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Amazon tacitly supports this scam because it only cares about sales. It doesn't really care about the sellers. It also knows that positive reviews have a huge

Amazon tacitly supports this scam because it only cares about sales. It doesn't really care about the sellers. It also knows that positive reviews have a huge influence in increasing sales, and negative reviews really dampens sales. This is why Amazon also allows what I call Product Page Hijacking. How this works is, Amazon allows multiple models or variants of a product to be listed on the same page, so that all their reviews are mixed together. This deceptive practice hoodwinks many customers. There are 2 kinds of product page hijacking - somewhat obvious ones and the really sneaky kind. Example of a somewhat obvious one - https://imgur.com/OfZLUeL https://imgur.com/OfZLUeL - here, one product page actually lists multiple router models that have different features and configurations. While it is a bit obvious, the buyer still has to carefully read the reviews to figure out what model the review is about. Example of the sneaky ones are products that only partially list their model number, and list and sell slightly different variants of model under a single product page. E.g search for "TP-Link WR841" in https://dd-wrt.com/support/router-database/ https://dd-wrt.com/support/router-database/ - there are 9 variants of the same model (in essence, 9 different models) that are differentiated by a version number (v9, v10, v11 etc. after their model name). But instead of creating a product page for each variant - "TP-Link WR841N v9" or "TP-Link WR841N v11" or "TP-Link WR841N v13" - only one product page is created under "TP-Link WR841N" and all the variants are sold under it. The variations in the models are sometimes not minor - some of the variants have a higher RAM and even totally different CPU! Since all the variants are sold under one product page, the reviews posted are actually for all these different variants. But the buyer will often have no idea of that. And they may not even receive the product they think the reviews are recommending!

bombcar 5y ago
The router issue is even more insidious as the vendors may not even know which version they have as the manufacturer considers them all identical even though they can be entirely different.
- webmobdev 5y ago
  I don't think it has reached that stage though - so far, they have been clearly labelling the full model name of the product on the box and / or on the product. (I think it may be illegal for them to do otherwise as they have to obtain various certifications when they ship the product). So the vendors do know what products they have. It is kind of deceptive advertising on Amazon - they deliberately mislabel the product model by not including the version number (which is actually part of the model name).

bombcar 5y ago

The router issue is even more insidious as the vendors may not even know which version they have as the manufacturer considers them all identical even though they can be entirely different.

webmobdev 5y ago
I don't think it has reached that stage though - so far, they have been clearly labelling the full model name of the product on the box and / or on the product. (I think it may be illegal for them to do otherwise as they have to obtain various certifications when they ship the product). So the vendors do know what products they have. It is kind of deceptive advertising on Amazon - they deliberately mislabel the product model by not including the version number (which is actually part of the model name).