doing enough about fake reviews, and definitely aren't doing enough about poor quality products, fake products, and poor products squatting over good / brand products. Their marketplace is not curated enough, and buying a product is a gamble. There are a few posts about that; one I remember is that someone bought a book off Amazon, but got a fake / copy / low quality reproduction instead.
m463 6y ago
Why don't they just put a "this review looks fake" button next to the helpful button? Wire it into a neural net, don't make it a way to snipe competitors products. ok, ok... probably not a realistic solution. I've left a few reviews recently and one good thing I have noticed is they seem to be adding some checks (I think they're intentional). Like you review a product and it says "overall rating 1-5" but below it will have subcategories like maybe "true to size 1-5" "value 1-5" or similar (can't recall the real ones). Every once in a while they throw in a curveball like "warmth 1-5" which would make sense for a sweater but is nonsense for something like a plate or ssd. I just press [X] and figure it's a check for a fake reviewer. (either that or a fake reviewer added a nonsense category)
- gwd 6y ago
  Or how about this: 1. Add a way to report solicitations for fake reviews. Ban companies that pay for fake reviews for a year and all their reviews above 3 stars are removed. Customers who report requests for fake reviews are given a small bonus; maybe a $5 credit or something. 2. Amazon themselves pretend to be sellers and solicit fake reviews from customers. If a customer reports the request for a fake review, they're given the same bonus but told that they were part of a sting operation. If the customer gives the fake review, they're banned from Amazon for a year, and all their reviews are removed. Obviously some details need to be worked out: need to make sure the system can't be abused, need to make sure the fake review solicitation doesn't make real sellers look bad. But if done properly, ti should make the whole fake-review solicitation completely impractical.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    The one with the customers won't work because creating a new account is trivial. Actually, I think so is creating a new company to sell stuff on Amazon. Mind you, if your company is kicked off Marketplace, it has to rebuild its reputation and inventory and stuff. But yeah, they should definitely mark companies that pay for reviews as dodgy. I don't think they would ban them - because ANYONE selling stuff on Amazon is earning them money - but they could do more. I don't think the problem hurts Amazon enough though. It's not like people stop using Amazon because of bad reviews. And I'm sure Amazon is undercutting the market so that any competitor with good reviews is unable to compete. Price beats everything, when it comes down to it.
baxtr 6y ago
I can actually confirm, that amazon invest heavily in this. However, they struggle with growing their team and their resources as fast as their (seller) business grows.
- capableweb 6y ago
  Why actually and not just confirm? Also, investing in something internally means absolutely zero as none of those investments seems to have paid off so far, since there has been absolutely nothing deployed or done by Amazon in public to fight the review spam.
- matkoniecz 6y ago
  "However, they struggle with growing their team" it means "Amazon considers that unimportant and refuses to pay competitive wages" Amazon had 21$ billion income in 2020, it is not a tiny company struggling for resources. ( per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) )
- fredophile 6y ago
  I've seen other people say the same thing about fraudulent products but amazon hasn't taken the most obvious step, stopping commingling products, there. This makes me believe that they aren't serious about that issue and I don't see why I should believe they're serious about this one either.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
matkoniecz 6y ago
It is clearly insufficient and I do not care why Amazon failed. Amazon had 21$ billion income ( per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) ). 50 people is nothing for them, and it is basically ignoring problem. Also, can you provide evidence that they have any people working on the problem?

yrgulation 6y ago

Tangentially, my Amazon account had been compromised. The person hacking my account bought amazon vouchers (fortunately the attached debit card was empty as i always keep cards i use online empty until i actually buy stuff). Four days in a row i was told by different customer support reps that the voucher will be cancelled in a few minutes (oddly enough i couldnt cancel it myself), and none actually did it all the while amazon tried charging my card and asking to update payment details. Since then, around 2 months ago, i stopped buying on amazon all together. Oddly enough i usually get a notification when i login from a new device, but this time i didnt even tho the voucher was bought by someone in Panama (not sure if they used a real name or not but they sure weren't logging in from my device).

_pmf_ 6y ago

> This review was not accepted by Amazon, saying that seller feedback should be given on the seller page. Gold.

lordnacho 6y ago

As an economics grad, I always wondered why online reviews existed at all. There's no skin in the game for anyone. If your neighbor recommends you a crap lawnmower, he'll have to explain to you why he thought it was good. You can ask him questions and compare his motivations to yours. He'll also end up living next to a badly mowed lawn if he doesn't put some work into it. The seller has every reason to pay people to write good reviews. He doesn't even need real people, it's the internet and you can invent people, complete with their own unique photos and profiles. Basically, honesty is expensive and cheating is cheap. Why would we trust it? My personal experience with Amazon is that it's the shop to go to for stuff that is ok if it is broken. If I buy a cable for £10, and there's a 10% chance it's faulty, it's not a huge problem for me. The other use case is where the guarantee comes from the brand. I'm not sure why but I tend to think if I buy an iPhone on Amazon, it will be the genuine thing from Apple, and I have history with Apple apart from Amazon reviews.

gwd 6y ago
> My personal experience with Amazon is that it's the shop to go to for stuff that is ok if it is broken. If I buy a cable for £10, and there's a 10% chance it's faulty, it's not a huge problem for me. I'm rather surprised at that, from someone who claims to be an economic grad. First of all, you must realize that that 10% isn't stable: the "Market for Lemons" effect will guarantee that if nothing is done to stop it, that 10% will become 90%. Secondly, you're not factoring in either your time or the opportunity cost of having to buy your second cable. If you order your cable and it arrives the next day but broken, you spend at least an hour figuring out that it's broken, and then have to order another one, and then wait at least another day for it to come.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  But a cable is such a simple item to find out if it's broken, it takes 5 seconds, plus I can just buy two and be 99% sure I have one that works. Akerlöf doesn't seem to apply here, there's no hidden information that comes out later. With a car there's all sorts of dimensions to it that might annoy you. Perhaps the idea is that all cables will go to crap eventually, but my detection cost is also fairly low on that. Additionally, and this is probably not a great dynamic, I can go to the website of a box-store, which will carry some of the same brands, presumeably vetted more than the junk shop.

bsd44 6y ago

I just thought of something. One way customers can battle fake reviews is by always attaching a picture of the product with the review. So when you see 5* reviews for a shower enclosure and you scroll down through the comment section and see pictures of tennis balls you know something isn't right and you likely won't buy the product since the comments appear to be for something else.

HorkHunter 6y ago
There are some FB groups where users can make money by receiving some products, write a review then send it back. then they get something in return. its not super hidden as well
cfn 6y ago
Funny enough, I saw two different 5 star reviews of some boots with the same amateur type photo.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

I've stopped purchasing items sold by 3rd party sellers on Amazon and it becomes a much better site. Unfortunately it seems you can no longer filter search results by "Sold and Shipped by Amazon", you have to filter by "Available from Amazon Prime/free shipping" and then filter manually which is a pain.

corobo 6y ago
Yeah I wish they'd just let me perma-select prime. Not even risking getting burned. I didn't know they used to have that filter though. That would be super useful to make a comeback
nomeddie 6y ago
The 3rd party market place on Amazon has become Aliexpress with higher markups. Unless I have an immediate need and I can not find the item locally, I just order it from Ali.
depingus 6y ago
Unfortunately, this is not enough anymore. Amazon commingles their legit inventory with 3rd party inventory that drop ships from their warehouses. They don't differentiate between the two inventories, so you can still end up with a counterfeit product; even when "Sold and Shipped by Amazon". I've actually had better luck with 3rd Party sellers that ship on their own (not from an Amazon Warehouse). If they send you a counterfeit, their store reputation is going to take a hit. Though at this point, eBay might be a better option. Lately, I've started buying direct from the manufacturer when possible, or shipped from B&M store. Their prices are the same, or better.

newswasboring 6y ago

> 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. People who are familiar with phone scam baiting will recognize this as a standard scam tactics. First go for the technical play and then emotional one. They can't scream on text so they don't jump to the angry one.

agamentium 6y ago
Was gonna say, "their job depends on it" sounds ike something straight out of a Kitboga scam baiting video.
mtberatwork 6y ago
This must be some kind of common sales technique then perhaps because I recently experienced this same playbook at a car dealership with the sales manager. After pulling out technical arguments as to why they couldn't do the price we agreed upon over email anymore, they went the emotional route and bluntly told me that I was hurting the well-being and livelihood of the sales person I was dealing with by not accepting their higher offer. I came in ready to purchase, but at that point, I exited as quickly as possible. This was supposedly a reputable dealership for a major car brand.
- sjg007 6y ago
  The counter is that your hurting my family etc... but I agree best to leave.

ppf 6y ago

You have very carefully tested the hypothesis that "neither Amazon nor its sellers care about good customer service or quality products". The question is - what are you going to do with that information?

tstrimple 6y ago

Five star garbage sells better than two star garbage. There is absolutely zero incentive for Amazon to fix this.

e40 6y ago

I left a bad review for a returned Taotronics space heater and I got an email from a random gmail account with the offer of $65 ($50 and $15) worth of Amazon gift cards. I contacted Amazon and reported them. The agent claimed they would do something, but obviously I have no idea if they would. The space heater in question had a very high rating. Now I know why.

dawnerd 6y ago

I’ve reported so many of these scams and nothing comes from it. If you really want to go deep into the dark side of amazon search for 2tb usb drives.

ffhhj 6y ago

If someone wants to check how serious this problem can get search Amazon for "laser protection googles", check the prices of cheap googles and compare to their very high ratings. There is no way those cheap pieces of plastic can protect eyes from lasers, and there are tests in youtube to probe it. Amazon is allowing a horrible health problem for their customers, some people will have severe eye issues or can get blind for life.

young_unixer 6y ago

- If something benefits Amazon, it's legitimate. - If somethings doesn't benefit Amazon, it's abuse. Their double standards are disgusting.