4 ms·

Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products

86 points by tonymet 2mo ago

Amazon now hides nearly all product reviews . Filtering and ordering are disabled . Only the top 5-10 are shown . To opt out, a 5 day email request is required Here is an example of the UI for members of the experiment https://x.com/stillmisanthro1/status/2092441592242028986

maxbobby 2mo ago
It looks like Amazon is starting to hide some reviews to protect against data scraping bots, and in some cases it is affecting real (non-bot) customers. Were you signed in when you got the message? All of the sorting / filtering / search options are showing up fine for me (as a signed in user).
- _vertigo 2mo ago
  When I clicked “see more reviews” while signed out it prompted me to sign in
  - CamperBob2 2mo ago
    That's been the case for years.
- tonymet 2mo ago
  I see it while signed in on all devices (web desktop, iOS, iPad web)
Melatonic 2mo ago
I haven't seen this yet. Never used the app - I use the mobile site usually while logged in (but not always). Unfortunately a few features are missing (like being able to see all items for some reason by a specific seller) but otherwise it works well. Is this you on X or did you link to a random post ?
- tonymet 2mo ago
  It’s an example on X of a UI experiment that I’m in
everdrive 2mo ago
Hard to know how to feel about this. Bots and such have really ruined the value of customer reviews. The best that can be said is they don't work as intended. The question is whether Amazon can actually fix this problem rather than continuing band-aid over it.
- metalliqaz 2mo ago
  they only care about preventing customer data escaping their grasp
- yunwal 2mo ago
  > Bots and such have really ruined the value of customer reviews. This is not true. Bots and such have ruined the value of ratings aggregations. Individual reviews are still useful because you can always find some that you can tell are not bots
  - everdrive 2mo ago
    You can, but you can never be strictly certain that you haven't been duped. At least for me, that uncertainty does a lot of work.
0cf8612b2e1e 2mo ago
Amazon has also changed their email receipts to be worthless. Previously, you would get the product name and price paid, giving you a minimal record sufficient for tracking. Now you get an email that says N items, broadly categorized (housewares, pets, clothing) and no pricing information. Clearly a customer focused decision.
- dgrin91 2mo ago
  This one infuriates me to no end. On credit card bills amazon orders show up as random garbage strings in the description. I had systems that would read these emails and pull out the product data so that I can feed it into my finance tracking system. Now I can't do anything.
  - joshstrange 2mo ago
    This also frustrates me, I vibe-coded [0] a chrome extension that reads the data from Amazon's website (read orders and purchases, which are different things...) and then matches them against the YNAB entries and then updates the memo line in YNAB with the name of the item(s) (after running the item name through a small LLM, haiku, to clean up amazon-speak into something reasonable). This has been working well for me overall. It's not open source (or paid), it's just for me and I'm not looking to maintain or support it but it should be easy to replicate. It does require I go to Amazon on my desktop and click the extension and tell it to "Sync" but that's easy enough and it makes my budgeting way easier. [0] I did this over 1.5 years ago (Jan 2025) so it's probably even easier now, I wrote it with Aider and it cost $27.81 in API credits (this was before Claude Code/coding subscriptions). The only reason I know the cost so exactly is that I had started to write a blog post about it but abandoned it.
    - secabeen 2mo ago
      Quicken Desktop (yes, it still exists) just added this as a new feature as well. It's pretty nice.
  - m463 2mo ago
    your credit card bills are super heavily data mined. I think what they're doing is fine.
josefritzishere 2mo ago
Can't trust Bezos, but also can't trust AI spam. Whatever shall we do?
- cardiffspaceman 2mo ago
  Can we put Bezos on a PIP?
  - 0x002A 2mo ago
    PIP's are for useful people who might go against the flow, not for Bezos like.
  - PKop 2mo ago
    He's not CEO anymore
lnxg33k1 2mo ago
They make it so extremely easy to return that I've never actually bothered to read reviews
- tonymet 2mo ago
  Sometimes that’s not an option, e.g. buying snow chains before a ski trip. Often the reviews reveal product limitations that aren’t specified in the listing.
  - robocat 2mo ago
    Years ago I bought a Dell XPS and an electric kettle, even though they both had a number one complaint on reviews (XPS: coil whine, kettle: plastic lid crazing). Both products are still available and it seems they both have the same complaints from a decade ago. "Dell continues to treat mild-to-moderate coil whine as an inherent characteristic of components rather than a manufacturing defect". Leave a review to help others, but don't expect manufacturers to care about even egregious issues.
    - tonymet 2mo ago
      I agree reviews aren’t perfect. and I’ve had many good products with poor reviews, and vice-versa
VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago
This is false. I was just on Amazon and none of what you said was true. The filter options and reviews are all there
- kay_o 2mo ago
  Presume this is an experiment or phased rollout. I was just on Amazon and only the first page of reviews are visible if logged in and no reviews are visible if logged out. edit: It seems badly done too as the (140) count next to the stars still links to the review section below the description's anchor but simply does nothing onclick due to the fact that the whole destination div is gone.
  - tonymet 2mo ago
    they broke a lot with the reviews for this experiment. e.g. filter by stars no longer works, but the link to it is active.
    - kay_o 2mo ago
      I can't tell if they're trying to fix it with slop now but clicking the number of reviews now jumps below the description. To nothing. Things are going great
- tonymet 2mo ago
  It’s active on my account, and on the X example. It’s likely an experiment. I contacted CS and they need 5 days to respond.
Postosuchus 2mo ago
Hmm... Is it an experiment? I'm seeing all reviews both on the web and in the app (Android phone). Having said so, I am not hopeful. Amazon has gone the enshittification route with the gusto few companies have. And they've been actively (and gleefully) making some of the most useful features near useless. This can be seen most pointedly with order history search. Whereas in the past searching for a string brought up the past orders based on string match, now trying to search for a given term brings up gobs of past orders with items having absolutely no relevance to that search term. My cynical theory here is that someone "improved" order search by bolting on "AI." It pains me a lot. I've been a fiercely loyal Amazon customer since 1994 and for a long time they've been the most customer-obsessed company out there. I can't even describe how different things are now.
- tonymet 2mo ago
  I’m guessing it’s an experiment, since some customers still see the old behavior . I’m in the no-reviews experiment, and so is the twitter post.
HackerThemAll 2mo ago
Have you already brought your country through laziness and convenience to a state where you are subordinate to Amazon? Don't you have other e-commerce sites?
- tonymet 2mo ago
  i don’t follow.
graton 2mo ago
This happened to me starting yesterday. Customer support was no help. Making me seriously consider exploring alternatives to Amazon. This is both on the app and using the website on my computer.
- tonymet 2mo ago
  same experience here. I clicked "send email" and no action was taken. then contacted CS text chat support and they didn't seem to have much insights. they "opened a ticket"
tonymet 2mo ago
Amazon replied : Hello, Thank you for your request to see more customer reviews. Your request has been approved, and you should now see more customer reviews. Thanks for choosing Amazon. ©2026 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Amazon and all related marks are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, Amazon.com, Inc. 410 Terry Avenue N., Seattle, WA 98109.

86 points by tonymet 2mo ago

maxbobby 2mo ago

It looks like Amazon is starting to hide some reviews to protect against data scraping bots, and in some cases it is affecting real (non-bot) customers. Were you signed in when you got the message? All of the sorting / filtering / search options are showing up fine for me (as a signed in user).

_vertigo 2mo ago
When I clicked “see more reviews” while signed out it prompted me to sign in
- CamperBob2 2mo ago
  That's been the case for years.
tonymet 2mo ago
I see it while signed in on all devices (web desktop, iOS, iPad web)

Melatonic 2mo ago

I haven't seen this yet. Never used the app - I use the mobile site usually while logged in (but not always). Unfortunately a few features are missing (like being able to see all items for some reason by a specific seller) but otherwise it works well. Is this you on X or did you link to a random post ?

tonymet 2mo ago
It’s an example on X of a UI experiment that I’m in

everdrive 2mo ago

Hard to know how to feel about this. Bots and such have really ruined the value of customer reviews. The best that can be said is they don't work as intended. The question is whether Amazon can actually fix this problem rather than continuing band-aid over it.

metalliqaz 2mo ago
they only care about preventing customer data escaping their grasp
yunwal 2mo ago
> Bots and such have really ruined the value of customer reviews. This is not true. Bots and such have ruined the value of ratings aggregations. Individual reviews are still useful because you can always find some that you can tell are not bots
- everdrive 2mo ago
  You can, but you can never be strictly certain that you haven't been duped. At least for me, that uncertainty does a lot of work.

0cf8612b2e1e 2mo ago

Amazon has also changed their email receipts to be worthless. Previously, you would get the product name and price paid, giving you a minimal record sufficient for tracking. Now you get an email that says N items, broadly categorized (housewares, pets, clothing) and no pricing information. Clearly a customer focused decision.

dgrin91 2mo ago
This one infuriates me to no end. On credit card bills amazon orders show up as random garbage strings in the description. I had systems that would read these emails and pull out the product data so that I can feed it into my finance tracking system. Now I can't do anything.
- joshstrange 2mo ago
  This also frustrates me, I vibe-coded [0] a chrome extension that reads the data from Amazon's website (read orders and purchases, which are different things...) and then matches them against the YNAB entries and then updates the memo line in YNAB with the name of the item(s) (after running the item name through a small LLM, haiku, to clean up amazon-speak into something reasonable). This has been working well for me overall. It's not open source (or paid), it's just for me and I'm not looking to maintain or support it but it should be easy to replicate. It does require I go to Amazon on my desktop and click the extension and tell it to "Sync" but that's easy enough and it makes my budgeting way easier. [0] I did this over 1.5 years ago (Jan 2025) so it's probably even easier now, I wrote it with Aider and it cost $27.81 in API credits (this was before Claude Code/coding subscriptions). The only reason I know the cost so exactly is that I had started to write a blog post about it but abandoned it.
  - secabeen 2mo ago
    Quicken Desktop (yes, it still exists) just added this as a new feature as well. It's pretty nice.
- m463 2mo ago
  your credit card bills are super heavily data mined. I think what they're doing is fine.

josefritzishere 2mo ago

Can't trust Bezos, but also can't trust AI spam. Whatever shall we do?

cardiffspaceman 2mo ago
Can we put Bezos on a PIP?
- 0x002A 2mo ago
  PIP's are for useful people who might go against the flow, not for Bezos like.
- PKop 2mo ago
  He's not CEO anymore

lnxg33k1 2mo ago

They make it so extremely easy to return that I've never actually bothered to read reviews

tonymet 2mo ago
Sometimes that’s not an option, e.g. buying snow chains before a ski trip. Often the reviews reveal product limitations that aren’t specified in the listing.
- robocat 2mo ago
  Years ago I bought a Dell XPS and an electric kettle, even though they both had a number one complaint on reviews (XPS: coil whine, kettle: plastic lid crazing). Both products are still available and it seems they both have the same complaints from a decade ago. "Dell continues to treat mild-to-moderate coil whine as an inherent characteristic of components rather than a manufacturing defect". Leave a review to help others, but don't expect manufacturers to care about even egregious issues.
  - tonymet 2mo ago
    I agree reviews aren’t perfect. and I’ve had many good products with poor reviews, and vice-versa

VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago

This is false. I was just on Amazon and none of what you said was true. The filter options and reviews are all there

kay_o 2mo ago
Presume this is an experiment or phased rollout. I was just on Amazon and only the first page of reviews are visible if logged in and no reviews are visible if logged out. edit: It seems badly done too as the (140) count next to the stars still links to the review section below the description's anchor but simply does nothing onclick due to the fact that the whole destination div is gone.
- tonymet 2mo ago
  they broke a lot with the reviews for this experiment. e.g. filter by stars no longer works, but the link to it is active.
  - kay_o 2mo ago
    I can't tell if they're trying to fix it with slop now but clicking the number of reviews now jumps below the description. To nothing. Things are going great
tonymet 2mo ago
It’s active on my account, and on the X example. It’s likely an experiment. I contacted CS and they need 5 days to respond.

Postosuchus 2mo ago

Hmm... Is it an experiment? I'm seeing all reviews both on the web and in the app (Android phone). Having said so, I am not hopeful. Amazon has gone the enshittification route with the gusto few companies have. And they've been actively (and gleefully) making some of the most useful features near useless. This can be seen most pointedly with order history search. Whereas in the past searching for a string brought up the past orders based on string match, now trying to search for a given term brings up gobs of past orders with items having absolutely no relevance to that search term. My cynical theory here is that someone "improved" order search by bolting on "AI." It pains me a lot. I've been a fiercely loyal Amazon customer since 1994 and for a long time they've been the most customer-obsessed company out there. I can't even describe how different things are now.

tonymet 2mo ago
I’m guessing it’s an experiment, since some customers still see the old behavior . I’m in the no-reviews experiment, and so is the twitter post.

HackerThemAll 2mo ago

Have you already brought your country through laziness and convenience to a state where you are subordinate to Amazon? Don't you have other e-commerce sites?

tonymet 2mo ago
i don’t follow.

graton 2mo ago

This happened to me starting yesterday. Customer support was no help. Making me seriously consider exploring alternatives to Amazon. This is both on the app and using the website on my computer.

tonymet 2mo ago
same experience here. I clicked "send email" and no action was taken. then contacted CS text chat support and they didn't seem to have much insights. they "opened a ticket"

tonymet 2mo ago

Amazon replied : Hello, Thank you for your request to see more customer reviews. Your request has been approved, and you should now see more customer reviews. Thanks for choosing Amazon. ©2026 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Amazon and all related marks are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, Amazon.com, Inc. 410 Terry Avenue N., Seattle, WA 98109.