10 ms·

Amazon 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 automatica

Amazon 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 ago
Why not just disable product changes altogether?
- charcircuit 3y ago
  Because you may want to improve the picture, description, etc of a product. Not everyone can get everything perfect the first time.
  - ryantgtg 3y ago
    The 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 ago
      Can you actually do that?
      - hippich 3y ago
        It 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...
        topato 3y ago
        As someone who is also a long time seller on Amazon, my unscientific A/B testing seems to point at greater Buy Box control being tantamount to greater control over an ASIN's product details. I work mainly in drop shipping, and it's a constant battle to even get a UPC to actually point to the correct product info. Chinese sellers love to make a product's retail UPC point match to an ASIN for an arbitrary number of that item. But it just seems like in cases like that, Amazon likes to side with whichever seller is making the most sales on that ASIN, no matter the what the facts are
        hippich 3y ago
        For us controlling but box never a problem. But making changes appear - almost always requires at least a week of back and forth with seller support
      - edgineer 3y ago
        I've seen it, both with wildly off reviews, and also in my historical orders. Try browsing through your oldest Amazon orders--you may very well see something you didn't buy at those links now.
      - TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
        Yes, you can sometimes read a review where the product is mentioned and it has nothing to do with the product you are looking at.
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        Suppose you post a product initially and the listing is all messed up. Clearly the wrong dimensions etc. But some people buy it and it's a decent product so it gets good reviews. Now you notice the problems with the listing and want to correct them. Can you?
        ryantgtg 3y ago
        Yes of course. But that is not remotely close to what we’re discussing here.
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        If you have a system that allows you to do that, guess what else you can do with it. If you don't, how do you fix a listing error?
      - heavyset_go 3y ago
        Yes, and it's a feature that most marketplace platforms specifically build out because they profit from new products being sold with glowing reviews from older unrelated products. This feature exists on Amazon, Etsy, eBay, etc.
- bluGill 3y ago
  How can you tell the difference between the same thing but updated packaging for the companies new brand from a whole new thing unrelated to the first? And in the grey area it is this years upgrades/version (is this still the same thing?) Don't forget that it needs to be automated as Amazon is too big to do this manually. And whatever rules you come up with can't be gamed.by creative lawyers.
  - viraptor 3y ago
    There's a massive difference here between changing Widget v1 to Widget V2 and changing a pillow to an air conditioner. There are very simple things they could limit right now, like not allowing to change the listing category after N days without a review and hundreds of other things. > as Amazon is too big to do this manually Amazon allowed a guy to build a dick-rocket for a trip to space. They can hire a hundred people to review those requests. Don't worry about poor Amazon not coping.
    - AlexandrB 3y ago
      I think even allowing changes from V1 to V2 while keeping reviews is pretty bad. It's not unheard of for hardware manufacturers to release a higher quality product initially and then "cost optimize" it to suck later. A good example is hard drives and SMR[1]. Why not allow linking back to the V1 version and its reviews from the V2 so shoppers can judge for themselves instead of having one take the place of the other? [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-disks-are-being-submarined-into-unexpected-channels/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-di...
      - heavyset_go 3y ago
        This is why I think a new listing per SKU requirement would be great. You also see this happen with retailers, where manufacturers work with retailers to build exclusive cheaper versions of existing products that use those products' names and packaging. You end up with situation where the Walmart version of your specific product is actually different than the ones sold everywhere else.
- mildchalupa 3y ago
  In hardware all products are constantly changing. Examples: A part gets obsoleted by vendor, sustaining engineering has to find a replacement. They conduct a small study to see how the new part works. The budget for conducting lengthy tests to determine if a simple change has any effect at the worst case tolerances is typically not there. Suppliers quality changes over time. This is known as supplier quality fade. Suppliers will often underbid a part to win a contract. Then once volume ramps up they begin value engineering. Maybe they add more regrind material to an injection mold. Or they progressively begin to make the part slightly thinner on each subsequent batch. Maybe they begin to use a toxic filler material without notice. An colleague literally had a situation in which a steel casting supplier was putting rocks in the castings. Companies move injection mold tooling from vendor A to vendor B. The tooling might be the same but the settings are different, so the results are then different. Without an excellent quality team that has money and time to check everything this will happen. If you are competing in a marketplace with low margins there will never be enough money to check everything.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Perhaps part of a product, each supplier, and each changed spec should contribute to a unique fingeprint. If you have a product which you keep calling FOO but has changed some spec in the new version (without hw change, perhaps you enabled some firmware option and now it can record 25 minutes instead of 20), it should get a new fingerprint. If it has changed a supplier for a chip, new fingerprint. And so on. And aside from the fingerprint, you should also give all the entries that contributed to it (which when hashed in a structured function should give the same fingerprint), plus things like its production date. Name="FOO", cpu.model="x-dragon-v5", cpu.supplier="Fukimata Japan", ..., fan.supplier="Fans-R-Us",... Reviews then are tied to the product+fingerprint instead of just the product.
    - vianneychevalie 3y ago
      I work in data management for large companies and I can promise you the problem is not a technical one. Which organization has the maturity to actually follow-through with quality data for such systems? Which legislators have the power to enforce such an approach?
hayst4ck 3y ago
I wish we could get some kind of semantic versioning system for manufactured items.
- brookst 3y ago
  It’s called a BOM. But unwieldy to use in this context.
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    Why would it be unwieldy. It doesn't have to face the consumer, just Amazon. All the consumer needs to know is same/not same.
    - brookst 3y ago
      What constitutes same? Is a $2000 TV “not the same” if the manufacturer changed the zip tie on the power cord?
MrOwen 3y ago
Are you aware a portion of this functionality exists already, albeit implemented in a very dark pattern? Go to reviews and in the filtering options, select the variation of the product you're viewing and sort by newest. You'll be able to spot when they changed the product typically and then get a feel for how current product is being reviewed.
- Broken_Hippo 3y ago
  You shouldn't have to. If you look at the reviews for product A, you should be getting reviews for product A. If they've updated product A, it is still product A and they can let you know that it was for an old version. Google already does this for games and apps on their play store. You shouldn't have to sort because companies are showing you reviews for product A, but you are looking at product B. These aren't even reviewing the same product. It is dishonest, and the consumer shouldn't be the one with the responsibility here.
Llamamoe 3y ago
They don't care. In Poland we have a central internet marketplace much like Amazon. It's better to such an overwhelming extent that trying to use Amazon makes me feel sick in comparison. Amazon feels like one of those fake garbage websites that sometimes SEO their way to the frontpage of search results. For a long time I seriously had no idea it was even a real store.
- ufo 3y ago
  What is that marketplace?
  - Vertius 3y ago
    allegro.pl would be my guess
    - wafflemaker 3y ago
      Remember illegaly selling Tibia in-game currency on Allegro. Think I was between 10 and 13 y old. Good old times. Haven't used Allegro much since I've left the country. Heard that after they got bought by someone, they made some user hostile actions like greatly increased their comissions from each sale. Good to hear that. they are still strong and opposing Amazon.
  - omnimus 3y ago
    Places that big tech was not interested in (eastern europe - poland, czechia, slovakia) actualy have competition and while its been condensing (allegro buying lots of competition) there are still many players. Its funny amazon has major warehouses in poland and czechia (fulfillment to germany) but they dont even have czech store. You can buy from amazon.de and have it delivered to czechia but amazon doesnt compete on the market. They try with amazon.pl but i dont think its very popular. Lots of the other companies have things like pickup at physical stores (using packeta.com) or nonstop storage boxes that are everywhere in cities. Amazon would have hard time competing there so why bother. It might show that amazon sttopped inventing in the space. I think its more likely that companies like that will start to successfully compete with amazon in germany. Then again amazon would probably just buy them if it was too threatening.
squarefoot 3y ago
> Amazon could automatically include the name of the product in each review And photos, the original listing ones before the user ones. This wouldn't help for example with different revisions of the same product, but still would do wonders against sellers recycling say reviews of a cat litterbox to sell a pair of shoes. > But how to automatically discount reviews that don't match the new product name That could really work but the discount should be 100% on the seller, otherwise Amazon would have no incentives.
mytailorisrich 3y ago
It's simpler: a listing and all the reviews attached to it ought to be for an unique and specific product. If the product changes then a brand new, clean listing should be created. If this is not the case it's that Amazon does not care.
- octacat 3y ago
  They care. They still get their share from the sales, so they care to keep it like it is now.

mcbutterbunz 3y ago

Why not just disable product changes altogether?

charcircuit 3y ago
Because you may want to improve the picture, description, etc of a product. Not everyone can get everything perfect the first time.
- ryantgtg 3y ago
  The 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 ago
    Can you actually do that?
    - hippich 3y ago
      It 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...
      - topato 3y ago
        As someone who is also a long time seller on Amazon, my unscientific A/B testing seems to point at greater Buy Box control being tantamount to greater control over an ASIN's product details. I work mainly in drop shipping, and it's a constant battle to even get a UPC to actually point to the correct product info. Chinese sellers love to make a product's retail UPC point match to an ASIN for an arbitrary number of that item. But it just seems like in cases like that, Amazon likes to side with whichever seller is making the most sales on that ASIN, no matter the what the facts are
        hippich 3y ago
        For us controlling but box never a problem. But making changes appear - almost always requires at least a week of back and forth with seller support
    - edgineer 3y ago
      I've seen it, both with wildly off reviews, and also in my historical orders. Try browsing through your oldest Amazon orders--you may very well see something you didn't buy at those links now.
    - TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
      Yes, you can sometimes read a review where the product is mentioned and it has nothing to do with the product you are looking at.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      Suppose you post a product initially and the listing is all messed up. Clearly the wrong dimensions etc. But some people buy it and it's a decent product so it gets good reviews. Now you notice the problems with the listing and want to correct them. Can you?
      - ryantgtg 3y ago
        Yes of course. But that is not remotely close to what we’re discussing here.
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        If you have a system that allows you to do that, guess what else you can do with it. If you don't, how do you fix a listing error?
    - heavyset_go 3y ago
      Yes, and it's a feature that most marketplace platforms specifically build out because they profit from new products being sold with glowing reviews from older unrelated products. This feature exists on Amazon, Etsy, eBay, etc.
bluGill 3y ago
How can you tell the difference between the same thing but updated packaging for the companies new brand from a whole new thing unrelated to the first? And in the grey area it is this years upgrades/version (is this still the same thing?) Don't forget that it needs to be automated as Amazon is too big to do this manually. And whatever rules you come up with can't be gamed.by creative lawyers.
- viraptor 3y ago
  There's a massive difference here between changing Widget v1 to Widget V2 and changing a pillow to an air conditioner. There are very simple things they could limit right now, like not allowing to change the listing category after N days without a review and hundreds of other things. > as Amazon is too big to do this manually Amazon allowed a guy to build a dick-rocket for a trip to space. They can hire a hundred people to review those requests. Don't worry about poor Amazon not coping.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    I think even allowing changes from V1 to V2 while keeping reviews is pretty bad. It's not unheard of for hardware manufacturers to release a higher quality product initially and then "cost optimize" it to suck later. A good example is hard drives and SMR[1]. Why not allow linking back to the V1 version and its reviews from the V2 so shoppers can judge for themselves instead of having one take the place of the other? [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-disks-are-being-submarined-into-unexpected-channels/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-di...
    - heavyset_go 3y ago
      This is why I think a new listing per SKU requirement would be great. You also see this happen with retailers, where manufacturers work with retailers to build exclusive cheaper versions of existing products that use those products' names and packaging. You end up with situation where the Walmart version of your specific product is actually different than the ones sold everywhere else.
mildchalupa 3y ago
In hardware all products are constantly changing. Examples: A part gets obsoleted by vendor, sustaining engineering has to find a replacement. They conduct a small study to see how the new part works. The budget for conducting lengthy tests to determine if a simple change has any effect at the worst case tolerances is typically not there. Suppliers quality changes over time. This is known as supplier quality fade. Suppliers will often underbid a part to win a contract. Then once volume ramps up they begin value engineering. Maybe they add more regrind material to an injection mold. Or they progressively begin to make the part slightly thinner on each subsequent batch. Maybe they begin to use a toxic filler material without notice. An colleague literally had a situation in which a steel casting supplier was putting rocks in the castings. Companies move injection mold tooling from vendor A to vendor B. The tooling might be the same but the settings are different, so the results are then different. Without an excellent quality team that has money and time to check everything this will happen. If you are competing in a marketplace with low margins there will never be enough money to check everything.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Perhaps part of a product, each supplier, and each changed spec should contribute to a unique fingeprint. If you have a product which you keep calling FOO but has changed some spec in the new version (without hw change, perhaps you enabled some firmware option and now it can record 25 minutes instead of 20), it should get a new fingerprint. If it has changed a supplier for a chip, new fingerprint. And so on. And aside from the fingerprint, you should also give all the entries that contributed to it (which when hashed in a structured function should give the same fingerprint), plus things like its production date. Name="FOO", cpu.model="x-dragon-v5", cpu.supplier="Fukimata Japan", ..., fan.supplier="Fans-R-Us",... Reviews then are tied to the product+fingerprint instead of just the product.
  - vianneychevalie 3y ago
    I work in data management for large companies and I can promise you the problem is not a technical one. Which organization has the maturity to actually follow-through with quality data for such systems? Which legislators have the power to enforce such an approach?

hayst4ck 3y ago

I wish we could get some kind of semantic versioning system for manufactured items.

brookst 3y ago
It’s called a BOM. But unwieldy to use in this context.
- HWR_14 3y ago
  Why would it be unwieldy. It doesn't have to face the consumer, just Amazon. All the consumer needs to know is same/not same.
  - brookst 3y ago
    What constitutes same? Is a $2000 TV “not the same” if the manufacturer changed the zip tie on the power cord?

MrOwen 3y ago

Are you aware a portion of this functionality exists already, albeit implemented in a very dark pattern? Go to reviews and in the filtering options, select the variation of the product you're viewing and sort by newest. You'll be able to spot when they changed the product typically and then get a feel for how current product is being reviewed.

Broken_Hippo 3y ago
You shouldn't have to. If you look at the reviews for product A, you should be getting reviews for product A. If they've updated product A, it is still product A and they can let you know that it was for an old version. Google already does this for games and apps on their play store. You shouldn't have to sort because companies are showing you reviews for product A, but you are looking at product B. These aren't even reviewing the same product. It is dishonest, and the consumer shouldn't be the one with the responsibility here.

Llamamoe 3y ago

They don't care. In Poland we have a central internet marketplace much like Amazon. It's better to such an overwhelming extent that trying to use Amazon makes me feel sick in comparison. Amazon feels like one of those fake garbage websites that sometimes SEO their way to the frontpage of search results. For a long time I seriously had no idea it was even a real store.

ufo 3y ago
What is that marketplace?
- Vertius 3y ago
  allegro.pl would be my guess
  - wafflemaker 3y ago
    Remember illegaly selling Tibia in-game currency on Allegro. Think I was between 10 and 13 y old. Good old times. Haven't used Allegro much since I've left the country. Heard that after they got bought by someone, they made some user hostile actions like greatly increased their comissions from each sale. Good to hear that. they are still strong and opposing Amazon.
- omnimus 3y ago
  Places that big tech was not interested in (eastern europe - poland, czechia, slovakia) actualy have competition and while its been condensing (allegro buying lots of competition) there are still many players. Its funny amazon has major warehouses in poland and czechia (fulfillment to germany) but they dont even have czech store. You can buy from amazon.de and have it delivered to czechia but amazon doesnt compete on the market. They try with amazon.pl but i dont think its very popular. Lots of the other companies have things like pickup at physical stores (using packeta.com) or nonstop storage boxes that are everywhere in cities. Amazon would have hard time competing there so why bother. It might show that amazon sttopped inventing in the space. I think its more likely that companies like that will start to successfully compete with amazon in germany. Then again amazon would probably just buy them if it was too threatening.

squarefoot 3y ago

> Amazon could automatically include the name of the product in each review And photos, the original listing ones before the user ones. This wouldn't help for example with different revisions of the same product, but still would do wonders against sellers recycling say reviews of a cat litterbox to sell a pair of shoes. > But how to automatically discount reviews that don't match the new product name That could really work but the discount should be 100% on the seller, otherwise Amazon would have no incentives.

mytailorisrich 3y ago

It's simpler: a listing and all the reviews attached to it ought to be for an unique and specific product. If the product changes then a brand new, clean listing should be created. If this is not the case it's that Amazon does not care.

octacat 3y ago
They care. They still get their share from the sales, so they care to keep it like it is now.