Amazon Reviews: Plenty of fraud, even after changes

The recent changes to Amazon's review rules are fantastic. They deal with fraudulent subsidized reviews rampant in the third party seller community. Yet Amazon is quietly leaving a huge source of fraud on the table: Non-buyer reviews.

Amazon accepts reviews on a product from anyone, whether they purchased the product or not. It is a trivial matter for someone to use this as an attack vector against competitors.

A one star review is extremely damaging. Just a few of these can derail ranking and sales. To counteract the effects of one start reviews a whole pile of five star reviews are necessary. Result: Lots of third party sellers had to resort to subsidized reviews. Amazon created the problem.

Sellers need a way to protect themselves from such offensively deployed negative reviews.

Amazon needs to only allow reviews by people who actually purchased the product and have owned it for a reasonable period of time.

You can post a review without buying the product or even before you receive it. How does this make any sense? How can you review vitamins, a tool or a chair before receiving it?

A review, in order to be valid, needs to be legitimate. One way to help legitimize it is to enforce time-from-purchase rules.

Finally, sellers need to be able to address negative reviews before they appear on a product page, affecting ranking and sales. This means giving the seller the ability to solve the problem prior to the publication. This is no different than real life: If your customer isn't happy they call/visit your, file a complaint and you make good on your promises or refund the product. This would be fair to both parties.

In summary, this is what they are missing:

  - Reviewer must actually have purchased the item on Amazon
  - Enforce reasonable time between purchase and review
  - Give sellers with the opportunity to provide excellent
    customer service by being able to deal with negative
    reviews prior to publication