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From the article: The rules also forbid a few more shady tactics such as review “hijacking.” That’s when a merchant takes a product listing page filled with le
by aaronbrethorst 3y ago
From the article:
The rules also forbid a few more shady tactics such as review “hijacking.” That’s when a merchant takes a product listing page filled with legitimate reviews and swaps in a different product that those customers never actually used. (Earlier this year, the FTC made its first enforcement action for this practice, fining a supplement maker $600,000 for doing this on Amazon.)
- stefan_ 3y agoWhy is the FTC doing Amazons job for them? Fine Amazon until they fix this shit.
- superturkey650 3y agoHow would Amazon generally know if a product has been switched out with an inferior product on the same listing?
- djur 3y agoThey could inspect the goods that they sell like a normal retailer.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoSo drop shipping is illegal then?
- djur 3y agoDrop shipping from a huge number of barely-vetted vendors should be legally risky, yes.
- godelski 3y agoWell the product title and pictures change, don't they? If your semantic meaning of the product change significantly and/or your images do, then it gets automatically flagged. Seems like not too difficult of a machine learning problem. Hell, you could do a lot of it without ML.
- superturkey650 3y agoAhh, I thought it was a case where they kept the listing the same but started changing the product to a lower quality version or knock-offs.
- 6510 3y agoIt would make sense to go after the seller for that but when the product is obviously changed it is much more effective to go after the platform. Something simple like either you delete the reviews or you pay to have your changes reviewed. If it is important to you to change everything it must be worth something.
- courseofaction 3y agoBy doing their jobs.
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoHow could you possibly expect the mest technologocally advanced retsiler on earth, that has invesntwd cloud services and sells machine learning, to match the benchmark set for grandpa's old store, to be aware of what is it theybare selling?
- matheusmoreira 3y agoThey're worth like a trillion dollars. I'm sure they'll figure out that insurmountable problem.
- pixl97 3y agoHeh, they're worth a trillion because they figured how to get you, the user, to do their work. Not because they spend the money they make.
- squeaky-clean 3y agoHow would the FTC know?
- kelnos 3y agoConsumer complaints, for one.
- squeaky-clean 3y agoYeah, my question was more rhetorical though. Amazon could know for the same reasons. Except they make submitting any sort of complaint like that very difficult. If you want to report a review you can't even select a reason for why.
- rapind 3y agoIt’s weird that you can change a product after it’s been sold, and especially after it’s received reviews. The only reason I can think of is to keep your reviews. Regardless, simply version the product on change and only show reviews for the current version would do the trick.
- datavirtue 3y agoBut then you couldnt sell tons of knock-off crap.
- drtz 3y agoRead it and review the change. Just because something is difficult to automate doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago> Just because something is difficult to automate doesn't mean it's not worth doing. Sometimes it does mean that. The number of updates to product listings is large and the proportion of updates that are scams is low. That means you need to be thorough enough to not have false positives or your false positives will outweigh actual scams by a big margin. Which means high cost per inspection. But then you have to apply the high cost inspection to all the updates that aren't scams. It's completely plausible that the cost of doing this could exceed the cost of the scams, i.e. doing it isn't worth it. To prevent this you need actual criminal penalties, because going to jail is a deterrent in a way that having your account closed when you can just turn around and sign up for another one is not.
- datavirtue 3y agoThey are past the point of no return. By the time everyone realized what was going on the fraud was a critical portion of their revenue (silicon valley syndrome). The only things that could possibly stop this are competition that wins by not doing it, or government intervention (or Yellowstone blowing its top).
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoIt doesn't really have anything to do with how long it's been going on. If having better reviews is a competitive advantage then they could do it themselves. The problem is, there is no guarantee that it's worth more than it costs.
- heavyset_go 3y agoThey built out and maintain the features that allow for this to happen. They also rake in an insane amount of revenue for allowing sellers to do this. It's part of their business model.
- firesteelrain 3y agoVersion control. It can be as simple as “Updated version here”. In fact they already have that feature
- cyanydeez 3y agoYou have an inflated idea what business jobs are without regulations
- spoonfeeder006 3y agoAmazon could automatically include the name of the product in each review (but if they haven't done that already the probably don't care) But how to automatically discount reviews that don't match the new product name, i.e. distinguishing from a major name change from a minor rephrase of the same product Not sure how reliable ML is in that scenario
- mcbutterbunz 3y agoWhy not just disable product changes altogether?
- charcircuit 3y agoBecause you may want to improve the picture, description, etc of a product. Not everyone can get everything perfect the first time.
- ryantgtg 3y agoThe person is asking why you can change it to a completely different product that’s in a different category. Like changing a listing for socks to a listing for a monitor stand.
- nevir 3y agoCan you actually do that?
- hippich 3y agoIt is weird on Amazon marketplace. For our own product, for which we have trademark, registered in their brand registry, etc, we often can't make our changes reflect on a live product page. But then we see clearly highjacked product pages, like a 3d printed bracket for mounting GoPro on iris quadcopter I was selling many years ago to a USB cable.... Many in sellers community believe it is inside job, where current employees of Amazon with access to making changes to the product catalog making a side income from such shenanigans. There were cases were Amazon's own product pages were hijacked like that in the past...
- barbariangrunge 3y agoWhy do anti-fraud laws not already cover this category of practices?
- behringer 3y agoFTC rules are not laws. You are still criminally and civilly liable for any crimes you commit, in addition to the FTC fines.
- yafbum 3y agoThe rules should let them fine Amazon instead, this way law enforcement resources won't be spent going after every supplement seller that sets up shop somewhere...
- Broken_Hippo 3y agoIt shouldn't be an either or sort of situations - it is quite possible to go after both. If you don't go after Amazon, the issue continues. If you don't go after the supplement seller, they rebrand and/or just start selling elsewhere and keep up their deceptive practices.
- coldtea 3y agoIt can happen with the same product too. Just lower the quality and specs, but keep the name and outside appereance.
- daveguy 3y agoThis is good news. Shady tactics like these are rampant on Amazon, and I hope Amazon is held partially accountable. I get not wanting liability for third party discussion forums (eg reddit, isp, etc) because of freedom of speech. But when a good or service is literally being sold through the marketplace that marketplace should be held to higher standards than a discussion forum.