4 ms·

I value Amazon for the reviews and the hassle-less ordering for years now. I seen prices in local stores sometimes be competitive and sometimes be twice as much

I value Amazon for the reviews and the hassle-less ordering for years now. I seen prices in local stores sometimes be competitive and sometimes be twice as much. I use the Amazon mobile-app to check reviews or compare prices of local items (it uses phone camera and is very fast), and I use http://camelcamelcamel.com/ http://camelcamelcamel.com/ to sanity check the items I wanna buy from amazon.

Nicholas_C 11y ago
>I value Amazon for the review Same here, but I've always wondered if they manipulate reviews. Obviously, crappy reviews on high margin items and good reviews on a different brand of the same item but with low margins are bad for Amazon. I've never seen anything that would lead me to believe they remove reviews but having 100% honest reviews could be hurting their business. I hope to hell and back they never compromise the integrity of their reviews, but I wonder if it's something they've thought about or are currently doing without our knowledge.
- brudgers 11y ago
  Amazon doesn't have to remove reviews. They can just show the five most productive one's on the product page. Given that for many items Amazon has multiple listings of the same thing, they can just put the one's most to their advantage upfront. Amazon can create (price . review rating) anchor points by ordering the listing on the search results page. To put it another way, if you're shopping the most relevant result for ten listings of X is the one with the lowest price. That's not however what "sort by revlevance" seems to mean.
brudgers 11y ago
I've been using Amazon from the days when it was little more than a book store and had a similar experience, though I've never placed a real high value on reviews. That's why I noticed that there was a change and that the change was taking advantage of my habit. Five years ago, there wouldn't have been a reason to compare the Amazon price to your local price. Amazon would have been clearly a better deal on everything except how fast you could have it. That was the fundamental proposition, better price for latency. Now the calculus is more complex and Amazon has deliberately chosen to make it so.

Nicholas_C 11y ago

>I value Amazon for the review Same here, but I've always wondered if they manipulate reviews. Obviously, crappy reviews on high margin items and good reviews on a different brand of the same item but with low margins are bad for Amazon. I've never seen anything that would lead me to believe they remove reviews but having 100% honest reviews could be hurting their business. I hope to hell and back they never compromise the integrity of their reviews, but I wonder if it's something they've thought about or are currently doing without our knowledge.

brudgers 11y ago
Amazon doesn't have to remove reviews. They can just show the five most productive one's on the product page. Given that for many items Amazon has multiple listings of the same thing, they can just put the one's most to their advantage upfront. Amazon can create (price . review rating) anchor points by ordering the listing on the search results page. To put it another way, if you're shopping the most relevant result for ten listings of X is the one with the lowest price. That's not however what "sort by revlevance" seems to mean.

brudgers 11y ago

I've been using Amazon from the days when it was little more than a book store and had a similar experience, though I've never placed a real high value on reviews. That's why I noticed that there was a change and that the change was taking advantage of my habit. Five years ago, there wouldn't have been a reason to compare the Amazon price to your local price. Amazon would have been clearly a better deal on everything except how fast you could have it. That was the fundamental proposition, better price for latency. Now the calculus is more complex and Amazon has deliberately chosen to make it so.