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> This makes me wonder why Amazon, in all their analytical genius, isn't cracking down on this when it's so blatantly obvious. I used to work at Amazon, and ca

> This makes me wonder why Amazon, in all their analytical genius, isn't cracking down on this when it's so blatantly obvious. I used to work at Amazon, and can say that this came up on internal mailing lists all. the. time. It really bothers people, particularly engineers who see that it is eroding customers' trust in Amazon. It's really bad, and people know it. There were significant teams trying to work on it when I left. I think it really is that it's a very difficult problem of cat-and-mouse, without any clear path to victory for Amazon, and the sellers have a huge monetary incentive to evade detection. It's very adversarial, and Amazon has the tough position of _also_ not wanting to discourage legitimate reviews and sellers. And there are so many sellers that solutions need to scale well. So: I think they're trying, but it's a bona fide hard problem.

the-pigeon 5y ago
> I think it really is that it's a very difficult problem of cat-and-mouse, without any clear path to victory for Amazon, and the sellers have a huge monetary incentive to evade detection. Honestly it's really hard to believe you. That may have been what you were told but there's hundreds of well documented cases of sellers manipulating reviews where Amazon does not penalize the seller. The logical explanation is Amazon has decided not to punish sellers who manipulate reviews if Amazon thinks it's a net gain for Amazon.
- spenczar5 5y ago
  > Honestly it's really hard to believe you. Yeah, I get it. For what it's worth - I didn't just get told they care, I saw some of the systems that were built to work on detection. Amazon is not a very short-term oriented company. They're usually pretty good at caring about long-term dominance to get dollars in ten years rather than pennies today. It's clear as day to anyone that fake reviews are hurting their image to customers, eroding trust. That's leading people to buy stuff elsewhere. At the same time, Amazon Marketplace is one of the underappreciated masterstrokes from Amazon over the last 15 years and has driven a huge increase in their retail revenue, which you can see in annual reports. So, certainly they're unwilling to take really dramatic action like dropping 3rd-party sellers entirely. But I still think they realize fixing this is pretty crucial for the long-term health of the retail business. It's hard for me to explain the cases where people find obvious fraud and the seller doesn't get penalized. These would get flagged internally in mailing lists too, and most of the time it was a process error somewhere - a ticket that got dropped when shuffled between the zillion different departments; Amazon's internal bureaucracy is truly insane and huge. I think it's usually incompetence rather than devious cleverness, honestly. There are probably some other cases that are more complicated (sellers reopening new accounts, and then doing social engineering on unwitting poorly-paid support people to regain listings). I think those are kind of rare. --- Anyway, all this to say: I get it, it's hard to believe because it's easy to think of Amazon as all-powerful. But... they're really not. It's a huge, slow, bureaucratic, sludgy company. They have some money (okay, a lot of money) and technical talent but it isn't super clear how you'd apply those to this problem. It's hard.
  - Judgmentality 5y ago
    > I get it, it's hard to believe because it's easy to think of Amazon as all-powerful. This has nothing to do with thinking Amazon is all-powerful, and everything to do with thinking they don't care because it makes them money. Amazon's revenue is clearly skyrocketing and they make a ton of money because of the marketplace. It seems obvious to me they made the decision to put revenue/profits over long-term customer support. You believe that Amazon wants to solve the problem. I believe Amazon doesn't want to solve the problem, because they make more money not solving it now. And talking about the long-term vision of a company whose founding CEO just stepped down is pretty meaningless. I'll be more blunt. Amazon saying they care about fake reviews is like Facebook saying they care about privacy. They make money by lying about it, not fixing it. Facebook clearly hasn't suffered the long term damage of years of horrible PR using their stock price as a metric (you know, the only metric that really matters), and Amazon likely won't either (in fact they've had just as much bad PR and look at them now).
    - Xeronate 5y ago
      If you had ever worked at Amazon you would find it very difficult to believe what you do. Short term solutions aren’t part of the companies culture. Andy Jassy has been around since the beginning and has the same core values as Jeff. Not to mention your argument could equally be made with Jeff as the CEO. It just isn’t how the company works.
      - Judgmentality 5y ago
        I have never worked at Amazon, but I have heard enough horrible things from people that used to work there that make me believe not everybody shares your opinion. In fact, those other people went out of their way to convince me not to take a job there. I am glad you seem to enjoy working at Amazon, or at least have a respect for the culture. I've never been there so I can't comment on it, but I've heard lots of horrible things about the culture there. And lately the complaints have been shifting towards Amazon thinking more and more about short-term profits instead of the big picture. All I can say is not everybody agrees with you.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- stickfigure 5y ago
  > where Amazon does not penalize the seller If fake reviews simply penalize the seller, you've opened up an attack channel where anyone can submit fake reviews and eliminate competitors from the marketplace. It's complicated.
  - _hyn3 5y ago
    But then you're buying your competitor's products.
- marmot777 5y ago
  Yeah, I have to call Bullshit that Amazon couldn’t stop at least organized mass fraud.
IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago
Thats a huge myth. The problem was created by amazon and can be fixed by Amazon. Close the backdoor entrance for chinese sellers, and problem solved. Amazon made it easy for random chinese companies to onboard as amazon sellers because it lowered every single barrier from an import/ banking/permit perspective Amazon can close that door anytime it wants.
- prima_cookie 5y ago
  but hey, I get free giftcards from those guys for copy-pasting the review they email me after buying a product from them...
fastball 5y ago
Doesn't Amazon allow sellers to send freebies to people and still count as a verified purchaser? For me, a good start would be: - Only allow people to rate things that they bought with their own money, as evidenced by a credit card or bank account linked with their name on it. - Only allow people to rate things after they have purchased multiple products, or after you've spent above a certain threshold (e.g. $100). AFAICT, those are not currently requirements on Amazon and would go a long way (in my layman's imagination) towards fixing the problem.
- spenczar5 5y ago
  Unfortunately, I don't think those would help, and they might hurt. Your first suggestion doesn't address paid reviews. Usually the scheme is "buy it, and we will reimburse you with a little extra on top after you leave a review." Your second suggestion would probably bias towards fake reviewers. It's pretty rare for someone to get paid just for one review. One of the hard things to realize is that paid reviews are written by real people. Most of them probably know they are doing something shady, but not all - some think this is a legitimate marketing interaction. Many of them also leave real reviews for stuff - including negative reviews. It's generally not actually bots writing reviews.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - TheCraiggers 5y ago
    Sure, but it would surely reduce the scale of these fake reviews. Right now, companies can buy reviews in batches of thousands; the only actual cost is in somebody/something creating that review and some overhead. If Amazon also required actual purchase of that item, now there's the extra cost of actually buying that item. Even more so when you're talking about things that are expensive. This would drastically lower the amount of spam that could be generated unless the company wants to throw some huge money at it. Returned items would still potentially be an issue, but I'm guessing Amazon already has things in place to kick off users that return too many items.
dillondoyle 5y ago
Can't you just only allow reviews for purchasers with X amount minimum lifetime amazon spend? Just make the cost benefit not worth it to do 500 scam reviews. They already have verified purchase.
- someguyorother 5y ago
  That seems vulnerable to a version of the Scientology bestseller exploit. Let's say the seller is selling widgets. They get their phantom accounts to buy the widgets and thus run up the lifetime spend counter. Then they give the "purchased" widgets to themselves and just keep on selling them. All they have to pay per iteration is the overhead (Amazon's take), assuming they'll manage to clear their stock later. E.g. say a widget costs $110, of which Amazon's take is $10. The seller uses their fake account to buy 10 widgets at a total cost of $1100. The seller both receive the widgets (shipped to the fake account's address) and the $1000 from the "sale". The total cost is thus $100 for making the fake account look like it has spent $1000.
mdavis6890 5y ago
"...Amazon...significant teams trying to work on it...but it's a bona fide hard problem." Random internet individuals: "But they could just..." Like so many things/problems - they all seem easy/obvious until you actually TRY TO DO IT, at which point you realize why all of the other very smart people haven't solved it yet.
- totalZero 5y ago
  This is an oversimplification. Amazon also profits from fake reviews because they encourage consumer confidence, and most of the solutions that "random internet individuals" propose would result in some lost revenue for Amazon. The tricky part is Amazon's counter-aligned business incentive. I put it in the same bucket as fake accounts on Twitter. My guess is that Twitter can correlate many accounts that do nothing but troll and shill for particular factions, and probably has a registry of these accounts, but they also lose MAUs when they nuke accounts. They have an incentive to wait until user growth comes in stronger than expected before they ban lots of active users. For me personally, the biggest weakness of Amazon is commingling of inventory. I never buy things like lubricants and bearings from Amazon, even if the seller is an authorized distributor, because there's no guarantee I will avoid knockoffs from a different seller. I'd rather buy from Walmart or pay more for a specialty retailer to ship me the product, because Amazon inventory is often mixed with cheap knockoff garbage.
- themeiguoren 5y ago
  FakeSpot and ReviewMeta are up on different tabs every time I buy something new on Amazon, and they do a pretty good job of alerting you to scammy reviews without any internal Amazon info. I can’t imagine it’s not something an internal team could make a serious dent in.
TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
> And there are so many sellers that solutions need to scale well. This actually raises a core part of the problem: why does Amazon need literally dozens of sellers for every piece of junk on the site? For any sort of commodity on the site, there can be thousands of results. All the same. All within a few percent of the same price. All completely indistinguishable through any mechanism in the search facility. There have been so many times that I've been looking for something with a specific feature, and it's just page after page after page of stuff I don't want, that I finally give up and just buy the crap they're shoving at me. That brutally-carnal competition for every nickel and dime is a big part of the motivation to flood the platform with fake reviews. What made Amazon great at the start was the fact that they DID NOT carry every conceivable item under the sun, from every single person who wants to spin up a mercantile account and give it a whirl. I've gone back to buying most things from brick-and-mortar stores because THEY are still doing the curation. They're not going to carry 17,000 different USB cables, and the ones they do are going to be high-enough quality that they don't have a high rate of return. I wish Amazon all the worst. To paraphrase Yogi Berra: No one shops at Amazon any more; it's too crowded.
- Traster 5y ago
  I think this actually works in Amazon's favour. It's a completely intractable problem to find the best widget from 17 pages of almost identical widgets with completely unstructured data to sift through. So what do customers do? They buy the Amazon recommended choice. It serves two purposes, it crowds out any competitive market place whilst capturing practically all of the value by determining what gets put in front of the customer first.
  - CodeMage 5y ago
    I'm not sure it really works in Amazons favor. Sure, some customers might be more inclined to buy the Amazon recommended choice. But I wonder how many are frustrated like me. When I buy stuff on Amazon, it's not because I want Amazon to recommend their pick. I want to compare alternatives and make my own choice. That's getting harder and harder, because there's a gazillion identical results with spammy, polluted product names, sold by a bajillion different-yet-indistinguishable sellers. And each one of those results has a nice, fancy-looking template, but when you start reading, it's full of spelling and grammar errors. It's as frustrating as trying to have a "conversation" with a chat bot. What's the solution? Beats me. A naive part of my brain is suggesting some kind of vetting process for sellers, or maybe a trust rating, but I'm sure there are tons of horrible problems with those ideas.
Gibbon1 5y ago
The problem is 20 years ago the people who were reviewing products were the buyers for distributors selling to brick and mortar stores. Amazon business model was being a parasite, benefiting from the system of high quality products and trust built into the system. Without having to pay distributors, buyers, and store rents. And lest we forget sales tax. But that old system is now dead and gone. So there are no trustworthy good faith reviewers.
BeetleB 5y ago
> and the sellers have a huge monetary incentive to evade detection. Let's not forget that it is Amazon that is providing this huge monetary incentive. As a customer, I really wouldn't care if Amazon dropped all 3rd party sellers. Most users won't. Amazon, of course, will.
dangrossman 5y ago
I don't think they're trying very hard. I recently bought a dog collar on Amazon. A week or so later, I got a large envelope in the mail, with "Amazon Early Reviewer Program, 2646 Rainer Ave S St 1020, Seattle, WA 98144" as the return address. Inside was a piece of paper with a code to "activate my $20 gift card" by leaving a 5-star review of the dog collar, photographing the review, and emailing it to a very non-Amazon email. It also instructed me that "for security reasons", I should not include or attach this letter to my review, nor leave a negative review without emailing them first. All this still purports to be from Amazon proper with the Amazon logo on the paper as well. This is clearly a scam from the seller to buy 5-star reviews, and their product has plenty of what look to be paid reviews to me as a result. I tried very hard to find any place to report this scheme, which goes past review buying to include impersonating Amazon itself, and mail fraud. I emailed several Amazon contacts, used contact forms on their site, and contact forms I could find on the seller side as well. I attached photos of the letter. The only response I got was a form letter telling me that if I saw a fake review, I should click the report button under that review. This is just one example. Almost every product I've bought in the past year that came from an individual seller included some kind of bribe for 5-star reviews, from gift cards to whole "free products every month" programs.
- hughrr 5y ago
  The other way round is the time I left a negative review for a phone case. I was emailed every day automatically by the seller directly to my email from theirs to retract my negative review. I asked them to stop. They didn’t. I reported this to Microsoft as it was an outlook.com source address. Microsoft did nothing. My junk mail folder was starting to fill. After about two months of this i got passive aggressive and set up a script to email them a 20 meg gif with “fuck you” tiled on it hourly to their mailbox. After about a day they got the point and I stopped receiving emails. I think amazon have stopped sellers getting hold of buyers emails directly now though.
  - tailspin2019 5y ago
    Brilliant.
  - 5y ago
joshhart 5y ago
Why not have certified users who have a clear history of buying things on the platform that can provide "trusted" reviews? Certainly there might still be a problem with sellers spamming people to ask for reviews in money but I think it would up the bar substantially. You can then improve this by only allowing reviews from people with known purchases. You can roll this out with two 5-star rating systems and replace the old one once the new one has enough ratings.
marmot777 5y ago
Would restricting reviews to only confirmed purchasers help?
dataflow 5y ago
> I think it really is that it's a very difficult problem of cat-and-mouse, without any clear path to victory for Amazon Uhm, how about not commingling inventory and not letting people swap out entire products underneath the same ratings/reviews?

the-pigeon 5y ago

> I think it really is that it's a very difficult problem of cat-and-mouse, without any clear path to victory for Amazon, and the sellers have a huge monetary incentive to evade detection. Honestly it's really hard to believe you. That may have been what you were told but there's hundreds of well documented cases of sellers manipulating reviews where Amazon does not penalize the seller. The logical explanation is Amazon has decided not to punish sellers who manipulate reviews if Amazon thinks it's a net gain for Amazon.

spenczar5 5y ago
> Honestly it's really hard to believe you. Yeah, I get it. For what it's worth - I didn't just get told they care, I saw some of the systems that were built to work on detection. Amazon is not a very short-term oriented company. They're usually pretty good at caring about long-term dominance to get dollars in ten years rather than pennies today. It's clear as day to anyone that fake reviews are hurting their image to customers, eroding trust. That's leading people to buy stuff elsewhere. At the same time, Amazon Marketplace is one of the underappreciated masterstrokes from Amazon over the last 15 years and has driven a huge increase in their retail revenue, which you can see in annual reports. So, certainly they're unwilling to take really dramatic action like dropping 3rd-party sellers entirely. But I still think they realize fixing this is pretty crucial for the long-term health of the retail business. It's hard for me to explain the cases where people find obvious fraud and the seller doesn't get penalized. These would get flagged internally in mailing lists too, and most of the time it was a process error somewhere - a ticket that got dropped when shuffled between the zillion different departments; Amazon's internal bureaucracy is truly insane and huge. I think it's usually incompetence rather than devious cleverness, honestly. There are probably some other cases that are more complicated (sellers reopening new accounts, and then doing social engineering on unwitting poorly-paid support people to regain listings). I think those are kind of rare. --- Anyway, all this to say: I get it, it's hard to believe because it's easy to think of Amazon as all-powerful. But... they're really not. It's a huge, slow, bureaucratic, sludgy company. They have some money (okay, a lot of money) and technical talent but it isn't super clear how you'd apply those to this problem. It's hard.
- Judgmentality 5y ago
  > I get it, it's hard to believe because it's easy to think of Amazon as all-powerful. This has nothing to do with thinking Amazon is all-powerful, and everything to do with thinking they don't care because it makes them money. Amazon's revenue is clearly skyrocketing and they make a ton of money because of the marketplace. It seems obvious to me they made the decision to put revenue/profits over long-term customer support. You believe that Amazon wants to solve the problem. I believe Amazon doesn't want to solve the problem, because they make more money not solving it now. And talking about the long-term vision of a company whose founding CEO just stepped down is pretty meaningless. I'll be more blunt. Amazon saying they care about fake reviews is like Facebook saying they care about privacy. They make money by lying about it, not fixing it. Facebook clearly hasn't suffered the long term damage of years of horrible PR using their stock price as a metric (you know, the only metric that really matters), and Amazon likely won't either (in fact they've had just as much bad PR and look at them now).
  - Xeronate 5y ago
    If you had ever worked at Amazon you would find it very difficult to believe what you do. Short term solutions aren’t part of the companies culture. Andy Jassy has been around since the beginning and has the same core values as Jeff. Not to mention your argument could equally be made with Jeff as the CEO. It just isn’t how the company works.
    - Judgmentality 5y ago
      I have never worked at Amazon, but I have heard enough horrible things from people that used to work there that make me believe not everybody shares your opinion. In fact, those other people went out of their way to convince me not to take a job there. I am glad you seem to enjoy working at Amazon, or at least have a respect for the culture. I've never been there so I can't comment on it, but I've heard lots of horrible things about the culture there. And lately the complaints have been shifting towards Amazon thinking more and more about short-term profits instead of the big picture. All I can say is not everybody agrees with you.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
stickfigure 5y ago
> where Amazon does not penalize the seller If fake reviews simply penalize the seller, you've opened up an attack channel where anyone can submit fake reviews and eliminate competitors from the marketplace. It's complicated.
- _hyn3 5y ago
  But then you're buying your competitor's products.
marmot777 5y ago
Yeah, I have to call Bullshit that Amazon couldn’t stop at least organized mass fraud.

IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago

Thats a huge myth. The problem was created by amazon and can be fixed by Amazon. Close the backdoor entrance for chinese sellers, and problem solved. Amazon made it easy for random chinese companies to onboard as amazon sellers because it lowered every single barrier from an import/ banking/permit perspective Amazon can close that door anytime it wants.

prima_cookie 5y ago
but hey, I get free giftcards from those guys for copy-pasting the review they email me after buying a product from them...

fastball 5y ago

Doesn't Amazon allow sellers to send freebies to people and still count as a verified purchaser? For me, a good start would be: - Only allow people to rate things that they bought with their own money, as evidenced by a credit card or bank account linked with their name on it. - Only allow people to rate things after they have purchased multiple products, or after you've spent above a certain threshold (e.g. $100). AFAICT, those are not currently requirements on Amazon and would go a long way (in my layman's imagination) towards fixing the problem.

spenczar5 5y ago
Unfortunately, I don't think those would help, and they might hurt. Your first suggestion doesn't address paid reviews. Usually the scheme is "buy it, and we will reimburse you with a little extra on top after you leave a review." Your second suggestion would probably bias towards fake reviewers. It's pretty rare for someone to get paid just for one review. One of the hard things to realize is that paid reviews are written by real people. Most of them probably know they are doing something shady, but not all - some think this is a legitimate marketing interaction. Many of them also leave real reviews for stuff - including negative reviews. It's generally not actually bots writing reviews.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- TheCraiggers 5y ago
  Sure, but it would surely reduce the scale of these fake reviews. Right now, companies can buy reviews in batches of thousands; the only actual cost is in somebody/something creating that review and some overhead. If Amazon also required actual purchase of that item, now there's the extra cost of actually buying that item. Even more so when you're talking about things that are expensive. This would drastically lower the amount of spam that could be generated unless the company wants to throw some huge money at it. Returned items would still potentially be an issue, but I'm guessing Amazon already has things in place to kick off users that return too many items.

dillondoyle 5y ago

Can't you just only allow reviews for purchasers with X amount minimum lifetime amazon spend? Just make the cost benefit not worth it to do 500 scam reviews. They already have verified purchase.

someguyorother 5y ago
That seems vulnerable to a version of the Scientology bestseller exploit. Let's say the seller is selling widgets. They get their phantom accounts to buy the widgets and thus run up the lifetime spend counter. Then they give the "purchased" widgets to themselves and just keep on selling them. All they have to pay per iteration is the overhead (Amazon's take), assuming they'll manage to clear their stock later. E.g. say a widget costs $110, of which Amazon's take is $10. The seller uses their fake account to buy 10 widgets at a total cost of $1100. The seller both receive the widgets (shipped to the fake account's address) and the $1000 from the "sale". The total cost is thus $100 for making the fake account look like it has spent $1000.

mdavis6890 5y ago

"...Amazon...significant teams trying to work on it...but it's a bona fide hard problem." Random internet individuals: "But they could just..." Like so many things/problems - they all seem easy/obvious until you actually TRY TO DO IT, at which point you realize why all of the other very smart people haven't solved it yet.

totalZero 5y ago
This is an oversimplification. Amazon also profits from fake reviews because they encourage consumer confidence, and most of the solutions that "random internet individuals" propose would result in some lost revenue for Amazon. The tricky part is Amazon's counter-aligned business incentive. I put it in the same bucket as fake accounts on Twitter. My guess is that Twitter can correlate many accounts that do nothing but troll and shill for particular factions, and probably has a registry of these accounts, but they also lose MAUs when they nuke accounts. They have an incentive to wait until user growth comes in stronger than expected before they ban lots of active users. For me personally, the biggest weakness of Amazon is commingling of inventory. I never buy things like lubricants and bearings from Amazon, even if the seller is an authorized distributor, because there's no guarantee I will avoid knockoffs from a different seller. I'd rather buy from Walmart or pay more for a specialty retailer to ship me the product, because Amazon inventory is often mixed with cheap knockoff garbage.
themeiguoren 5y ago
FakeSpot and ReviewMeta are up on different tabs every time I buy something new on Amazon, and they do a pretty good job of alerting you to scammy reviews without any internal Amazon info. I can’t imagine it’s not something an internal team could make a serious dent in.

TheRealDunkirk 5y ago

> And there are so many sellers that solutions need to scale well. This actually raises a core part of the problem: why does Amazon need literally dozens of sellers for every piece of junk on the site? For any sort of commodity on the site, there can be thousands of results. All the same. All within a few percent of the same price. All completely indistinguishable through any mechanism in the search facility. There have been so many times that I've been looking for something with a specific feature, and it's just page after page after page of stuff I don't want, that I finally give up and just buy the crap they're shoving at me. That brutally-carnal competition for every nickel and dime is a big part of the motivation to flood the platform with fake reviews. What made Amazon great at the start was the fact that they DID NOT carry every conceivable item under the sun, from every single person who wants to spin up a mercantile account and give it a whirl. I've gone back to buying most things from brick-and-mortar stores because THEY are still doing the curation. They're not going to carry 17,000 different USB cables, and the ones they do are going to be high-enough quality that they don't have a high rate of return. I wish Amazon all the worst. To paraphrase Yogi Berra: No one shops at Amazon any more; it's too crowded.

Traster 5y ago
I think this actually works in Amazon's favour. It's a completely intractable problem to find the best widget from 17 pages of almost identical widgets with completely unstructured data to sift through. So what do customers do? They buy the Amazon recommended choice. It serves two purposes, it crowds out any competitive market place whilst capturing practically all of the value by determining what gets put in front of the customer first.
- CodeMage 5y ago
  I'm not sure it really works in Amazons favor. Sure, some customers might be more inclined to buy the Amazon recommended choice. But I wonder how many are frustrated like me. When I buy stuff on Amazon, it's not because I want Amazon to recommend their pick. I want to compare alternatives and make my own choice. That's getting harder and harder, because there's a gazillion identical results with spammy, polluted product names, sold by a bajillion different-yet-indistinguishable sellers. And each one of those results has a nice, fancy-looking template, but when you start reading, it's full of spelling and grammar errors. It's as frustrating as trying to have a "conversation" with a chat bot. What's the solution? Beats me. A naive part of my brain is suggesting some kind of vetting process for sellers, or maybe a trust rating, but I'm sure there are tons of horrible problems with those ideas.

Gibbon1 5y ago

The problem is 20 years ago the people who were reviewing products were the buyers for distributors selling to brick and mortar stores. Amazon business model was being a parasite, benefiting from the system of high quality products and trust built into the system. Without having to pay distributors, buyers, and store rents. And lest we forget sales tax. But that old system is now dead and gone. So there are no trustworthy good faith reviewers.

BeetleB 5y ago

> and the sellers have a huge monetary incentive to evade detection. Let's not forget that it is Amazon that is providing this huge monetary incentive. As a customer, I really wouldn't care if Amazon dropped all 3rd party sellers. Most users won't. Amazon, of course, will.

dangrossman 5y ago

I don't think they're trying very hard. I recently bought a dog collar on Amazon. A week or so later, I got a large envelope in the mail, with "Amazon Early Reviewer Program, 2646 Rainer Ave S St 1020, Seattle, WA 98144" as the return address. Inside was a piece of paper with a code to "activate my $20 gift card" by leaving a 5-star review of the dog collar, photographing the review, and emailing it to a very non-Amazon email. It also instructed me that "for security reasons", I should not include or attach this letter to my review, nor leave a negative review without emailing them first. All this still purports to be from Amazon proper with the Amazon logo on the paper as well. This is clearly a scam from the seller to buy 5-star reviews, and their product has plenty of what look to be paid reviews to me as a result. I tried very hard to find any place to report this scheme, which goes past review buying to include impersonating Amazon itself, and mail fraud. I emailed several Amazon contacts, used contact forms on their site, and contact forms I could find on the seller side as well. I attached photos of the letter. The only response I got was a form letter telling me that if I saw a fake review, I should click the report button under that review. This is just one example. Almost every product I've bought in the past year that came from an individual seller included some kind of bribe for 5-star reviews, from gift cards to whole "free products every month" programs.

hughrr 5y ago
The other way round is the time I left a negative review for a phone case. I was emailed every day automatically by the seller directly to my email from theirs to retract my negative review. I asked them to stop. They didn’t. I reported this to Microsoft as it was an outlook.com source address. Microsoft did nothing. My junk mail folder was starting to fill. After about two months of this i got passive aggressive and set up a script to email them a 20 meg gif with “fuck you” tiled on it hourly to their mailbox. After about a day they got the point and I stopped receiving emails. I think amazon have stopped sellers getting hold of buyers emails directly now though.
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  Brilliant.
- 5y ago

joshhart 5y ago

Why not have certified users who have a clear history of buying things on the platform that can provide "trusted" reviews? Certainly there might still be a problem with sellers spamming people to ask for reviews in money but I think it would up the bar substantially. You can then improve this by only allowing reviews from people with known purchases. You can roll this out with two 5-star rating systems and replace the old one once the new one has enough ratings.

marmot777 5y ago

Would restricting reviews to only confirmed purchasers help?

dataflow 5y ago

> I think it really is that it's a very difficult problem of cat-and-mouse, without any clear path to victory for Amazon Uhm, how about not commingling inventory and not letting people swap out entire products underneath the same ratings/reviews?