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Aukey kicked off Amazon following fake reviews allegations

353 points by wetpaws 5y ago

r_singh 5y ago
Source?
- waheoo 5y ago
  https://www.androidauthority.com/amazon-removes-tech-accessory-makers-over-fake-reviews-1224557/ https://www.androidauthority.com/amazon-removes-tech-accesso...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - herpderperator 5y ago
    Maybe the HN submission's URL should be updated to point to this article.
    - Aissen 5y ago
      This is two weeks old, but a few other publications covered this: https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/amazon-removing-popular-accessory-companies-fake-product-reviews/?tag=reviewgeek-20 https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/amazon-removing-popular... https://www.reviewgeek.com/81928/aukey-is-in-trouble-with-amazon-has-all-of-its-products-removed/ https://www.reviewgeek.com/81928/aukey-is-in-trouble-with-am... https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/10/22428858/amazon-aukey-mpow-listings-disappearing https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/10/22428858/amazon-aukey-mpo... https://www.tomsguide.com/news/aukey-kicked-off-amazon-following-fake-reviews-allegations https://www.tomsguide.com/news/aukey-kicked-off-amazon-follo...
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - jorams 5y ago
      Agreed. There's a story here, but the linked page contains no information about it. It doesn't even show that they are banned.
0xy 5y ago
1 down, 90% of the remaining marketplace sellers to go? Marketplace quality is dollar store bargain bin gambling at this point. It's easy to see why this is happening too. Internal voices in fraud are drowned out by voices in growth who exclaim about the hit to revenue and conversion rate.
- gigatexal 5y ago
  Yeah it’s getting there. The quality of listings is terrible too.
  - 0xy 5y ago
    It's similar to eBay where sellers try to jam as many keywords as possible into the title. Obviously working around massive limitations in discoverability.
    - arkitaip 5y ago
      I hate the keyword stuffing but also discovered that when you are shopping and only have a faint understanding of what keywords to search for, the stuffing often helps...
    - MaxBarraclough 5y ago
      > sellers try to jam as many keywords as possible into the title I've seen sellers try to match on more searches by mentioning what their product isn't, along the lines of Brand new replacement widgets (NOT original ACME widgets). > Obviously working around massive limitations in discoverability. That's the result of competition, rather than search-engine limitations, no?
      - gigatexal 5y ago
        Yeah the keyword stuffing for a title is annoying.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > Marketplace quality is dollar store bargain bin gambling at this point. I get to evaluate the product physically before I buy it at the dollar store. Some of the trash I get from Amazon I can tell is crap the second I open the box.
nsoonhui 5y ago
Now the Aukey page looks up on my side?
- Aissen 5y ago
  Is any product available ?
alangibson 5y ago
Amazon.de is sub-eBay in terms of bargain bin junk store vibe. It's mostly stuff direct from Alibaba with an own brand name slapped on it to get around having to compete for the buy box. I've actually started going back to eBay, Google Shopping and some independent web shops I know are good just to cut through the noise.
- nikanj 5y ago
  I go to AliExpress. No point in me paying for some middleman to order crap from China for me.
  - Glavnokoman 5y ago
    Yeah. The thing is some people think they can buy non- crap from china there. And it is getting really difficult even if you're ready to pay extra.
  - Aissen 5y ago
    The point is you can get it the next day on Prime. You're paying for availability (between 1.8x, 2.2x markup), and ease of sending a product back should it not match your expectations. Edit: also, big brands like Aukey have stock available next to you, so there's only one middle-man (Amazon), and it handles the logistics, so it's not like it's doing nothing…
    - gorbypark 5y ago
      I recently moved to Spain from Canada, and have pretty much bought everything on AliExpress. They’re making a big push into Spain and most things are available with 10 day delivery. It’s not Amazon prime quick, but it’s worth it for the savings. AliExpress would take 2-3 months to get to Canada.
      - tecleandor 5y ago
        And you also have some products located in EU and ES warehouses that arrive very quickly. They have this "AliExpress Plaza" which is products located in Spain .
KamiCrit 5y ago
Surprised that they had to resort to fake reviews considering the quality of products they sold. What a rat race. "Quality means doing it right when no one is looking." -Henry Ford
- baybal2 5y ago
  I very much doubt they did marketing by themselves. In China, it's usually outsourced to specialist Amazon wizards, people who are kind of in rank with "SEO consultants."
  - arkitaip 5y ago
    Of course the company knew about the fraud. The fact they outsourced the actual work to a third party just means they can claim plausible deniability.
    - alangibson 5y ago
      If they knew, they're guilty of fraud. If they didn't, they're guilty of incompetence.
      - Closi 5y ago
        Either way they should be judged/policed by their actions rather than their intent, because intent is too hard to prove or disprove.
  - LeonM 5y ago
    I think you comment is underrated. It's not just China, everywhere I look I see companies partnering with shoddy marketing/SEO 'consultants'. They are rarely transparent about their tactics, and often resort to click farms, fake reviews, keyword stuffing etc. The company doesn't understand the risk to their brand, because they don't understand what the consultant is doing in the first place. The problem here is, I guess, that these tactics do actually work on the short term. So the consultant gets paid, the team reaches their targets and the manager gets promoted. By the time eBay, or any other platform supplier, implies sanctions (and rightfully so, imo) the 'consultant' is long gone, and everybody loses.
baybal2 5y ago
By the way, Aukey was the company in the Amazon email database leak. I think, after everybody started pointing a finger on Amazon tolerating them, they had to act.
- EastSmith 5y ago
  Can I ask which Amazon email database leak?
  - asddubs 5y ago
    there was a post about a database of an amazon review faking ring being exposed a bit ago
  - aembleton 5y ago
    https://www.zdnet.com/article/data-leak-implicates-over-200000-people-in-amazon-fake-product-review-scam/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/data-leak-implicates-over-2000...
- SkyPuncher 5y ago
  Pointing fingers at Aukey seems to be a drop in the bucket. If Amazon is sharing this information with sellers, assume that everyone has it.
raverbashing 5y ago
Yeah, Amazon is getting worse with time. I do investigate the store and usually don't even bother if it's not FBA (it's fine if it isn't but usually for more specialized stuff, not stuff that's blatantly OEM from China)
- fmajid 5y ago
  No, even items sold by Amazon are unsafe, due to their "stickerless commingled inventory" program, whereby 3rd-party inventory is mixed with Amazon's, and treated the same. Thus you could get a counterfeit product from a third party even if your order was listed as "sold by Amazon".
jptech 5y ago
For Amazon Japan, there's a site called "Sakura Checker" (https://sakura-checker.jp https://sakura-checker.jp") which based on the distribution of the reviews and ratings, the grammar and wording, store's reputation, etc., tells how much the chance of reviews being fake are. Interestingly I checked a few of Aukey products and they were reported as highly having fake reviews.
- gaudat 5y ago
  That site is blocked by Microsoft on my mobile connction sadly. One obvious clue to the listing being Chinese is the length of the title. Chinese listings tend to include descriptions and usages of the product in addition to the product name itself. I guess it is the Chinese's way to SEO hacking because all products I see on Taobao or AliExpress have the same spammy title all the way to the length limit.
  - Youden 5y ago
    Why is Microsoft blocking websites at all, let alone on a mobile connection?
  - ilkan 5y ago
    Long titles are the recommended tactic of all the "Make money fast on Amazon!" courses I've seen. Keyword stuffing for the algorithm.
    - Washuu 5y ago
      Unfortunately it appears to work well. Though it also has the side effect of cluttering up search results. I need a bunch of small drawstring pouches for a project. So all the resellers have stuffed their titles with "bag pouch sack" and the actual size of the item is irrelevant to the title.
- spurgu 5y ago
  There's https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/ as well which I've been using. It's sad that we have to resort to tools like these.
qwertox 5y ago
Pulled from amazon.com, because amazon.de still sells their products. There's no reason not to assume that AUKEY isn't using the same tactics on international sites Many of the reviews are taken directly from amazon.com ---- Danielle Schenk Great product highly recommend 5.0 von 5 Rezension aus den Vereinigten Staaten vom 4. April 2019 Verifizierter Kauf These headphones last all day for my husband who works at an oil plant. There noise cancelling is amazing so he can listen to music while protecting his ears. Plus they look like earplugs so he doesn't get fussed at! Great product ---- So it's safe to assume that Amazon has absolutely no issue with this, unless there's a lawsuit threatening them.
- mh- 5y ago
  They show up on Amazon.com too, for me.
gandalfian 5y ago
This report says the FTC pushed them into it https://www.vox.com/recode/22443153/amazon-seller-supsensions-aukey-mpow-ftc-paid-fake-reviews https://www.vox.com/recode/22443153/amazon-seller-supsension...
- alangibson 5y ago
  They old Amazon line about being 'customer obsessed' sure went out the window a while ago.
  - intricatedetail 5y ago
    Obsessed about customers rear end...
  - drdec 5y ago
    When you are buying from a third-party via Amazon's website, exactly who do you think Amazon's customer is?
    - sidlls 5y ago
      It's not the third-party, that's for sure. Sellers on Amazon are almost entirely at the mercy of the honesty and good graces of the buyer. And, thanks to the rise of "drop shipping your way to riches!" "gurus" that have proliferated the web over the last few years, the Amazon marketplace has become a sewer of white-labeled identical (trash quality, usually) products all sourced from manufacturers on sites like Alibaba.
  - bogwog 5y ago
    When a company stops caring about customers, it’s either because their management is stupid (and the company is doomed), or because the company is immune to competitive forces.
- fmajid 5y ago
  I was pleasantly surprised by their removal of Aukey et al, given their past record of willful negligence and attempts to deflect liability for all sorts of horrors. This article confirms it was not actually a change of heart by Amazon. I'm not entirely sure if Amazon's fake-review enforcement is a deliberate sham (i.e. whether it is malice or incompetence), but this new information does raise the likelihood that it is deliberate policy.
paxys 5y ago
Posting fake reviews on Amazon is a prisoner’s dilemma at this point. I’m not surprised to see even top brands getting caught up in it, because if you don’t do it your competitors most certainly will.
- fmajid 5y ago
  It's more devious than that. You have companies posting obviously fake 5-star reviews of competitors' products to get them banned for review manipulation. I doubt that was the case with Aukey. https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketplace-scams-seller-court-appeal-reinstatement https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketpl...
- totalZero 5y ago
  It almost makes you wonder if we should have a review system that doesn't include stars at all.
  - fmajid 5y ago
    It doesn't matter, any crowdsourced review system can and will be gamed, just as any communications service can and will be spammed. What is unsaid is that it's not just unscrupulous companies (including Amazon) that are involved. There are also ordinary consumers who deliberately post the fake 5-star reviews in exchange for compensation. I've seen people make excuses for them, but I can't see how any of them can be under the impression they are not doing wrong. Now if Amazon were forced to disclose statistics about return rates or complaints on products, that would in fact be valuable information. It could still be gamed due to other shoddy Amazon practices like allowing a merchant to start a listing for a cheap but genuinely good product, collect good reviews, then switch the product description to something completely unrelated.
    - totalZero 5y ago
      The gaming will be different though. It's easy to adulterate a numerical average of a low-effort star rating, and harder to fake a review written in English with pictures and details.
intricatedetail 5y ago
This year I bought so many things on Amazon that turned out to be substandard or even unsafe and then you can't even depend on reviews. One time I left negative feedback on a product that almost got me seriously hurt, the seller somehow got my personal email and was demanding I take review down. I did, because who knows who those people are. I think regulator should crack down. Comb their inventory and tax books.
- fmajid 5y ago
  Amazon has been trying to avoid liability for dangerous products sold on its site, even when they knew the products were dangerous: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/28/21080720/amazon-product-liability-lawsuits-marketplace-damage-third-party https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/28/21080720/amazon-product-l... What's more, even their own-brand AmazonBasics has many defective and dangerous products: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-electronics-fire-safety-invs/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-ele...
ericls 5y ago
Chinese brand. Not surprising
- kenned3 5y ago
  Thankfully only Chinese companies sell crap right? Ford Pinto - Ford knew people would die, but sold it anyhow. General Motor's flawed ignition switch, one of the deadliest auto recalls in history, killed 124 people.
VoodooJuJu 5y ago
Too little too late. They'll be crying all the way to the bank.
miked85 5y ago
A good first step to remove bad actors - next is to stop commingling inventory.
theropost 5y ago
It seems like they are working on sellers who are offering free gift cards, etc from 3rd party websites for positive reviews. The new one I noticed that is starting, are letters telling me about how hard their lives are, and how they need me to buy their products to feed their kids. Whats next?
- op00to 5y ago
  Wow who would have guessed my mom was right about the starving kids in China when I was a picky eater.
ratiolat 5y ago
Whats a good online webstore from where to buy equipment for our personnel in the USA, mostly computer monitors, laptop desk stands, usb hubs and so on? Amazon has been quite bad so far - takes lots of time to find the correct item and then begins the game of "is this thing the real thing or not?". Employees are spread out in the USA, especially in these covid times. Delivery time is not critical compared to the item's authenticity, pricing and support.
- ratiolat 5y ago
  Kind of answering to myself. I discovered that Markit works in the USA too: https://www.markit.eu/us/en/Catalog.aspx https://www.markit.eu/us/en/Catalog.aspx
  - p49k 5y ago
    What is Markit? The site itself doesn’t explain the concept very well and the content is behind a login.
    - ratiolat 5y ago
      I don't know which kind of answer satisfies you, so I'm gonna answer in many different ways: 1. It's a "frontend" for warehouses 2. It's a webstore for buying stuff 3. It's a middleware between a company buying stuff and warehouse selling stuff It's usually used by businesses who need to buy gear. It gives you overview of different warehouses selling the same thing, the difference between them is usually delivery time, pricing, amount of stock. So you can decide that hey, I want this from warehouse Y and this from warehouse X. They also do autooptimization based on pricing or amount of shipments if you want to. The reason why I like them is because it's simple, adfree, easy payment, easy tracking.... it's just easy. For example here's a random product: https://www.markit.eu/us/en/kingston-datatraveler-70-usb-flash-drive-64-gb/v2p21636660c140401 https://www.markit.eu/us/en/kingston-datatraveler-70-usb-fla... On the left you can see the whole catalogue of things. The only caveat I'm aware of is that it's for companies only. But, as said before, I have only used them in Europe where it's the default option and in a rare occasion where they don't offer something, I need to use an alternative. By and large they have 99% of our cases covered. Usually they might not have the cheapest price, but it's okay because the ease of use pays it back in a blink of an eye.
moepstar 5y ago
My biggest gripe with Amazon is its search. For a company that initially was a searchengine (A9 if i recall right, still being used for the site) the search and filter options aren't worthily described if you use the word bad. I mean, what else besides being able to filter for brands and maybe price is there? Cue every purchase being research into the fundamentals of the thing you need, together with not being able to trust reviews. Regarding the reviews, i've turned to only looking at "most critical" reviews - at least with those i'm kinda quickly able to differ between "logistics service dun f'up" and "this thing has so many issues it's not even funny anymore". Edit to add: my purchases on AMZN are down by like 90% - replacing my online shopping by going to local (hardware) stores mostly
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > I mean, what else besides being able to filter for brands and maybe price is there? So many things. Take a look at NewEgg's search. Even when I search for specific model numbers on Amazon I have to wade through irrelevant results.
  - moepstar 5y ago
    Just to clarify, we're on the same page here - with "there" i meant "on Amazon"...
- varispeed 5y ago
  They should add a country of origin filter (or be mandated by law to do this), so customers can easily filter out all crap from unethical countries. edit: also drop shipping filter would be helpful.
  - bootlooped 5y ago
    If the product isn't Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA), there is probably no way to know if it is drop shipped or not. Some of them state the country it will be shipped from, but I'm not sure that is a requirement, and it could still be drop shipped from inside the country.
techaddict009 5y ago
Seems like they were giving gift cards in product box in exchange of reviews: https://twitter.com/corbindavenport/status/1391838929360457743 https://twitter.com/corbindavenport/status/13918389293604577... More detailed info here: https://lifehacker.com/what-the-hell-happened-to-aukeys-products-on-amazon-1846870233 https://lifehacker.com/what-the-hell-happened-to-aukeys-prod... But again so many small & big seller do the same!
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  I got offered a $40 gift card for a positive review of a $50 product.
jarym 5y ago
Did they do this to make a one time example out of a big seller and appease critics or is the consensus here that they’re clamping down on fake reviews?
RGamma 5y ago
Unfortunately Stiftung Warentest is not available in English (except its about page) A good way to cut all the crap. https://www.test.de/unternehmen/about-us-5017053-0/ https://www.test.de/unternehmen/about-us-5017053-0/
- hh3k0 5y ago
  When in doubt, I rely on Stiftung Warentest as well.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Nope. Not anymore. Maybe it was different a few decades ago. Nowadays I'll get strong 'Gell-Mann Amnesia' vibes from them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes... The same goes for Ökotest. It's just another form of marketing because potential customer looks for some red-white label to feel safe. So everybody who can afford it, tries to get some red-white label. It's as worthless as "DLG prämiert" on some sausages from ALDI. Sometimes I've thought "Tickt ihr noch richtig?", because I had the devices they recommended, while I've considered them trash. Especially funny when you have a few decades of them as *.pdf In other words, they manage to make something like a horoscope look like a thoroughly systematic and scientific test, while it isn't, at all. edit: I'd excempt testing of mechanical/electrical safety of devices/appliances, things like energy efficiency and maybe loudness. Anything else I can think of right now is just subjective for comparable items. That's for Warentest. For Ökotest I can only think of obvious proof of toxicity as an exemption. Otherwise even more subjective. edit: Einen hab ich noch! Haus&Garten Test, noch lächerlicher! :-)
- hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
  Is this basically the German version of Consumer Reports ? https://www.consumerreports.org/ https://www.consumerreports.org/
  - moepstar 5y ago
    Yes, it is!
williesleg 5y ago
Couldn't shake them down enough eh?
exabrial 5y ago
Which sucks, because their stuff is actually good.
- inoop 5y ago
  Did you get free headphones to write this comment? :)
  - bradenb 5y ago
    I know you're joking, but I agree with the parent comment. I have a number of AUKEY products and actually have had zero issues. I've also never been bothered by them to give a review (though I suspect if I had given a negative one they might have contacted me).
  - exabrial 5y ago
    Hah! No kidding right? Just a long time user before they started the review shenanigans.
- interestica 5y ago
  Yeah, I have to say I've had good experiences. Im literally plugged into a battery right now that was unlike other options I could find in terms of form factor and capacity: 3 usb a, usb c, lightning, power delivery, micro usb, and super flat (to better fit in a bag). I suppose it's in the good experience that I was blind to the other "review-stuffing" activities.
libertine 5y ago
Like I said in other comment: this is all Amazon doing, and their inactivity towards reports of what clearly was, and is, bad practices. Amazon basically became a rigged marketplace where those who thrive are the ones who can get away with a lot of things. From completely disregarding guidelines, TOS, targeted attacks to destroy competitors listings, you name it. It's just like prisons, people go in and come out worst because that's the game that has to be played in order to survive. The only one to blame is Amazon that promoted these practices by giving leverage to those who did it. With more revenue, more exposure, privileged access to Amazon account managers (yes, talking to a human is a privilege for an Amazon Seller).
- specialist 5y ago
  Games without rules and referees degenerate into brawls. Similarly, open markets require regulations, enforcement, fair and impartial judiciary (tort), and property rights. Fraud and counterfeits spoil markets. Lowering trust. Increasing transaction costs. Poorly regulated Freedom Markets™ like eBay and Amazon are net negatives, even while a few thrive on the chaos.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    Buying from Amazon used to be just as legit as buying from Best Buy, Circuit City or Walmart. They sold the same types of products, but Amazon with its no-sales-tax advantage usually offered better prices and more selection. Then they got greedy and decided to turn the site into Aliexppress US.
    - SmellTheGlove 5y ago
      The joke used to be that Best Buy was just a showroom for Amazon. That is definitely no longer the case.
      - buffet_overflow 5y ago
        I'm genuinely grateful that Amazon has at least pulled those and other even smaller stores into an age of much easier online ordering and delivery.
tanjiro 5y ago
Amazon has been increasing its reliance on 3P sellers (60% of total revenue now compared to <50% a couple of years ago) as they bring in more profit than 1P. Such problems are likely to increase. As others pointed out, plenty of fake reviews out there. I live in UK & do buy electronics from Amazon mainly because its the only reliable (fast delivery + refunds w/o questions) place to buy cheap Chinese stuff.
- 1-6 5y ago
  If you’re like me, after a while, your home gets filled with cheap Chinese stuff. Some go into the trash and some go to the ‘Free Stuff’ pile outside. Unwinding my life without products is a daily/monthly/yearly occurrence and I greatly appreciate quality and thoughtfulness that goes into a product over simple function. I’ve also shifted focus to software and cloud which helps a bit to declutter. I no longer run a lab full of hardware at home.
beckman466 5y ago
This is just a scapegoating of one 'bad apple' to pretend that this action is all that is needed to improve whatever situation Amazon is pretending to tackle here. In reality the system itself is rotten. Aukey is just a sacrificial lamb to distract from that rotten system.
- fma 5y ago
  Yep...this was known all along by anyone who has ever used Amazon. Now we need to deal with places like Slickdeals which now pushes crap to front page by their partners and bans competitors. This is another way to drive reviews. Though they are legitimate purchases, if you get a crappy product at 50% off you'll likely to leave a better review than a crappy a full price.
mlang23 5y ago
I stopped purchasing from Amazon years ago. I used to have a phase where I was a really good customer, back in the 2005-2012. It felt trashy back then as well, but in a good sense. These days, Amazon is full of faked reviews, duplicate products with vast prize difference, very bad product description quality, and all the things you dont want from a reseller. Granted, for a while, we were willing to accept a certain sloppy style in exchange for the pricing, but this treshold has been crossed long ago. Me perceiving Amazon as complete trash has even spilled over into other offerings. I will not touch Alexa (for various reasons), and I am definitely not going to use their video stuff. I dont want to be customer of a company that has so little standards.
- SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago
  Same here, I used to get multiple Amazon packages per week, now I try to avoid them. The only reason I buy from them now is to take advantage of their ultra lax return policies. It wasn’t just Amazon that changed though. The proliferation of easier payment options (Apple/Google Pay, PayPal) and availability of one-touch credit card autofill on other websites eroded their moat, at least in my case.
- specialist 5y ago
  A close relative once had a pretty good business hosted on eBay. (I occasionally helped with computer stuff.) Robust enough for a large garage full of inventory and my aunt and uncle to quit their day jobs. eBay's stewardship of the marketplace started bad and then steadily got worse. Just fighting the search results, where legit products were buried under SEO and copycats, became a full time job. A little bit of jostling, that's just healthy competition, same as it ever was. But when legit business has to cheat just to stay afloat, the market's broken. Eventually, it just wasn't worth the bother.
  - TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
    I just canceled my Ebay account a couple days ago (and rarely buy anything from Amazon any more). Ebay and Amazon are victims of their own "success." Everyone understands what they're doing wrong, and exactly when they went astray, but they don't seem to be doing anything about it. Ebay and Amazon continue to strive to be all things to all people selling and buying online, and won't fix the problems we can all plainly see. I note that other apps/services like Etsy or Shopify or Reverb are filling in the gaps left behind from this mentality. I hope these second-tier apps continue to attract more disillusioned people from the first tier, but stay focused on what has made them successful so far.
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tyingq 5y ago
Of course, the number one result when you search for wireless headphones is Amazon's product. The reviews seems to indicate they aren't great: https://www.amazon.com/Echo-Buds-Wireless-immersive-reduction-previous-generation/product-reviews/B07F6VM1S3/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_show_all_btm?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews https://www.amazon.com/Echo-Buds-Wireless-immersive-reductio...
ck2 5y ago
Meanwhile like 1 in 10 things I buy from amazon comes with a sticker or piece of paper from the seller promising free product if people write reviews. You go look on the product pages and it's only good reviews. 100% paid for and amazon has to know about it since the sticker or paper goes through their own fulfillment.
rchaud 5y ago
I couldn't beat them, so I joined them. I bought a no-name tablet stand on Amazon.ca with adjustable height for about $20. The packaging included a note to review the product for a $20 coupon code. Done and done. At this point, who cares? I've been using Amazon for over 20 years. As a young teen, user reviews of music CDs helped build by tastes as they were purely organic expressions of how buyers felt about the music. That ended years ago with the switch to Fulfilled by Amazon aka digital flea market.
the_snooze 5y ago
A few months back, I bought an AKASO Keychain camera to see if it's at least a 75%-decent knock-off of the Insta360 Go. I found that it was a truly terrible product and left a negative review detailing all my impressions and issues with it. Not long afterwards, "Tara" from AKASO (using a gmail.com account with the name "Jessica") sent me multiple requests for the following: >We sincerely appreciate your comment, which is helpful for improvement of our product and service in future. To bring you a better shopping experience, we would like to send you 30 USD gift card. Would you please help us to re-adjusting your comment rating or remove it? Thanks to the Amazon review system, companies would much rather spend money suppressing bad reviews of their shit products instead of spending money to make good products in the first place.
- fma 5y ago
  Anyone know how these sellers get your email address? I had a similar experience. The product met 90% of what I needed but the advertised 10% did not, and that 10% was critical for what I needed to do. I left a 2 or 3 star review (I forgot). I kept getting spammed to my personal e-mail. I was not sure if they were sending through Amazon system or directly - my guess was directly. Later on I did modify my review. I reduced it by 1 more star.
  - nanliu 5y ago
    There's third party services that performs reverse lookup of bad reviews to find the buyer identity and contact info. The whole purpose is to circumvent the Amazon customer contact process. I left 1 star review for a product, and the seller tried continuously to solicit withdraw or revision of the review. I attempted to update the review calling out this behavior with screenshot of the email and Amazon wouldn't approve it. Ultimately, they replaced it with a product revision and immediately got another 20k reviews with near 5 star rating. There's very little anonymity for buyers given all our digital crumbles. The entire digital economy's purpose is to track and identify you as a consumer. On top of this, how reviewers are paid via affiliates is the wrong incentive model. I'm not sure how this could be fixed, but I would be interested in a service that flipped the information asymmetry and gave me insight on the company selling the product and their trust worthiness. Company ownership would be icing on the cake since brands change hand so frequently (see example: https://toolguyd.com/tool-brands-corporate-affiliations/ https://toolguyd.com/tool-brands-corporate-affiliations/).
1-6 5y ago
If a store curated products and presented to the customer only quality products they found interesting, it wouldn’t exist long because customers would just open Amazon’s app and bypass all the store’s hard work and margins. Distributors and retailers who have brand recognition like Birkenstock, LVMH, Rolex, The North Face, and Patagonia can easily ‘do their own thing’ but I hope a collective of smaller brands can come together and make their own storefront. I’ll be ready with dollars.
ItsMonkk 5y ago
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Amazon reviews are just another metric. If you do not have personal accountability, the measure will always be gamed. The reason that reddit is the only place on the internet where you can get general purpose recommendations, is because it relies on the personal accountability of the users giving feedback have between each other. As the subreddit gets to large, this is lost. Treasure small communities. There is no way to improve the system. The more you improve the metric, the more the metric is gamed. Stop relying on metrics.
Saris 5y ago
I find it funny, and also sad that it took a huge data breach showing the public exactly what was going on for Amazon to do something about it. They don't really care about this because they get their cut from the sales and go on their merry way. Maybe if they see sales take enough of a hit from people mis-trusting Amazon they might take a more serious stance on fake reviews.
rootusrootus 5y ago
I would like an alternative to Amazon, but have not yet found anything directly comparable. Despite promises to the contrary, eBay sellers are almost always charging a higher price. Shipping is slow, even from big reputable companies. Amazon has a lock on fast, inexpensive shipping, and it seems to be a very effective moat. If you buy only products 'shipped from and sold by Amazon' then the rate of fraud is low enough that the easy shopping & fast delivery keep you in the fold. Is Amazon immune to disruption?
- somacore 5y ago
  The closest analog we have here is Instacart. You pay a yearly fee for express delivery, and you get to pick from several local stores to get your stuff. Groceries, Target, you can even get Costco without a membership of your own. The drawbacks are selection and price. On top of express (prime-like pricing) there's also tipping which adds at least 15%. We do it mainly for groceries and some odds and ends, but for sure it's not even coming close to Amazon-level disruption. And then of course none of these places have Amazon's computing services, lol. That's a whole other sport.
ratsmack 5y ago
Reviews are absolutely worthless. All I want to know is how many units have been sold and how many complaints have been issued against the product.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Also returns.
troelsSteegin 5y ago
I would think it's really in Amazon's interest to crack down on fakes. Fakes are bad customer experience. My guess is that fakes are hard to detect at Amazon's operational scale - that it's "not solved" how to filter or curate out shrewd fakes vendors and ads for fakes on the platform at scale. The Amazon market place is like an AppStore without the benefit of code to scan. Amazon does need to signal that they are going to detect the fake sellers. But I also think that they would benefit by implementing a more restrictive listings policy, where they risk some false positives in favor of reducing the overall prevalance of fakes. This is one of the things that makes the AppStore frustrating for publishers to deal with, but it also in principal benefits the Apple customer. A low restriction policy instead favors vendor relationships vs consumer experience. Maybe Amazon benefits by identifying customers with a propensity to buy goods like fakes. One would think Amazon is losing consumers for certain goods. Amazon operates a marketplace. It makes money from sellers, in terms of selling paying to advertise, and it makes money from transactions, as some fraction of sales. It instruments the marketplace, so it knows which consumers are buying which goods. It makes money from its own brands, which given its instrumentation, can efficiently targetly pockets of demand. Amazon does OK as long as it is the default or preferred marketplace for stuff. As a consumer, I should not be seeing fake stuff at all. This is a search quality problem, like not seeing SEO'd spam in search results. If it's hard to tell good stuff from fake stuff, you would think a BestBuy or a Walmart with assured quality would win out. What it looks like now is that not "enough" consumers are turned off from negative Amazon experiences. Do I pay a lower price though a more convenient experience, and risk a notably worse fake, or do I pay a little more, and go to a differernt vendor? I wonder if there is a relative or absolute cost charactic to fakes - like no deal can be but so good and probably not be a fake. What I would want to see is if Amazon is losing sales on higher cost higher risk items to competitors. I think the ultimate question for undestanding Amazon will always be the money - how are the marketplace profits are driven - and in that what's the mix of vendor ads, transaction fees, and consumer targeting. My speculation is that they are working toward technical solutions for fakes, and that they think they have time and position in market to get there. Fakes are not yet enough of an experiential or reputational problem for Amazon to do differently.
Simulacra 5y ago
What bothers me increasingly is how many name brands are NOT on Amazon. The accessory market across the board has become companies I've never heard of, or companies also owned by Amazon. Increasingly, it feels like Amazon is becoming one giant MicroCenter. I do hope virtual sales people don't chase me wanting to add their barcode to my amazon cart.
BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
The Kiwi Design store is still up on Amazon.com, and Kiwi Design's RMA contact is suspiciously "aukey5c@163.com".
rdl 5y ago
The sad thing is Aukey makes pretty uniformly good products; I'd happily disclose that I'd received free products from them if they sent them to me and then write honest reviews (which would probably be 4 or 5 star, at lest for all the Aukey stuff I've bought to date -- cables and batteries and stuff).
nobodytome 5y ago
https://www.amazon.com/s?me=A3KEIBWKST18IS&marketplaceID=ATVPDKIKX0DER https://www.amazon.com/s?me=A3KEIBWKST18IS&marketplaceID=ATV... This seller hired people in US to buy their products then leave 5 stars reviews, they refund + bonus ($10-30) via paypal.

353 points by wetpaws 5y ago

r_singh 5y ago

Source?

waheoo 5y ago
https://www.androidauthority.com/amazon-removes-tech-accessory-makers-over-fake-reviews-1224557/ https://www.androidauthority.com/amazon-removes-tech-accesso...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- herpderperator 5y ago
  Maybe the HN submission's URL should be updated to point to this article.
  - Aissen 5y ago
    This is two weeks old, but a few other publications covered this: https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/amazon-removing-popular-accessory-companies-fake-product-reviews/?tag=reviewgeek-20 https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/amazon-removing-popular... https://www.reviewgeek.com/81928/aukey-is-in-trouble-with-amazon-has-all-of-its-products-removed/ https://www.reviewgeek.com/81928/aukey-is-in-trouble-with-am... https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/10/22428858/amazon-aukey-mpow-listings-disappearing https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/10/22428858/amazon-aukey-mpo... https://www.tomsguide.com/news/aukey-kicked-off-amazon-following-fake-reviews-allegations https://www.tomsguide.com/news/aukey-kicked-off-amazon-follo...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - jorams 5y ago
    Agreed. There's a story here, but the linked page contains no information about it. It doesn't even show that they are banned.

0xy 5y ago

1 down, 90% of the remaining marketplace sellers to go? Marketplace quality is dollar store bargain bin gambling at this point. It's easy to see why this is happening too. Internal voices in fraud are drowned out by voices in growth who exclaim about the hit to revenue and conversion rate.

gigatexal 5y ago
Yeah it’s getting there. The quality of listings is terrible too.
- 0xy 5y ago
  It's similar to eBay where sellers try to jam as many keywords as possible into the title. Obviously working around massive limitations in discoverability.
  - arkitaip 5y ago
    I hate the keyword stuffing but also discovered that when you are shopping and only have a faint understanding of what keywords to search for, the stuffing often helps...
  - MaxBarraclough 5y ago
    > sellers try to jam as many keywords as possible into the title I've seen sellers try to match on more searches by mentioning what their product isn't, along the lines of Brand new replacement widgets (NOT original ACME widgets). > Obviously working around massive limitations in discoverability. That's the result of competition, rather than search-engine limitations, no?
    - gigatexal 5y ago
      Yeah the keyword stuffing for a title is annoying.
pessimizer 5y ago
> Marketplace quality is dollar store bargain bin gambling at this point. I get to evaluate the product physically before I buy it at the dollar store. Some of the trash I get from Amazon I can tell is crap the second I open the box.

nsoonhui 5y ago

Now the Aukey page looks up on my side?

Aissen 5y ago
Is any product available ?

alangibson 5y ago

Amazon.de is sub-eBay in terms of bargain bin junk store vibe. It's mostly stuff direct from Alibaba with an own brand name slapped on it to get around having to compete for the buy box. I've actually started going back to eBay, Google Shopping and some independent web shops I know are good just to cut through the noise.

nikanj 5y ago
I go to AliExpress. No point in me paying for some middleman to order crap from China for me.
- Glavnokoman 5y ago
  Yeah. The thing is some people think they can buy non- crap from china there. And it is getting really difficult even if you're ready to pay extra.
- Aissen 5y ago
  The point is you can get it the next day on Prime. You're paying for availability (between 1.8x, 2.2x markup), and ease of sending a product back should it not match your expectations. Edit: also, big brands like Aukey have stock available next to you, so there's only one middle-man (Amazon), and it handles the logistics, so it's not like it's doing nothing…
  - gorbypark 5y ago
    I recently moved to Spain from Canada, and have pretty much bought everything on AliExpress. They’re making a big push into Spain and most things are available with 10 day delivery. It’s not Amazon prime quick, but it’s worth it for the savings. AliExpress would take 2-3 months to get to Canada.
    - tecleandor 5y ago
      And you also have some products located in EU and ES warehouses that arrive very quickly. They have this "AliExpress Plaza" which is products located in Spain .

KamiCrit 5y ago

Surprised that they had to resort to fake reviews considering the quality of products they sold. What a rat race. "Quality means doing it right when no one is looking." -Henry Ford

baybal2 5y ago
I very much doubt they did marketing by themselves. In China, it's usually outsourced to specialist Amazon wizards, people who are kind of in rank with "SEO consultants."
- arkitaip 5y ago
  Of course the company knew about the fraud. The fact they outsourced the actual work to a third party just means they can claim plausible deniability.
  - alangibson 5y ago
    If they knew, they're guilty of fraud. If they didn't, they're guilty of incompetence.
    - Closi 5y ago
      Either way they should be judged/policed by their actions rather than their intent, because intent is too hard to prove or disprove.
- LeonM 5y ago
  I think you comment is underrated. It's not just China, everywhere I look I see companies partnering with shoddy marketing/SEO 'consultants'. They are rarely transparent about their tactics, and often resort to click farms, fake reviews, keyword stuffing etc. The company doesn't understand the risk to their brand, because they don't understand what the consultant is doing in the first place. The problem here is, I guess, that these tactics do actually work on the short term. So the consultant gets paid, the team reaches their targets and the manager gets promoted. By the time eBay, or any other platform supplier, implies sanctions (and rightfully so, imo) the 'consultant' is long gone, and everybody loses.

baybal2 5y ago

By the way, Aukey was the company in the Amazon email database leak. I think, after everybody started pointing a finger on Amazon tolerating them, they had to act.

EastSmith 5y ago
Can I ask which Amazon email database leak?
- asddubs 5y ago
  there was a post about a database of an amazon review faking ring being exposed a bit ago
- aembleton 5y ago
  https://www.zdnet.com/article/data-leak-implicates-over-200000-people-in-amazon-fake-product-review-scam/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/data-leak-implicates-over-2000...
SkyPuncher 5y ago
Pointing fingers at Aukey seems to be a drop in the bucket. If Amazon is sharing this information with sellers, assume that everyone has it.

raverbashing 5y ago

Yeah, Amazon is getting worse with time. I do investigate the store and usually don't even bother if it's not FBA (it's fine if it isn't but usually for more specialized stuff, not stuff that's blatantly OEM from China)

fmajid 5y ago
No, even items sold by Amazon are unsafe, due to their "stickerless commingled inventory" program, whereby 3rd-party inventory is mixed with Amazon's, and treated the same. Thus you could get a counterfeit product from a third party even if your order was listed as "sold by Amazon".

jptech 5y ago

For Amazon Japan, there's a site called "Sakura Checker" (https://sakura-checker.jp https://sakura-checker.jp") which based on the distribution of the reviews and ratings, the grammar and wording, store's reputation, etc., tells how much the chance of reviews being fake are. Interestingly I checked a few of Aukey products and they were reported as highly having fake reviews.

gaudat 5y ago
That site is blocked by Microsoft on my mobile connction sadly. One obvious clue to the listing being Chinese is the length of the title. Chinese listings tend to include descriptions and usages of the product in addition to the product name itself. I guess it is the Chinese's way to SEO hacking because all products I see on Taobao or AliExpress have the same spammy title all the way to the length limit.
- Youden 5y ago
  Why is Microsoft blocking websites at all, let alone on a mobile connection?
- ilkan 5y ago
  Long titles are the recommended tactic of all the "Make money fast on Amazon!" courses I've seen. Keyword stuffing for the algorithm.
  - Washuu 5y ago
    Unfortunately it appears to work well. Though it also has the side effect of cluttering up search results. I need a bunch of small drawstring pouches for a project. So all the resellers have stuffed their titles with "bag pouch sack" and the actual size of the item is irrelevant to the title.
spurgu 5y ago
There's https://reviewmeta.com/ https://reviewmeta.com/ as well which I've been using. It's sad that we have to resort to tools like these.

qwertox 5y ago

Pulled from amazon.com, because amazon.de still sells their products. There's no reason not to assume that AUKEY isn't using the same tactics on international sites Many of the reviews are taken directly from amazon.com ---- Danielle Schenk Great product highly recommend 5.0 von 5 Rezension aus den Vereinigten Staaten vom 4. April 2019 Verifizierter Kauf These headphones last all day for my husband who works at an oil plant. There noise cancelling is amazing so he can listen to music while protecting his ears. Plus they look like earplugs so he doesn't get fussed at! Great product ---- So it's safe to assume that Amazon has absolutely no issue with this, unless there's a lawsuit threatening them.

mh- 5y ago
They show up on Amazon.com too, for me.

gandalfian 5y ago

This report says the FTC pushed them into it https://www.vox.com/recode/22443153/amazon-seller-supsensions-aukey-mpow-ftc-paid-fake-reviews https://www.vox.com/recode/22443153/amazon-seller-supsension...

alangibson 5y ago
They old Amazon line about being 'customer obsessed' sure went out the window a while ago.
- intricatedetail 5y ago
  Obsessed about customers rear end...
- drdec 5y ago
  When you are buying from a third-party via Amazon's website, exactly who do you think Amazon's customer is?
  - sidlls 5y ago
    It's not the third-party, that's for sure. Sellers on Amazon are almost entirely at the mercy of the honesty and good graces of the buyer. And, thanks to the rise of "drop shipping your way to riches!" "gurus" that have proliferated the web over the last few years, the Amazon marketplace has become a sewer of white-labeled identical (trash quality, usually) products all sourced from manufacturers on sites like Alibaba.
- bogwog 5y ago
  When a company stops caring about customers, it’s either because their management is stupid (and the company is doomed), or because the company is immune to competitive forces.
fmajid 5y ago
I was pleasantly surprised by their removal of Aukey et al, given their past record of willful negligence and attempts to deflect liability for all sorts of horrors. This article confirms it was not actually a change of heart by Amazon. I'm not entirely sure if Amazon's fake-review enforcement is a deliberate sham (i.e. whether it is malice or incompetence), but this new information does raise the likelihood that it is deliberate policy.

paxys 5y ago

Posting fake reviews on Amazon is a prisoner’s dilemma at this point. I’m not surprised to see even top brands getting caught up in it, because if you don’t do it your competitors most certainly will.

fmajid 5y ago
It's more devious than that. You have companies posting obviously fake 5-star reviews of competitors' products to get them banned for review manipulation. I doubt that was the case with Aukey. https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketplace-scams-seller-court-appeal-reinstatement https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketpl...
totalZero 5y ago
It almost makes you wonder if we should have a review system that doesn't include stars at all.
- fmajid 5y ago
  It doesn't matter, any crowdsourced review system can and will be gamed, just as any communications service can and will be spammed. What is unsaid is that it's not just unscrupulous companies (including Amazon) that are involved. There are also ordinary consumers who deliberately post the fake 5-star reviews in exchange for compensation. I've seen people make excuses for them, but I can't see how any of them can be under the impression they are not doing wrong. Now if Amazon were forced to disclose statistics about return rates or complaints on products, that would in fact be valuable information. It could still be gamed due to other shoddy Amazon practices like allowing a merchant to start a listing for a cheap but genuinely good product, collect good reviews, then switch the product description to something completely unrelated.
  - totalZero 5y ago
    The gaming will be different though. It's easy to adulterate a numerical average of a low-effort star rating, and harder to fake a review written in English with pictures and details.

intricatedetail 5y ago

This year I bought so many things on Amazon that turned out to be substandard or even unsafe and then you can't even depend on reviews. One time I left negative feedback on a product that almost got me seriously hurt, the seller somehow got my personal email and was demanding I take review down. I did, because who knows who those people are. I think regulator should crack down. Comb their inventory and tax books.

fmajid 5y ago
Amazon has been trying to avoid liability for dangerous products sold on its site, even when they knew the products were dangerous: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/28/21080720/amazon-product-liability-lawsuits-marketplace-damage-third-party https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/28/21080720/amazon-product-l... What's more, even their own-brand AmazonBasics has many defective and dangerous products: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-electronics-fire-safety-invs/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/amazonbasics-ele...

ericls 5y ago

Chinese brand. Not surprising

kenned3 5y ago
Thankfully only Chinese companies sell crap right? Ford Pinto - Ford knew people would die, but sold it anyhow. General Motor's flawed ignition switch, one of the deadliest auto recalls in history, killed 124 people.

VoodooJuJu 5y ago

Too little too late. They'll be crying all the way to the bank.

miked85 5y ago

A good first step to remove bad actors - next is to stop commingling inventory.

theropost 5y ago

It seems like they are working on sellers who are offering free gift cards, etc from 3rd party websites for positive reviews. The new one I noticed that is starting, are letters telling me about how hard their lives are, and how they need me to buy their products to feed their kids. Whats next?

op00to 5y ago
Wow who would have guessed my mom was right about the starving kids in China when I was a picky eater.

ratiolat 5y ago

Whats a good online webstore from where to buy equipment for our personnel in the USA, mostly computer monitors, laptop desk stands, usb hubs and so on? Amazon has been quite bad so far - takes lots of time to find the correct item and then begins the game of "is this thing the real thing or not?". Employees are spread out in the USA, especially in these covid times. Delivery time is not critical compared to the item's authenticity, pricing and support.

ratiolat 5y ago
Kind of answering to myself. I discovered that Markit works in the USA too: https://www.markit.eu/us/en/Catalog.aspx https://www.markit.eu/us/en/Catalog.aspx
- p49k 5y ago
  What is Markit? The site itself doesn’t explain the concept very well and the content is behind a login.
  - ratiolat 5y ago
    I don't know which kind of answer satisfies you, so I'm gonna answer in many different ways: 1. It's a "frontend" for warehouses 2. It's a webstore for buying stuff 3. It's a middleware between a company buying stuff and warehouse selling stuff It's usually used by businesses who need to buy gear. It gives you overview of different warehouses selling the same thing, the difference between them is usually delivery time, pricing, amount of stock. So you can decide that hey, I want this from warehouse Y and this from warehouse X. They also do autooptimization based on pricing or amount of shipments if you want to. The reason why I like them is because it's simple, adfree, easy payment, easy tracking.... it's just easy. For example here's a random product: https://www.markit.eu/us/en/kingston-datatraveler-70-usb-flash-drive-64-gb/v2p21636660c140401 https://www.markit.eu/us/en/kingston-datatraveler-70-usb-fla... On the left you can see the whole catalogue of things. The only caveat I'm aware of is that it's for companies only. But, as said before, I have only used them in Europe where it's the default option and in a rare occasion where they don't offer something, I need to use an alternative. By and large they have 99% of our cases covered. Usually they might not have the cheapest price, but it's okay because the ease of use pays it back in a blink of an eye.

moepstar 5y ago

My biggest gripe with Amazon is its search. For a company that initially was a searchengine (A9 if i recall right, still being used for the site) the search and filter options aren't worthily described if you use the word bad. I mean, what else besides being able to filter for brands and maybe price is there? Cue every purchase being research into the fundamentals of the thing you need, together with not being able to trust reviews. Regarding the reviews, i've turned to only looking at "most critical" reviews - at least with those i'm kinda quickly able to differ between "logistics service dun f'up" and "this thing has so many issues it's not even funny anymore". Edit to add: my purchases on AMZN are down by like 90% - replacing my online shopping by going to local (hardware) stores mostly

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> I mean, what else besides being able to filter for brands and maybe price is there? So many things. Take a look at NewEgg's search. Even when I search for specific model numbers on Amazon I have to wade through irrelevant results.
- moepstar 5y ago
  Just to clarify, we're on the same page here - with "there" i meant "on Amazon"...
varispeed 5y ago
They should add a country of origin filter (or be mandated by law to do this), so customers can easily filter out all crap from unethical countries. edit: also drop shipping filter would be helpful.
- bootlooped 5y ago
  If the product isn't Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA), there is probably no way to know if it is drop shipped or not. Some of them state the country it will be shipped from, but I'm not sure that is a requirement, and it could still be drop shipped from inside the country.

techaddict009 5y ago

Seems like they were giving gift cards in product box in exchange of reviews: https://twitter.com/corbindavenport/status/1391838929360457743 https://twitter.com/corbindavenport/status/13918389293604577... More detailed info here: https://lifehacker.com/what-the-hell-happened-to-aukeys-products-on-amazon-1846870233 https://lifehacker.com/what-the-hell-happened-to-aukeys-prod... But again so many small & big seller do the same!

wintermutestwin 5y ago
I got offered a $40 gift card for a positive review of a $50 product.

jarym 5y ago

Did they do this to make a one time example out of a big seller and appease critics or is the consensus here that they’re clamping down on fake reviews?

RGamma 5y ago

Unfortunately Stiftung Warentest is not available in English (except its about page) A good way to cut all the crap. https://www.test.de/unternehmen/about-us-5017053-0/ https://www.test.de/unternehmen/about-us-5017053-0/

hh3k0 5y ago
When in doubt, I rely on Stiftung Warentest as well.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Nope. Not anymore. Maybe it was different a few decades ago. Nowadays I'll get strong 'Gell-Mann Amnesia' vibes from them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes... The same goes for Ökotest. It's just another form of marketing because potential customer looks for some red-white label to feel safe. So everybody who can afford it, tries to get some red-white label. It's as worthless as "DLG prämiert" on some sausages from ALDI. Sometimes I've thought "Tickt ihr noch richtig?", because I had the devices they recommended, while I've considered them trash. Especially funny when you have a few decades of them as *.pdf In other words, they manage to make something like a horoscope look like a thoroughly systematic and scientific test, while it isn't, at all. edit: I'd excempt testing of mechanical/electrical safety of devices/appliances, things like energy efficiency and maybe loudness. Anything else I can think of right now is just subjective for comparable items. That's for Warentest. For Ökotest I can only think of obvious proof of toxicity as an exemption. Otherwise even more subjective. edit: Einen hab ich noch! Haus&Garten Test, noch lächerlicher! :-)
hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
Is this basically the German version of Consumer Reports ? https://www.consumerreports.org/ https://www.consumerreports.org/
- moepstar 5y ago
  Yes, it is!

williesleg 5y ago

Couldn't shake them down enough eh?

exabrial 5y ago

Which sucks, because their stuff is actually good.

inoop 5y ago
Did you get free headphones to write this comment? :)
- bradenb 5y ago
  I know you're joking, but I agree with the parent comment. I have a number of AUKEY products and actually have had zero issues. I've also never been bothered by them to give a review (though I suspect if I had given a negative one they might have contacted me).
- exabrial 5y ago
  Hah! No kidding right? Just a long time user before they started the review shenanigans.
interestica 5y ago
Yeah, I have to say I've had good experiences. Im literally plugged into a battery right now that was unlike other options I could find in terms of form factor and capacity: 3 usb a, usb c, lightning, power delivery, micro usb, and super flat (to better fit in a bag). I suppose it's in the good experience that I was blind to the other "review-stuffing" activities.

libertine 5y ago

Like I said in other comment: this is all Amazon doing, and their inactivity towards reports of what clearly was, and is, bad practices. Amazon basically became a rigged marketplace where those who thrive are the ones who can get away with a lot of things. From completely disregarding guidelines, TOS, targeted attacks to destroy competitors listings, you name it. It's just like prisons, people go in and come out worst because that's the game that has to be played in order to survive. The only one to blame is Amazon that promoted these practices by giving leverage to those who did it. With more revenue, more exposure, privileged access to Amazon account managers (yes, talking to a human is a privilege for an Amazon Seller).

specialist 5y ago
Games without rules and referees degenerate into brawls. Similarly, open markets require regulations, enforcement, fair and impartial judiciary (tort), and property rights. Fraud and counterfeits spoil markets. Lowering trust. Increasing transaction costs. Poorly regulated Freedom Markets™ like eBay and Amazon are net negatives, even while a few thrive on the chaos.
- rchaud 5y ago
  Buying from Amazon used to be just as legit as buying from Best Buy, Circuit City or Walmart. They sold the same types of products, but Amazon with its no-sales-tax advantage usually offered better prices and more selection. Then they got greedy and decided to turn the site into Aliexppress US.
  - SmellTheGlove 5y ago
    The joke used to be that Best Buy was just a showroom for Amazon. That is definitely no longer the case.
    - buffet_overflow 5y ago
      I'm genuinely grateful that Amazon has at least pulled those and other even smaller stores into an age of much easier online ordering and delivery.

tanjiro 5y ago

Amazon has been increasing its reliance on 3P sellers (60% of total revenue now compared to <50% a couple of years ago) as they bring in more profit than 1P. Such problems are likely to increase. As others pointed out, plenty of fake reviews out there. I live in UK & do buy electronics from Amazon mainly because its the only reliable (fast delivery + refunds w/o questions) place to buy cheap Chinese stuff.

1-6 5y ago
If you’re like me, after a while, your home gets filled with cheap Chinese stuff. Some go into the trash and some go to the ‘Free Stuff’ pile outside. Unwinding my life without products is a daily/monthly/yearly occurrence and I greatly appreciate quality and thoughtfulness that goes into a product over simple function. I’ve also shifted focus to software and cloud which helps a bit to declutter. I no longer run a lab full of hardware at home.

beckman466 5y ago

This is just a scapegoating of one 'bad apple' to pretend that this action is all that is needed to improve whatever situation Amazon is pretending to tackle here. In reality the system itself is rotten. Aukey is just a sacrificial lamb to distract from that rotten system.

fma 5y ago
Yep...this was known all along by anyone who has ever used Amazon. Now we need to deal with places like Slickdeals which now pushes crap to front page by their partners and bans competitors. This is another way to drive reviews. Though they are legitimate purchases, if you get a crappy product at 50% off you'll likely to leave a better review than a crappy a full price.

mlang23 5y ago

I stopped purchasing from Amazon years ago. I used to have a phase where I was a really good customer, back in the 2005-2012. It felt trashy back then as well, but in a good sense. These days, Amazon is full of faked reviews, duplicate products with vast prize difference, very bad product description quality, and all the things you dont want from a reseller. Granted, for a while, we were willing to accept a certain sloppy style in exchange for the pricing, but this treshold has been crossed long ago. Me perceiving Amazon as complete trash has even spilled over into other offerings. I will not touch Alexa (for various reasons), and I am definitely not going to use their video stuff. I dont want to be customer of a company that has so little standards.

SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago
Same here, I used to get multiple Amazon packages per week, now I try to avoid them. The only reason I buy from them now is to take advantage of their ultra lax return policies. It wasn’t just Amazon that changed though. The proliferation of easier payment options (Apple/Google Pay, PayPal) and availability of one-touch credit card autofill on other websites eroded their moat, at least in my case.
specialist 5y ago
A close relative once had a pretty good business hosted on eBay. (I occasionally helped with computer stuff.) Robust enough for a large garage full of inventory and my aunt and uncle to quit their day jobs. eBay's stewardship of the marketplace started bad and then steadily got worse. Just fighting the search results, where legit products were buried under SEO and copycats, became a full time job. A little bit of jostling, that's just healthy competition, same as it ever was. But when legit business has to cheat just to stay afloat, the market's broken. Eventually, it just wasn't worth the bother.
- TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
  I just canceled my Ebay account a couple days ago (and rarely buy anything from Amazon any more). Ebay and Amazon are victims of their own "success." Everyone understands what they're doing wrong, and exactly when they went astray, but they don't seem to be doing anything about it. Ebay and Amazon continue to strive to be all things to all people selling and buying online, and won't fix the problems we can all plainly see. I note that other apps/services like Etsy or Shopify or Reverb are filling in the gaps left behind from this mentality. I hope these second-tier apps continue to attract more disillusioned people from the first tier, but stay focused on what has made them successful so far.

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tyingq 5y ago

Of course, the number one result when you search for wireless headphones is Amazon's product. The reviews seems to indicate they aren't great: https://www.amazon.com/Echo-Buds-Wireless-immersive-reduction-previous-generation/product-reviews/B07F6VM1S3/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_show_all_btm?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews https://www.amazon.com/Echo-Buds-Wireless-immersive-reductio...

ck2 5y ago

Meanwhile like 1 in 10 things I buy from amazon comes with a sticker or piece of paper from the seller promising free product if people write reviews. You go look on the product pages and it's only good reviews. 100% paid for and amazon has to know about it since the sticker or paper goes through their own fulfillment.

rchaud 5y ago

I couldn't beat them, so I joined them. I bought a no-name tablet stand on Amazon.ca with adjustable height for about $20. The packaging included a note to review the product for a $20 coupon code. Done and done. At this point, who cares? I've been using Amazon for over 20 years. As a young teen, user reviews of music CDs helped build by tastes as they were purely organic expressions of how buyers felt about the music. That ended years ago with the switch to Fulfilled by Amazon aka digital flea market.

the_snooze 5y ago

A few months back, I bought an AKASO Keychain camera to see if it's at least a 75%-decent knock-off of the Insta360 Go. I found that it was a truly terrible product and left a negative review detailing all my impressions and issues with it. Not long afterwards, "Tara" from AKASO (using a gmail.com account with the name "Jessica") sent me multiple requests for the following: >We sincerely appreciate your comment, which is helpful for improvement of our product and service in future. To bring you a better shopping experience, we would like to send you 30 USD gift card. Would you please help us to re-adjusting your comment rating or remove it? Thanks to the Amazon review system, companies would much rather spend money suppressing bad reviews of their shit products instead of spending money to make good products in the first place.

fma 5y ago
Anyone know how these sellers get your email address? I had a similar experience. The product met 90% of what I needed but the advertised 10% did not, and that 10% was critical for what I needed to do. I left a 2 or 3 star review (I forgot). I kept getting spammed to my personal e-mail. I was not sure if they were sending through Amazon system or directly - my guess was directly. Later on I did modify my review. I reduced it by 1 more star.
- nanliu 5y ago
  There's third party services that performs reverse lookup of bad reviews to find the buyer identity and contact info. The whole purpose is to circumvent the Amazon customer contact process. I left 1 star review for a product, and the seller tried continuously to solicit withdraw or revision of the review. I attempted to update the review calling out this behavior with screenshot of the email and Amazon wouldn't approve it. Ultimately, they replaced it with a product revision and immediately got another 20k reviews with near 5 star rating. There's very little anonymity for buyers given all our digital crumbles. The entire digital economy's purpose is to track and identify you as a consumer. On top of this, how reviewers are paid via affiliates is the wrong incentive model. I'm not sure how this could be fixed, but I would be interested in a service that flipped the information asymmetry and gave me insight on the company selling the product and their trust worthiness. Company ownership would be icing on the cake since brands change hand so frequently (see example: https://toolguyd.com/tool-brands-corporate-affiliations/ https://toolguyd.com/tool-brands-corporate-affiliations/).

1-6 5y ago

If a store curated products and presented to the customer only quality products they found interesting, it wouldn’t exist long because customers would just open Amazon’s app and bypass all the store’s hard work and margins. Distributors and retailers who have brand recognition like Birkenstock, LVMH, Rolex, The North Face, and Patagonia can easily ‘do their own thing’ but I hope a collective of smaller brands can come together and make their own storefront. I’ll be ready with dollars.

ItsMonkk 5y ago

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Amazon reviews are just another metric. If you do not have personal accountability, the measure will always be gamed. The reason that reddit is the only place on the internet where you can get general purpose recommendations, is because it relies on the personal accountability of the users giving feedback have between each other. As the subreddit gets to large, this is lost. Treasure small communities. There is no way to improve the system. The more you improve the metric, the more the metric is gamed. Stop relying on metrics.

Saris 5y ago

I find it funny, and also sad that it took a huge data breach showing the public exactly what was going on for Amazon to do something about it. They don't really care about this because they get their cut from the sales and go on their merry way. Maybe if they see sales take enough of a hit from people mis-trusting Amazon they might take a more serious stance on fake reviews.

rootusrootus 5y ago

I would like an alternative to Amazon, but have not yet found anything directly comparable. Despite promises to the contrary, eBay sellers are almost always charging a higher price. Shipping is slow, even from big reputable companies. Amazon has a lock on fast, inexpensive shipping, and it seems to be a very effective moat. If you buy only products 'shipped from and sold by Amazon' then the rate of fraud is low enough that the easy shopping & fast delivery keep you in the fold. Is Amazon immune to disruption?

somacore 5y ago
The closest analog we have here is Instacart. You pay a yearly fee for express delivery, and you get to pick from several local stores to get your stuff. Groceries, Target, you can even get Costco without a membership of your own. The drawbacks are selection and price. On top of express (prime-like pricing) there's also tipping which adds at least 15%. We do it mainly for groceries and some odds and ends, but for sure it's not even coming close to Amazon-level disruption. And then of course none of these places have Amazon's computing services, lol. That's a whole other sport.

ratsmack 5y ago

Reviews are absolutely worthless. All I want to know is how many units have been sold and how many complaints have been issued against the product.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Also returns.

troelsSteegin 5y ago

I would think it's really in Amazon's interest to crack down on fakes. Fakes are bad customer experience. My guess is that fakes are hard to detect at Amazon's operational scale - that it's "not solved" how to filter or curate out shrewd fakes vendors and ads for fakes on the platform at scale. The Amazon market place is like an AppStore without the benefit of code to scan. Amazon does need to signal that they are going to detect the fake sellers. But I also think that they would benefit by implementing a more restrictive listings policy, where they risk some false positives in favor of reducing the overall prevalance of fakes. This is one of the things that makes the AppStore frustrating for publishers to deal with, but it also in principal benefits the Apple customer. A low restriction policy instead favors vendor relationships vs consumer experience. Maybe Amazon benefits by identifying customers with a propensity to buy goods like fakes. One would think Amazon is losing consumers for certain goods. Amazon operates a marketplace. It makes money from sellers, in terms of selling paying to advertise, and it makes money from transactions, as some fraction of sales. It instruments the marketplace, so it knows which consumers are buying which goods. It makes money from its own brands, which given its instrumentation, can efficiently targetly pockets of demand. Amazon does OK as long as it is the default or preferred marketplace for stuff. As a consumer, I should not be seeing fake stuff at all. This is a search quality problem, like not seeing SEO'd spam in search results. If it's hard to tell good stuff from fake stuff, you would think a BestBuy or a Walmart with assured quality would win out. What it looks like now is that not "enough" consumers are turned off from negative Amazon experiences. Do I pay a lower price though a more convenient experience, and risk a notably worse fake, or do I pay a little more, and go to a differernt vendor? I wonder if there is a relative or absolute cost charactic to fakes - like no deal can be but so good and probably not be a fake. What I would want to see is if Amazon is losing sales on higher cost higher risk items to competitors. I think the ultimate question for undestanding Amazon will always be the money - how are the marketplace profits are driven - and in that what's the mix of vendor ads, transaction fees, and consumer targeting. My speculation is that they are working toward technical solutions for fakes, and that they think they have time and position in market to get there. Fakes are not yet enough of an experiential or reputational problem for Amazon to do differently.

Simulacra 5y ago

What bothers me increasingly is how many name brands are NOT on Amazon. The accessory market across the board has become companies I've never heard of, or companies also owned by Amazon. Increasingly, it feels like Amazon is becoming one giant MicroCenter. I do hope virtual sales people don't chase me wanting to add their barcode to my amazon cart.

BugsJustFindMe 5y ago

The Kiwi Design store is still up on Amazon.com, and Kiwi Design's RMA contact is suspiciously "aukey5c@163.com".

rdl 5y ago

The sad thing is Aukey makes pretty uniformly good products; I'd happily disclose that I'd received free products from them if they sent them to me and then write honest reviews (which would probably be 4 or 5 star, at lest for all the Aukey stuff I've bought to date -- cables and batteries and stuff).

nobodytome 5y ago

https://www.amazon.com/s?me=A3KEIBWKST18IS&marketplaceID=ATVPDKIKX0DER https://www.amazon.com/s?me=A3KEIBWKST18IS&marketplaceID=ATV... This seller hired people in US to buy their products then leave 5 stars reviews, they refund + bonus ($10-30) via paypal.