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Ask HN: Is there an extension to block sellers on Amazon?

12 points by burger_moon ↗ HN
I was thinking today it would be nice to block product pages or have a warning banner appear on the page if the seller has a large amount of fake reviews or many recent reviews that are not good.

I was looking at buying a print off Amazon today and just before checking out I remembered to run it through fakespot. Even though everything looked good to me, the ASIN I was looking up got an F grade on reviews. It'd be nice to just avoid sellers entirely who use fake reviews.

5 comments

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gesman
I also think that the whole profitable business model could be built that is entirely based on presenting clear and transparent view on amazon sellers and products.

Amazon is clearly capable yet unwilling to eliminate fraudulent sellers and fake reviews from it's platform and third party solution is long overdue.

tareqak
I think the idea is great, but doesn't it have the same potential problem as making apps involving Twitter's API?
marketgod
This is probably better as you aren't relying on Amazon's API. Scrape every product, get all the sellers, then start flagging each seller as valid or not. Amazon won't really be able to shut you down. Even better is once the extension runs on the users computer, you will be able to scrape using your customers which makes it harder to block. This looks like a great idea.
mike-cardwell
This comment reminds me of the days when I had to run mail systems and people would complain about receiving spam. Doesn't matter if you block 100 spam emails from their mailbox, if even one gets through, the spam filtering is crap. Especially if the spam is "obviously spam" to their human eyes.

Amazon might very well be filtering out a massive amount of fake reviews. In fact, they might be filtering out the vast vast majority of them. But because you can see still see a lot, they must be "unwilling" to do it.

mchannon
You should write one. Most people don't perceive the problem to the extent you perceive it. Traction and customer acquisition will be very hard, so it depends on if you can make it worth your time.

Many fake reviewees engage in the practice not because they're not shipping product as agreed, but because they perceive cheating as necessary. You'll also have to handle the edge cases of when the only seller for an item is disreputable (or faux-reputable).