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Amazon still isn't doing enough to stop bait-and-switch reviews
- catlikesshrimp 5y agoI only read the 3 star or lower reviews. When they remove the rating filter, I will be in trouble.
- silisili 5y agoI think 4 star reviews are generally helpful as well, because these cheating companies only want and pay for 5 star reviews. Knowing that, basically everything other than 5 is generally pretty honest. A bad sign is when a product has only 1 star and 5 star reviews.
- odonnellryan 5y agoIf you leave a bad review on a high priced item often you will be contacted and offered a refund for removing the review.
- loeg 5y agoOr Amazon will prevent you from posting the critical review in the first place.
- odonnellryan 5y agoI haven't had this one happen!
- navan 5y agoI also have not had this. But a critical review of Dell monitor got deleted after a few months.
- orthecreedence 5y agoThey blocked me from writing reviews entirely, and I haven't been able to get unblocked.
- throaway46546 5y agoIt's also common to get offers of compensation for a good review with the product.
- odonnellryan 5y agoI'm sure! I have thought about this when reading reviews for products. Often they have very similar language used... Pointing out how specific things about the item are really great etc.
- colechristensen 5y agoI have had more than one bad review rejected or removed for dubious reasons.
- nerdjon 5y agoI have been fighting with Amazon on a review for a product I bought and returned for weeks now. The manufacture is trying to bribe me to remove my review (offering me multiple times what I paid for it at this point). I have been trying to update my review to reflect that but it keeps being denied but I am not being told why. It is very frustrating that these companies are able to deceive customers through reviews.
- AlexandrB 5y agoI had the same experience when I received a gift card with my item imploring me to leave a good review. Mentioning this "incentive" in the review got it blocked by Amazon.
- KennyBlanken 5y agoThere are certain things you're not allowed to mention. For example, anything related to shipping speed or delivery issues. Even if the item was shipped direct by the seller. Hope this helps.
- detaro 5y agoAnything related to the seller is not accepted as part of the product review (which makes some sense in most cases, since one product can be offered by multiple sellers).
- nerdjon 5y agoYeah I can see why that makes sense as a blanket rule most of the time. I feel like in this case I am likely calling out the manufacture, but I am not entirely sure.
- asddubs 5y agoin cases of review fraud that rule doesn't make sense though IMO, since no matter who's selling it, it's directly related to the rating of the article presented
- bombela 5y agoI bought a gaming mouse where the middle button could never be pressed in combinaison with another. It turns out there was a firmware update to fix that. And of course it only runs on MS Windows. My review stating this was blocked. I made appeal multiple times and Amazon simply ignored me. Last time I checked the listing had a perfect 5 star rating...
- jcun4128 5y agoOr they just remove it silently (no notification) and then you try to post and it says "not accepting reviews from this account". In my case I was pissed off about these fake battery capacities and I posted evidence (current draws with images) and yeah... Similarly I bought the same replacement battery for a Lenovo laptop and all 3 times (from different companies including Amazon) I got fake ones (fake capacity). It is unfortunate how convenient Amazon is though. The lockers and 1 day shipping.
- civilized 5y agoI don't understand what Amazon thinks it's doing with its legions of data scientists, analysts, product managers and engineers that they consider so much more important than solving this problem, which will destroy their reputation long-term and create space for a competitor. At this rate, Amazon will be on its way to becoming Yelp -- untrusted, irrelevant, ultimately deserted.
- wolverine876 5y ago> Yelp -- untrusted, irrelevant, ultimately deserted. Is that true of Yelp? People I know still use it (I don't).
- binarybits 5y agoWhat do you use?
- wolverine876 5y agoIt depends on what I'm looking for. People I know, local news, objective data, just trying different places until I find one I like. There are no great answers. Yelp does serve as a sort of index of shops.
- tshaddox 5y agoGoogle Maps reviews.
- MattGaiser 5y agoIndeed. As much as few I know trust Yelp, there really isn't anything close to an effective alternative, except for maybe the Uber Eats ratings. This is why this is not a problem for Amazon. Removing Amazon from my life would require substantially restructuring it and losing a lot more time procuring goods. Have I been burned a few times by shoddy goods? Yes, the alternative is spending time in stores or spending days waiting for packages. I can order something in the morning and have it delivered by the evening.
- BoysenberryPi 5y agoPersonally experienced this. I bookmarked a keyboard I was interested in purchasing in a month or so. When I went back it was a completely different item with the same reviews. Just today in fact, I was looking for an office chair seat cushion and found a very telling reddit comment from 3 years ago[1]. I know Amazon has a bulletproof return policy for the most part but I don't want to be hassled with returning everything. This just results in me just not using Amazon. You may be able to justify it for large purchases because of Amazon's return policy but for something as mundane as a can opener or seat cushion? Just shop elsewhere. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/a72co8/seat_cushion_suggestions/ebzyzlu/ https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/a72co8/seat_cushi...
- travoc 5y agoYou don’t have to return it. Print the return label and attach it to whatever you want.
- BoysenberryPi 5y agoI try not to make a habit of so brazenly committing fraud.
- ratsmack 5y agoI believe that is what most people would consider as being dishonesty and fraud.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y agoTwo wrongs are two wrongs no matter which way you slice them. Still, it’s an amusing comment. Amazon is complicit in aiding a third party to commit fraud. Not all of us are just, up right, mature adults, of sound mind and strict morals. Sending them back a steaming pile of dog shit is kind of amusing.
- estaseuropano 5y agoNo, because some minimum wage worker has to unpack it. You don't tskr revenge on the people responsible, but on a poor sob that just wanted to earn a living.
- asd33313131 5y agoSolution? Allow filtering reviews in last 7, 30, 60, 90 days (reviews in last 7 days might show 2.5 of 5 stars, e.g.)
- jmu1234567890 5y agoThis is what I also do, sort reviews chronologically
- estaseuropano 5y agoOnly option is yo sort by newest review. It means bad reviews haven't been purged yet and is unaffected by fake votes.
- tyingq 5y agoFor most categories and products, if they just disallowed the seller from changing the GTIN, and showed the GTIN descriptive wording in the listing, this would be solved.
- alyandon 5y agoThat would be very nice to have. However, in case you are unaware you can sort by most recent reviews although that is not a perfect solution by any means.
- tw04 5y agoWhy would they? The average consumer doesn’t even know what they are and assumes if they have a bad experience with a highly rated product it’s a one-off. I’ve told several friends and family I’ll only use Amazon as a last resort at this point. When they ask why and I explain the bait and switch thing (among many other questionable business practices) they are always shocked to hear that’s a thing.
- KennyBlanken 5y agoBig-name companies have been caught putting out top-performing SSDs and then after the reviews are out, silently shipping drives with worse flash chips, worse controllers, no DRAM cache, etc. Review sites know it happens but don't call it out because then they won't get pre-embargo access to hardware or the company will demand the hardware back. Review sites only really work because they're able to amass a substantial amount of hardware; if everything has to be returned, they can't run comparison tests and the like. And then you have organizations like the Wirecutter who review vacuum cleaners and include a vacuum one of their staff bought 6 years ago alongside currently sold models. ....and if they'd done the slightest bit of homework they'd know that the company had moved production of that specific model to a different country and cheapened all the materials. It's like buying a ~2001MY Mercedes because your 1985 E-class was well built. The early 2000's, Mercedes was cranking out cheaply designed/built crap.
- iamwil 5y agoYeah, it's a pity. It use to be a no-brainer shopping at Amazon. But now, I waste more time sifting through a bunch of cheaply made home goods that I'm just more inclined to look for sturdy, well-made products elsewhere. Also, it seems like they mix the inventory from different vendors, so it ends up being a crap shoot whether you get the original, or a knock-off, and the reviews reflect that.
- wolverine876 5y ago> I'm just more inclined to look for sturdy, well-made products elsewhere. Any tips?
- iamwil 5y agoI signed up for a newsletter called Modern Different that curates products. It's easier to believe the motivation while it's small. Also asking on reddit on the appropriate subreddit is pretty helpful.
- fjert 5y ago>Also, it seems like they mix the inventory from different vendors, so it ends up being a crap shoot whether you get the original, or a knock-off, and the reviews reflect that. I've noticed this so many times. I've stopped buying any sort of health products like supplements or even electric toothbrush heads from Amazon. It scares me seeing reviews about fake products in stuff like that
- asddubs 5y agoYeah, recently I wanted a second charger for my thinkpad. I ended up just buying it on lenovo.com, because I had 0 faith in actually getting a real product from amazon, especially in that category
- purplepatrick 5y agoI don’t get why we need to have good ratings and reviews at all. Why not only allow bad ratings (eg a simple thumbs down) and reviews, then run some ML to detect and normalize semantic patterns (“short battery life”), and then word-cloud or summarize those. Users could then sort ratings ascendingly from least number of bad ratings and scan the semantic patterns. Voilà - a functioning ratings and review setup…
- justinsaccount 5y agoI often search reviews for "linux" to see if anyone mentioned anything like "works out of the box with linux kernel 5.0". It works the other way too, I don't care if someone gave something 1 star because it failed to work on their windows xp machine.
- loeg 5y agoA vendor with bad ratings in that system could just keep creating new product pages to clean their reputation. There's no incentive to have long-lived product pages.
- robert_tweed 5y agoThis is a separate problem Amazon needs to sort out. Far too many duplicate products with a different ASIN. They could easily fix that with manual inventory checking, but they don't. The same process would fix the bait-and-switch problem.
- paulpauper 5y agoread 3 star or lower reviews . those tend to be most accurate
- robert_tweed 5y agoAdversarial reviews. The problem isn't just fake positive reviews. The other problem is fake negative reviews left by competitors, which is already a problem on Amazon. Most 1-star reviews are either stupid & irrelevant (it arrived a day late, ONE STAR! and so forth), or fake. I've seen some categories of products with lots of obviously fake reviews claiming safety issues. These were on every single product I could find, so clearly all the manufacturers were targeting each other. The 2-4 star range has historically been the most reliable, but fake review factories got wise to that a few years ago and will now often intentionally leave a minor gripe in their fake positive reviews to make them seem more authentic. A better solution is to publish the % return rates for products and forget about reviews. You can even normalise that into a 5-star rating by product category, e.g., "Here are the top 5 products similar to this one, with average return rate of 1%. The product you are viewing has a return rate of 15%". With low-friction return reason categories you could even classify high return rates for things like "doesn't look like the photos", "poor quality", "smaller than expected", etc. Unfortunately Amazon's return reasons are variable-friction, so their data on this will be biased, although it might be consistently biased across product groups. I do like the word cloud idea - but pulled from optional free-text return reasons instead of reviews. This doesn't solve the "it broke after 2 years" problem, but neither does the current review system.
- kevindeasis 5y agoThis reminds me of multiple websites. websites that sells specialized items in their niche. their products, all different companies have stellar reviews left in their website via third party software. but you can easily tell that those reviews have to be fake. even though they are verified. you can easily tell fake reviews, its like theyre not even trying to write a fake review. even more hilarious is they sometimes accidentally write a review for the wrong product for the wrong company the thing that worries me is this makes me question if the product that i am buying is actually legit. like is this product actually safe as they say it is and is actually non-toxic to a human’s body
- managerclass 5y agoIt's been a while since I've used sort by average customer review. Only useful sorts are "featured" or possibly price if you put in some filter parameters on the side. Anything else is just asking for hot garbage. There are few things that I buy from amazon now that aren't shipped and sold by amazon. I just don't trust third party sellers unless it's a 'direct' seller aka the company making the product. Almost would prefer if amazon would just remove all third party sellers but I guess they need to maintain their reputation of being the everything store.
- estaseuropano 5y agoAmazon does not separate the inventory so you will never know whether what you get is amazon or third party inventory.
- alicesreflexion 5y agoThis depends on the item. Items that just use a UPC do get comingled, products that use an Amazon-specific barcode like an X00 do not, and this is required for some types of products (eg food or anything with an expiration date) As I understand it, anything used or returned will also get an LPN barcode, which tracks that specific unit.
- amluto 5y ago> Machine learning algorithms are getting sophisticated enough to figure out whether a batch of 100 reviews is mostly talking about can openers or garlic. This barely needs ML. Amazon knows, a priori, what product the reviews were for. The fact that garlic reviews can be repurposed for can openers, regardless of their actual text, is the problem. The real underlying problem is wrong incentives. Amazon makes money when you buy that crappy can opener.
- asddubs 5y agothe problem is also that sellers can claim a product is their own and take over the listing when it's not
- bagacrap 5y agohow do you clarify a valid product update? Aeropress changed the plastic used at some point in ~2013 but didn't publicize it widely. Should the Amazon listing start over from scratch for that type of change?
- amluto 5y agoApple reviews start over unless you explicitly ask for all versions. This is mildly obnoxious but works okay. Amazon could easily show reviews for the current product and a nice display of predecessor products and their reviews.
- qvrjuec 5y agoThis would only work with the assumption that the owners of the product listing would update the version of the product in good faith. It would only be in their interest to do so if the current version of the project would get better reviews than the older version, and what I would imagine normally happens is the old version is made better to get better reviews and is then modified to be cheaper and worse later on.
- amluto 5y ago
- FridayoLeary 5y agoDo they even care about their retail business anymore? Their website is a dumpster fire. (source: take a look at it)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- noduerme 5y agoI wish I could say I stopped buying things off Amazon for ethical reasons, but the truth is, I stopped buying because if you look closely at the reviews, you realize that almost everything for sale there is now a scam or a knock-off. This was a slow creep for awhile, but now the problem has grown exponentially. Amazon is what Canal Street was in the 90s - somewhere to buy fakes, stolen goods, and electronics that might catch fire. Amazon has no interest in fixing this problem, because they know that well over half their "inventory" is now from knockoffs, IP theft and/or bait-and-switch scams. it's almost impossible to find items there anymore that are not fake, whether it's re-packaged hard drives or "pyrex" bowls that explode in the microwave. One way to look at this, and the way I think Amazon must look at it, is that it's not any worse than a third world night market. The attitude of vendors in, e.g. Phnom Penh or Mexico City markets is that the very fact that stupid Americans think they're going to get "real" goods just proves how much they deserve to be scammed. Amazon is actually helping baffled Americans to finally understand what the third world has always known - unboxing is going to be disappointing. Everything you think is affordable is probably fake, and you can't trust the packaging. Only the rich get actual brand products. As America degrades, people will start to get more savvy and more cynical about this, but right now it's still a newish phenomenon and people are shocked, shocked! to find out the kids toys they bought are full of toxic chemicals that we ourselves shipped overseas for burial or "recycling".
- winternett 5y agoScamazon, Wak-Mart, and Turget likely facilitate the sale of shoddy goods because consumers need to repurchase them when they break and overall that makes them higher profits. I've had to buy room fans almost every year because that's really the only local option I have now at big box stores near me, The smaller shops are all closed now. This is why we can't allow the concept of mom-and-pop shops to die off... Quality of consumer goods should always outrank price in terms of importance, that's also possibly why many of the largest outlets are resorting to enabling fake and misleading reviews.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago> Scamazon, Wak-Mart, and Turget Are those nicknames for major retailers or are they knock offs themselves? After shopping at Wu-Mart in Beijing, I really can’t tell anymore. > This is why we can't allow the concept of mom-and-pop shops to die off In Beijing, I was much less likely to get scammed at Walmart or Carrefour than at the many local mom and pop shops.
- RobLach 5y agoThis is such a solve-able problem that it can only be purposeful.
- ilamont 5y agoInternet companies and their defenders sometimes insist that this kind of problem is impossible to solve—that the scale of the web makes a certain amount of bad behavior impossible to stop. Impossible? Which Internet companies have made such a claim? And who is their “defenders” that feels so compelled to step for the likes of Amazon?
- bostik 5y agoAll of them? Not in those words, because "impossible" is a term a corporate PR machine will not want to throw around, but you will see the phrase "a very hard problem" quite often. And for a good reason. Please read: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni... Add the facts that norms vary across cultures, and that laws vary across jurisdictions. But this only relates to user-generated content. Amazon is allowing bait-and-switch across the board, with physical products and their categories. That's not a problem with content moderation, Amazon has a problem with accountability.
- cyounkins 5y agoAmazon has now removed the reviews from the first link, but I found one where the reviews are for glassware. Every review has a 'report abuse' button, but there is nowhere for me to report the product on the page. I use ReviewMeta but unfortunately it doesn't appear to be working for these.
- fma 5y agoI was in the market for a wood filing cabinet. The picture was something I wanted and it had good reviews. When you read the reviews in detail they start talking about using it as a kitchen island. Hmm ...OK. then you look at customer pictures and it's a metal rack. Anyways. I buy online from Walmart or Target first if I can. Walmart seems to automatically price match Amazon, and 0 chance of fakes due to comingling or expired products due to comingling (sellers buy soon to expire products on the cheap, send it to Amazon and it gets mixed with everything else)
- leejo 5y agoIt feels like Amazon is at a place where eBay was about, what, a decade ago? At least from a shopper point of view. In other words it feels like you're overwhelmed by choice but much of that choice makes you feel uneasy. It seems to be full of dodgy sellers using questionable practices like those described in the post, the feedback (review) system is utterly broken, getting in touch with a real person is near impossible, sellers are using bots to game prices and the search system. And (AFAIA) Amazon still doesn't use 3d Secure / Verified by Visa? Perhaps this is a sweetheart deal from the card schemes, given they're so big, or do the issuers not want to take the liability shift? There's something not quite right here. Anyway, I don't know if eBay actually solved any of the problems or if most of the dodgy sellers just moved to Amazon.
- gscott 5y agoThe products on eBay are the same as on Amazon now. All Chinese sellers or drop shippers.
- neilalexander 5y agoAmazon is completely and utterly flooded with companies that sound like they fell right out of a random string generator. If you'd like a bedside alarm clock for example, you have to sift through pages and pages of nonsense "brands" like Tisaika, Keniy, Noklead, Yissvic, Anjank, Coulax, Famicozy, Noklead, Liorque, Jiemei, Paladone, Yzzseason, Tokincen, Hopsem, Mosuo and Moxtoy. It is now incredibly difficult to find products by reputable brands that you stand a chance of recognising, and if you do, they are probably knock-offs too.
- Ensorceled 5y ago> getting in touch with a real person is near impossible The secret seems to be to leave a balanced, well written negative review ... then they contact you pretty quickly.
- ceejayoz 5y agoWe had a power strip catch fire. I left a review with a photo of the scorched strip and started getting bombarded with off-Amazon contact requests to "make it right" if I'd take the photo down.
- grouphugs 5y agothe only thing amazon sells is garbage. literally everything that amazon is selling is going to end up in a landfill in a fewdays/weeks/months maybe a couple years at most. stop making garbage. stop buying garbage
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- adam0c 5y agois it really that hard to spot fake reviews...? come on juat use some common sense and quit being lazy
- arbuge 5y agoIt gets worse. Amazon mixes products from different third party vendors in its marketplace for the same product listing. So even if you find a listing for a brand item with clean reviews which actually pertain to the item in question, you could still very well end up with a cheap low quality knock off when you order it.
- discardedrefuse 5y agoThey use blended inventory to ship the item faster (cheaper). And yes, this means that the "Sold and Shipped from Amazon" badge doesn't mean shit. You're actually better off buying from someone who ships it themselves, because its their reputation on the line.
- stewx 5y agoAmazon makes it very hard to flag listings that have this problem and they often take no action when you do report it. I recently complained to Amazon about some flagrantly irrelevant 5-star reviews on wireless headphones that were actually reviews for backpacks or CDs. It took about a month and numerous, numerous emails to different places to get them to deal with it.
- tristor 5y agoYep. I’ve completely stopped using Amazon and I plan on cancelling Prime soon. The only thing I still sometimes buy on Amazon is books. At this point I only buy things directly from the manufacturer or a listed authorized specialist retailer, and only from brands I have strong evidence are BIFL quality. So much of the stuff in the world is garbage. The one thing I’ve yet to find BIFL quality options is daily wear clothing. At least some clothing articles do have options though. Amazon is just a dumping ground for the worst of Chinese garbage. Almost nothing on the site is of even acceptable quality. It’s really unfortunate, I used to love using Amazon as a customer.
- bagacrap 5y agoI try to only buy things with recognizable brand names on Amazon. The premium you pay to an American intermediary for crap that was ultimately produced in China anyway is the cost of quality control.
- weeblewobble 5y agoI agree it's a huge problem. However, I don't think the solution is censorship by tech oligarchs. A fake review is still speech, and if you believe in free speech and free expression as a social (not legal) principle, I don't see how you can support Jeff Bezos deciding which speech you are and are not allowed to see. The solution to harmful speech (which fake reviews are) is more speech, not censorship. "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to my death your right to mislead people with fake reviews"
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