Lots of them are offering a gift card for a review to purchasers - which seems slightly less scammy as you’re unlikely to leave a good review of a crappy product for a $5 gift card.
I had this happen, left a negative review mentioning the pay-for-review scam, and had the review removed by Amazon because it's "off topic". I don't know if it's just aligned incentives, but Amazon doesn't seem to care about this kind of review stuffing at all.
Of course they are, it's not like Amazon really cares much. With all the power of AWS and deep learning etc., identifying fake reviews should be a piece of cake if you are Amazon. It doesn't affect the bottom line, so why bother.
Amazon used to be the place I went to learn about the quality of a product. If it looked good, well, here I was already on the product page...
Now, with the counterfeit product problem I will no longer consider amazing for anything health, safety or food related.
With the fake review problem, I no longer look at Amazon to figure out if a product is quality or not. Which leads to more purchases from physical stores or other websites.
Between the two of those issues, my use of Amazon has dropped pretty significantly (to the point that I cancelled Amazon Prime during the pandemic).
I agree with what you're saying and I use Amazon much less now too, but Amazon definitely monitors the numbers and they're making more money this way. Who knows how much they're trading long-term reputation for short term gains?
> Who knows how much they're trading long-term reputation for short term gains?
I think this is exactly the risk. Amazon didn’t become huge chasing quarterly or short term gains. The damage they’ve done to their reputation over the last several years may take another 5-10 years to show up in the numbers in a significant way, but by that point it’s much harder to turn around.
It’s hard to know what the long term damage will be, if any, though. I’m certainly not their representative median customer.
I have always found it best to ignore the good reviews and instead look at the negative reviews to identify patterns of complaints.
If there is a pattern of failure ,quality, or issues and its not worth dealing with I wont buy the product. Also if the issues are common among vendors or products then I go with the cheapest. Why pay more if they are all crap or just as risky to buy and it sets a more accurate expectation of the product.
I also typically ignore the negative reviews complaining about the package arriving damaged or late as that can happen with anything as long as I don't need it by a certain date.
I also look for customer pictures of the product if available.
Yeah I have seen that as well and should have clarified that is a possibility. However to avoid that I also look at the middle reviews and avoid the reviews with no or little explanation. However, I avoid the top reviews at all cost which typically is just the manufactures product description anyways.
It also depends on the cost of the product and the PITA it would be to return if defective on how deep I go into looking a the low to mid range reviews.
I absolutely shop more at Best Buy, Costco and other places because of this reason. Whatever I buy at these places, I know they stand behind the quality. Do I go to Best Buy for a $10 cable? No. But a $3000 DSLR, I would rather buy from B&H.
I guess I feel more comfortable commenting on this vs such posts about Google (my employer) because I don't have to worry about leaking anything important but this is absolutely not a piece of cake.
Anyone who has worked on planet scale anti-abuse systems knows this is a very tough and never ending problem.
You think there are obvious signals for good or bad - the 0.01% cases where this does not hold up turns to 20 million daily mistakes if your product has 2B DAUs. You think you built something that works, spammers need to figure out just one loophole to game the system. Sometimes they don't even have to look at a technical loophole, if the economics works out you can even pay normal users small sums of money and the bad activity is now masked by troves of genuine user activity.
It is a little painful to see how HN loves to vilify people working on these issues, but its a little like saying we have police but the crime is not 0 yet. And if the argument is it happens too often that is actually most likely not true - a 99.999% accurate system will make a mistake 600k times every month for 2B DAU activity assuming one user interaction a day for the product. Which is often a big underestimation for many large products.
I do think like any other area there is a lot we can do better and that we are already working on it. But man it sucks to have spent 6 months working 12 hour days just to see someone making grandiose statements on how something is an easy issue to fix when you know its absolutely false.
I guess its fine though, FANG pays well and I enjoy my work and think its a net positive to the society.
This is a bit like arguing that Medicare for all is impossible in the United States because it is such a big country.
This is a straw man argument, because only relative terms matter. Nobody cares about the absolute numbers except your boss. The customers care about their percentage chance of encountering spam and fake reviews.
You're saying it's too hard to achieve 100% success (0% failure rate), and that we should settle for 99.999% success (0.001% failure rate). Multiplying these by big numbers is irrelevant. It could be a trillion. Who cares? The implication is that the system is nearly perfect.
Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template.
The same argument applies for Medicare: The citizens don't care about the absolute budget, they just care about their individual tax increase or decrease. Only a handful of people in the treasury care about the absolute numbers.
You've fallen into a common statistical trap. If we assume the volume of auto-generated spam is significantly (several orders of magnitude) higher than the volume of legitimate reviews (which seems to be the case, and would make sense), having a 99.999% success rate doesn't mean that users will observe 99.999% legitimate reviews.
The equivalent of "medicare for all is impossible" would be that an approach saying "anti spam is impossible so we wont do anything". That is not the case. While I do not know about amazon reviews I would bet its a fairly likely case that they do have teams trying to fight this spam.
The equivalent in your example would be saying we have medicare for all but for some people the system does not work. Thats the state of the world we are in, we are making efforts but they will never be 100% perfect.
>> Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template.
See thats the thing, the only people who know this for certain is the ones who have access to Amazon data. You or I dont know the experience for "most online shoppers". If anything looking at data has repeatedly made me realize that we in tech have a very bad understanding of "generalized overall population" cohorts.
I think it would be very difficult to detect these:
a) with 100% accuracy, and
b) without involving humans at all
but I noticed the trend of fake Amazon reviews some time ago, and some patterns were very evident. I'd click on the profile of a five-star reviewer, more often than not every review they left was five stars. And every product I'd click through on also had a deluge of suspicious five star reviews. I even started scraping data into a graph database but then discovered that Amazon tries very hard to resist scraping attempts and gave up.
I think it would be very possible to set up some kind of basic pattern analysis along these lines. Clearly, merchants are buying positive reviews in bulk, so detecting sudden spikes in positive reviews and working out correlations with other product review dumps wouldn't be difficult. Once you've got a sense of it, you hand the data over to human investigators who take it the rest of the way. But despite its insane wealth, Amazon is clearly not interested in spending the money required to do that.
I suspect anti-abuse at scale is impossible. The mistake (albeit a hugely profitable one) was to turn themselves into a marketplace and platform rather than a curated seller. The implication is clear: any marketplace is untrustworthy and caveat emptor.
"At scale" is a euphemism for an ideology whose goal is world domination, there's no reason for a desire for it to be protected. Anti-abuse systems being in place is more important than preventing constraints on growth.
I mean seriously, in the past several years we've learned that "at scale" is actually a public hazard.
We will never have anything if we decide only perfect things are allowed to exist.
Its not the best example but even our country/state/local level justice system has cases where it fails. In addition to judges actually making incorrect verdicts, there are many ills that cause this - eg. Police not following procedures, poor people not having the money to right wrongs by appealing decisions, being bullied or scared into pleas etc.
That does not mean we should not have a justice system at all. Just like us, the systems we build are not perfect. That does not mean they should not exist. There is immense value in the valley between non existent and perfect.
Amazon: send requests to your customers at random to review products they purchased (perhaps reimburse them for their time with a gift card). Post only those reviews.
How will that help? The seller can still influence and finance the buyers. It may be more expensive but I'm certain the seller will do what is necessary for those high rankings. The stakes are that high.
If Amazon sells 10,000 Acme Widgets and sends an email to just 1% of those customers asking for a review. How is Acme going to game that? Pay all 10,000 purchasers of their product so that the 1% that get the Golden Ticket to write a review give them 5 stars?
The problem seems to me to be that the reviewer gets to decide to post a review. Turn it around and have Amazon select reviewers at random and you've made it much harder to game.
Obviously sellers would initially only need to inform all 10k customers that if Amazon would ever request a review for them, there is a $20 reward waiting for writing a 5 star review. Obviously sellers would word things differently. This system would also be much cheaper to game because you only need to bribe 1% of all your customers.
If it's an "expensive" product, you ask people to buy your product and have them send it back to you for a reward. If it's cheap, the reviewer can keep the item in exchange for a desirable review. The sample rate is irrelevant.. you just need enough reviews to out rank your competitors.
I'm not in the industry but I'm willing to bet there are flourishing communities that participate in this type of trade. And it's as sophisticated as it needs to be to get around Amazons countermeasures.
How else are we seeing so many corrupt reviews? Not like Amazon is just passively watching this happen. This is a huge issue for them since it's a bad user experience and Jeff Bezos is obsessed with satisfying customers.
I understand false positives are a problem - but why can't they simply only show / count reviews they are 99.9% certain AREN'T fake.
You might only show 80% of all user reviews - but if 10% of your reviews are fake - then you're only hiding 10% of real reviews.
Who cares? Amazon definitely doesn't have a problem of not having enough reviews. It does have a problem of having too many products with almost entirely fake reviews.
But this is a total strawman argument. Who cares if you have a few false positives? What is the downside of marking a review as fake when it's not? Next to nothing. You don't even have to tell the person who submitted the review it was treated as fake.
In my opinion it is a huge net positive. Its not the popular opinion on HN but I do think it is.
Its personally been instrumental for me. Coming from a solidly lower middle class background in a developing country - Google was the only reason I could get better at my work and eventually do well financially. It gave me access to information that I could not afford otherwise, books were too expensive for my families income.
Even now I see how much services like search and Youtube help people learn. Youtube created a vibrant community of content in a local language that has helped many of my friends learn things. I recently spoke to a teenager who learnt to repair household electronics by watching tutorials on Youtube - in our local language.
Google has a lot of problems. I mean a lot. But its certainly a net positive in my opinion. While its fun to participate in (legitimate) first world discussions on web standards being killed by Google, it has undoubtedly improved the lives of millions of people from my home country.
Just like people, companies have the ability to do good and bad at the same time. For me the scale for Google is pretty heavily towards good.
I agree - in a lot of these Amazon discussions on HN a lot of people seem to believe Amazon does nothing.
But if you look at e.g. seller forums at Amazon, there are a lot of large threads about the opposite problem - Amazon taking out lots of reviews the sellers consider legitimate.
So clearly they are doing something, and it might even be that only a small minority of fake reviews get through, but due to Amazon's scale there are still a lot of them.
What's interesting is the Chinese companies are actually getting better at this. It's usually multi-part.
* Post a meaningful deposit / security to list, more if you list more.
* Pretty involved complaint resolution process and tracking inventory by actual seller (no comingled inventory).
* Product spot checks by platform itself for stuff that sells a better
* Product spot checks let you also pick up the free product offers for good reviews game players this way.
* Real human support for review bombing situations and de-listings. If you can start untangling the knots a lot of the scam folks are all cross linked.
I've got plenty more, and no one is paying me $100K. So these platforms are mostly just lazy.
Eventually someone will build a knock-off amazon with more trust, and we'll all move there and just use amazon for AWS compute.
It’s similar to rampant doping in competitive sports, where everyone knows what’s going on. When there are millions of dollars at stake in contracts, prize money, and sponsorships, people will cheat and take risks. Even if they’re caught, the payoffs are usually greater than consequences.
The incentives and payoffs are far, far greater than any type of consequences to the seller. Worst case, they can shut down and start another shill store.
I usually just vet reviews for the same product from other online retailers, re: BH Photo, Best Buy, Target, Walmart (although not sure about Walmart reviews), Monoprice, maybe Newegg, etc
I’m part of a FB group where you can get free product in exchange for reviews. All I did was join and I was offered my choice for 60 different free items.
I haven't used amazon in years and this was largely the reason why.
After getting scammed a few times by products that seemed to have good reviews I decided to just keep shopping local instead where I can actually see the product and speak to human beings who used it.
Amazon will forever be the one stop shop for cheap counterfeit shit until they actually address these issues.
Same. I canceled Prime two years ago, and haven't bought anything from Amazon in several months. I just buy locally now, and if I can't find something locally, I buy it from the manufacturer's website or a smaller reseller with a better reputation.
So easy to say. My local stores all have at least a 25 to 50 percent markup on anything on Amazon. Cameras to drones to computers to auto parts. Amazon beats on price by a huge margin.
I'd love to buy tyres and oil from the local shop but the 50 to 100 percent price difference is not worth it.
You have no way of knowing that the overpriced stuff at the local garage is not fake either. I've had the Austrian consumer affairs department intervene on my behalf a number of times when local garages attempt to overprice on items that were either not required during the service or overpriced. I've had local plumbers try to charge double the price on certain items when they thought I wouldn't notice. Your rose colored glasses are quaint. Everybody is out to make a buck and I wouldn't put it past local shops to buy fake products and charge double for it. I'd rather my fake stuff at a decent price thankyou.
I stopped buying electronics after receiving a counterfeit Playstation controller, from the actual, Amazon Choice, PlayStation store. Unsurprisingly, my review that contained a teardown comparing the internals of a genuine controller with the counterfeit didn't ever make it to the product page.
I also stopped buying anything health/body related after receiving some "organic bees wax" for some DIY candles that smelled like a chemical plant and melted at the wrong temperature (who knows what it was) and some vitamin D pills that were all melted.
I recently got an email offering 50% off a seller's products if I left a good review. This is happening on all marketplaces, not just Amazon. The only way I see to truly solve the problem is only allowing verified buyers to leave a review.
Sellers generate fake orders for their products using real identities, actually send the product to those people, but leave a fake review in their name.
I've tried raising the issue repeatedly with Amazon, but I've now given up and look forward to the random crap I get sent almost on a monthly basis.
Better idea: Only verified buyers who have been on Amazon for X amount of time (or some other process to gain trust) should be allowed to leave reviews.
I never experienced it myself, but I’ve seen reviews claiming they had a letter in their package that they’d get X currency if they leave a 5-star-review.
Sorta similar but different, I left a 3 star review for something (cheap headphones that were OK but not great), and got a few emails after it offering me credit etc. if I changed it to a 5 star review.
I didn't, but did report it to Amazon (no idea if they cared at all.)
I received an Instagram ad offering reimbursement to buy a company's product on Amazon.
I signed up with a throwaway e-mail account. They sent a step-by-step guide to go to Amazon, enter a specific search term, scroll until I found their product, purchase it, and then send them the receipt for reimbursement.
They didn't ask me to write a review. They only wanted to generate the appearance of organic search traffic to their product.
The problem really is us, the buyers, who won't purchase something that has zero reviews or only a few reviews.
So in order to even make the first few sales they need to generate a bunch of fake reviews.
This is extremely well known phenomenon especially in the Chinese market where it is also extremely standard to get a bunch of fake reviews to get the ball rolling on sales. Guess what, it happens in the US too.
I don't endorse it, but the sellers are just doing what the buyers incentivize them to do.
Reviews are broken. There needs to be a web of trust for reviews. I would weight a review from somebody I know or trust 1000x more than every Amazon or online review ever left.
It's not just store reviews that are broken - web search is also completely broken because of affiliate spam
I spent far too much time at the moment with each purchase researching and tracking down trusted reviews.
Unless it’s a really big ticket item I’ve given up on product research as the investment is just not worth my time. I just buy whatever Wirecutter tells me to; usually they’re not too wrong.
OMG wire cutter. Affiliate advertising once removed.
EDIT: NextDesk scandal aside, when was the last time you saw WireCutter recommend a product that did NOT offer affiliate commissions (let’s just call a spade a spade: these are kickbacks).
I don’t use WC anymore so I can’t answer that myself. I stopped using them when I saw some companies completely ignored in 2 different industries with which I’m familiar. Those companies did not have kickbacks.
Yes, they will never recommend something they can’t monetize. But they also do some basic product testing and I’ve yet to get actual crap buying their recommendation. If I’m getting something under $100 they get me a good enough solution and save me a lot of time. It’s just not worth the research cost to do better.
I guess the paid alternative is consumer reports, but I feel like they’re not noticeably better.
I am sure there are plenty of honest reviews on the internet, tucked into enthusiast sites or on personal blogs. It's hard to find them unless you're a member of their community. Unless they review a lot of products, you have no continued relationship with them. This means you can't evaluate your opinion of their reviews (as to trustworthiness, or even just taste).
Surely anyone who devotes a lot of time and money to reviewing products is going to want to be (and deserves to be) paid. That means direct payment has to come from the customer, or the business.
The "business pays" model has an incentive to exclude businesses that don't pay, to push you towards more expensive items, and in general to get you to buy shit you don't need. But at least the reviewer has some skin in the game, since you won't continue to buy through their referral links if they recommend too many products that are too bad.
The "customer pays" model seems to solve a lot of the incentive problems, but it's always hard to get people to pay for something that others are giving out for free (even if the free ones are occasionally subpar or even harmful!)
Ultimately, I'm not really sure I see "buyer pays" review sites as terribly unfair? Surely they'll just pass the cost on to customers. Some of the businesses, like NextDesk, seem to find the process unfair. I have some sympathy for them, but the reality is that the products I've bought based on Wirecutter recommendations tend to be better. I don't have the time, or even the ability these days, to pick through search results trying to figure it out for myself.
Maybe I will give Consumer Reports a try, but is the cost of the subscription (of which I don't know the utility), and the lock-in, worth the marginal cost of missing out on great products like NextDesk? Does Consumer Reports even give more complete surveys of options than Wirecutter? Hard to say. I think I would go insane if I spent any more time than I already do looking for "truth" on the internet.
I've recently had bad experiences with wirecutter's recommendations. I no longer trust them. It started a little before the NYT acquired them but the downward momentum accelerated from there.
The biggest flaw I see is their product selection process, it always involves looking at the amazon top sellers. Those are usually filled with astroturfed, paid and bribed reviews.
I haven't found anything better. It's back to my own research and conclusion. I miss the days when sorting Amazon's best selling item was the way to go, adding reddit as a keyword to the search query for best X or even sorting Newegg ratings by best. Nothing seems trustworthy anymore.
I don't mind spending the time researching things because the frustration of owning something that isn't up to usually snuff costs more time, grief and money.
All that being said, here are a few sources I still respect:
It seems like the only hope for a solution here is competition? One would assume review sites need to both be more honest, and take a smaller commission, before they gain market dominance.
Web of trust doesn't scale. This isn't broken because most reviewers can't be trusted. It is broken because a very very few actors are abusing these systems. As someone above pointed out, Amazon can fix this. It isn't a hard problem. The issue is, their incentives are not aligned with fixing it.
This is a useful trick for quickly vetting just about anything that's outside your area of expertise. Often a simple search like "X sucks" or "X is bad" can be very telling. It's a good sign when it's difficult to find well written negative reviews. Of course, there are many misguided negative reviews, but they can still help you make an informed decision.
> They’re way too negative and usually list weird one off problems or shipping issues.
That's presumably why they said "read" the negative reviews. Obviously you don't then base your decision off negative reviews that turn out to not matter.
I agree, sometimes the complaint is a niche problem resulting from the buyer's false expectation but, generally speaking, I've avoided buying a lot of products.
Recent example, shredders all have great 5 star reviews but only the odd negative will point out the obvious problem that cheap shredders are made cheaply and will break in a short space of time.
I think we need this too, but I'm skeptical it would work. I'm afraid most of us don't know/trust enough people. For example, I'm considering buying a sofa from store X, but no one I know has ever bought from store X.
There's a good chance that the items you're most ignorant about are also the items your friends are most ignorant about (or at least enough of them that it'll significantly reduce the quantity of the feedback).
Also, once this became a thing, once it became monetizable, my web of trust would shrink drastically. I mean, geez, I'm even suspicious of my doctors prescriptions.
Maybe we need professional reviewers with a transparent system in place to protect against manipulation (as much as possible). Something like Consumer Reports on a larger scale.
There’s no incentive to fix reviews. Amazon doesn’t gain anything neither does the company selling the product. Unless you’re willing to pay money for reviews, reviews will never factor in the consumers’ interest. People aren’t willing to pay for content.
One solution as a consumer is to buy from a place you trust. It would be nice if there was a version of Amazon that didn't have 3rd party sellers and only consisted of reputable (verified supply chain) products.
Since Amazon is not providing this, one example of a place to shop is Costco in person. Things sold by Costco are generally reliable enough. On top of that, Costco has a generous return policy so I can buy whatever I need. If it was truly unusable/broken, I can return it easily.
Part of the reason I continue to shop on boutique eCommerce sites, for lack of a better term, is that a store with a good reputation can essentially verify it's own catalogue. I know if I buy for X or Y store they will have chosen the best product for the job, because their store's reputation is built on their ability to curate good products.
In the UK we have John Lewis which is a department store with a decent reputation. OK, they are far from perfect, but their product range is curated to the point that when you search for, say, a toaster, you're not overloaded with 1000's of options and their own customer reviews seem to be quite genuine.
Anything over £100, I tend to default to John Lewis rather than amazon.
I'm really sad that APlus (the first incarnation) never really took off. Their review system where you would ask e.g. your tech-friend for tech-recommendations, and those are then visible to any other friends (I think that's how it worked?) seemed really nice.
I don't understand how easy it could be to Google around a bit and find companies offering this service, but its seemingly impossible to stop at scale.
Employ a group of people to go undercover with these firms, who are purposefully violating your platforms TOS, and enact draconian measures against the brands your employees encounter.
This is ridiculously obvious when searching for basically anything on Amazon now. There will be 10 identical product listings with 10 different brand names, many of which have reviews describing, and pictures showing, completely different products.
Amazon loves fake reviews as long as they are 5 star. The more it looks like people buying stuff using amazon are happy, the better that marketing is for Amazon. Look at all these people who are so happy to be buying stuff on Amazon, so much better than the alternatives.
Amazon could clean this up and then watch the average drop. From the removal of the fake fives but also it makes it look more "socially accpetable" to leave 4 and 3 star reviews. So it costs Amazon to do the right thing by the people parting with money for stuff so they don't.
Amazon are well aware of /their/ incentives and when their incentives align with what looks to me a lot like fraud they'll play the plausibly deny game.
Or perhaps I'm wrong they don't know and there's nothing they can do. Amazon employees will probably confirm that.
Disruption often means to offer an alternative, better solution to a poorly solved problem. You seem to be suggesting we don't try and solve the product validation problem at all!
Because the truth is that the reviews are probably almost all fake. Who the f**k IRL takes the time to log back in and leave a product review when the product arrives? I've never done it, and I used to buy from Amazon quite a lot.
This is somewhat true. I review only when am highly impressed or thoroughly disgusted with a product. So-so products where I got more or less what I hoped for, and which is not too highly differentiated from alternatives, I don't bother with reviewing them.
This was what most people did when they bought things online even 15 years ago. I used to leave reviews for almost everything in the 90s and early 2000s. Amazon was a community. At some point of scale that changed.
There are lots of weird things that happen in reviews (from real people). I've often come across three-star reviews which say:
"Product was awesome, but shipping took three days, not one".
There are other reviews I've found useful, for example ones that point out minor flaws. That ability would be lost if you had a simple "good/bad" reaction only.
No please don’t Netflix the Amazon reviews. There is a huge advantage in granularity. Everything in life isn’t so binary, where you either loved or hated it. There is so much gray area in between that makes ratings useful. Netflix neutered their whole rating system when they introduced the thumbs up and down system.
In a way, before Amazon you effectively did have 'quality, curated reviews' - in the form of what products brick and mortar stores chose to stock. Most decent stores aren't going to stock complete garbage, so if you found an item with the attributes you're looking for, it would probably work.
This comment isn't entirely without merit. If Amazon could guarantee the genuineness of every product and description, and delivery times, is there any need for star ratings? Reviews are better because it's easier to differentiate between fake and real reviews for now ( as fake reviews usually contain grammatically incorrect sentences, multiple copies with different names etc )
That's what we have done at the marketplace I'm running in the UK. There are no seller ratings and users are encouraged to share feedback.
I don't know about elsewhere, but Amazon India has been slowly phasing out returns for replacements. It used to be fairly easy to get a return on Amazon, but now almost every product I've bought in the past year or so (and that's a lot of stuff in a variety of categories, thanks to the pandemic) has been replacement-only. If someone gets a fake product, I doubt they'll look for a "replacement", so I'm not sure switching to a return% will be good enough either.
This is, of course, in addition to other issues with removing reviews, such as lacking nuance on why something was returned, etc. I've seen some stellar reviews on Amazon that went out of their way to list the minutiae of a product and the experience of using it, and that's helped me out a lot in the past.
I'm sure some do, happens in the restaurants and hotel ratings systems, too (yelp, Google, trip advisor).
It would be interesting to know how often this happens compared to buying the 5 star reviews. My guess would be that the fake negative reviews for competitors are less than 10% of the total fake reviews.
My mother-in-law no longer buys anything of significance from Amazon after being burned with counterfeit materials.
I carefully check reviews, use fakespot, etc.
There is a point where the eroding of trust will be significant enough to affect the bottom line. Eventually most people know to not trust Amazon reviews, soon it will be.
Certain things it's impossible to avoid - I'm trying to buy 18650 batteries for a flashlight and it's overwhelming trying to find legit sellers. There are some classes of products where it's really hard to tell what's real (reviews not matching product description, obviously fake 5-star and 1-star reviews etc.)
This is where independent resellers via Shopify, their own cart system, etc. have a chance. There's no way to be sure you're getting a real battery from Amazon so I always buy this type of thing from a community-trusted independent vendor that has a real account with authorized suppliers.
It might cost more in shipping and delivery time, but it's strongly preferable to having my desk catch fire due to missing or defective safety components, which are very common among knockoffs. At least there's someone to sue if that happens with an authentic battery.
Shopify is a clusterfu*k of scripted random generated pop-up stores that have no intention of delivering what they promise, most shopify stores are worse than wish.com in my experience
Yup, I've completely abandoned Amazon for ANY kind of battery, and other categories of products (and I've been buying from Amazon for two decades).
I last (foolishly) tried again a few weeks ago for some SR44 cells. Should be easy, right? Nope, after digging into scores of bogus products and reviews, Fakespot, etc., it was just obvious that there are zero trustworthy products in that category. I found another battery specialist supplier, even tho they had a bit longer lead time and no free shipping.
(and don't even get me started on Amazon's lame search and sorting functions)
Totally agree about the searching. I've considered seeing if Amazon has anything resembling an API, or if using some kind of screen-scraping was possible to create an overlay app that would do actually usable searching, but figure they'd just shut it down legally or technically, since good searching is obviously not what they want. It is so obvious that they don't want good searching that the structure their databases in such a way as to ensure that the result is what I call Data-Mush. E.g., the size and weight of the item needs to be two separate sets of fields, clearly identified for the dims/weight of the item itself, and the dims/weight of the packaged item. Yet there is zero consistency or clarity on even that most basic data. Yuk
On the batteries, even the common 18650 is a hopeless cause, at least if we want to get a battery that is what it claims.
A long time ago, it was useful to sort by average review, but now, I need to look at summing the percentage of 1+2-star reviews, and eliminating the high scores, then among the least-bad, check those for bad reviews (e.g., shipping failure, not the vendor's fault, etc.).
It has become a massive chore to use Amazon and hope to get something that is not crap, so evidently, the management there is optimizing for quantities of crap over quality.
Not sure how much this will help for batteries but I've found it helpful for other products, go to the manufacturer's site and try to find a list of authorized distributors. Most of the time you'll find that an authorized distributor also has an amazon store front. Not sure if it still avoids the stock co-mingling problem though if it is stocked through an amazon warehouse.
A lot of the time it's stupid things like advertising a product is glass or crystal when it's actually clear plastic. I got burned by that once. I've also seen manufacturers get burned when they put their branded merchandise up on Amazon only to have a clone/ copy sell under the same SKU. The manufacturer ends up fielding the returns, getting the 1 star reviews, and has little ability to prevent the copycat products.
It's not always "Nike" or some big brand, often it's smaller brands who have built up a reputation but don't have the legal team to fight with Amazon and protect their product from pirates.
Here’s an example from real life just last week. Clorox ToiletWand Refill. Go look on Amazon, I’ll wait here. You’ll find many different sellers, some obviously “third party”, and some that look original but when you delve into the reviews you find stuff like this: https://imgur.com/9vyE8kq
I didn’t want to buy a toilet cleaner that would fall apart and make me fish it out of the toilet, so we went and got them from Target instead.
Amazon needs to separate out the ebay-style new/used peer-to-peer marketplace from the more trusted "Sold by Amazon" stuff.
Both marketplace types are useful (especially for books), but consumer goods need some kind of notice when you're buying from anyone other than Amazon.
I don't understand why counterfeiting isn't just an immediate ban for the vendor. Isn't this a huge liability risk? Or do the get some protection because they're just the "marketplace", like a common carrier?
Amazon comingles inventory. I doubt Amazon knows which vendor supplied the product that was reported as a counterfeit. Even if they did what would stop someone from opening BarCo after Amazon closes FooCo's account?
A big one. I used to spend a lot of money on textbook-grade books from Amazon, but I've mostly stopped now. There's a veritable deluge of people reporting getting copies that are obviously Xeroxed, or photo scanned and printed on cheap paper. It's just not worth the risk.
As a little experiment for other HN readers out there, try this:
Pick out a few random words here: https://www.randomlists.com/random-words . Put those few random words into Amazon's search bar and then order the list from most to least expensive. Then scroll down a bit. This should give you a pretty good selection of a random set of 'real' items. Do this, say, 3-4 times to get ~10 random items not influenced by your search history (presumably). Open them up in new tabs for easier organization. Now, go into a few of those items and try to say that they are 100% not 'fraudulent'.
How many could you get through before you gave up in frustration? Personally I got to about 5 before I gave up trying to determine if they were junk or not.
Likewise. If I see that there are ten sellers for what is (often very obviously) the exact same thing, I know it's crap and the reviews are fake. This would be so easy for Amazon to detect and filter themselves, but they don't. As it is, I end up having to click through to the second or third page of results before I even find anything unique enough to be worth running through fakespot/reviewmeta.
Considering that after almost 25 years there is still no functionality for reporting listings as being fraudulent or counterfeit, that tells you exactly where amazon's priorities lie.
As soon as they implement that feature they'll be swamped with reports on every product regardless of whether it's fake or not. Rival sellers will use it to try to monopolise a product, annoyed customers will use it to take revenge on genuine sellers, and occasionally people will report an actual fake. Unless it's much better than a simple report function it won't work.
I'm sure Amazon has some smart people looking at the numbers on this, but as just one anecdata, my family has been buying a ton of stuff from Amazon since they were just books. Now we buy things that are repeat purchases or a couple of trusted brands (e.g. Amazon Basics or Anker). For bigger purchases (like a medium-basic coffee machine) we're either looking at Costco and Target, or researching a lot on Consumer Reports. Wirecutter used to be good, but hard to trust these days too.
We definitely spend less at Amazon because of lack of trust and counterfeit concerns, and it seems directionally true for the HN crowd. That's got to be a worry for anyone at Amazon - if the people who were early adopters are starting to leave your platform, that's got to be concerning...
Definitely, if it's food or health/medical, I'll skip Amazon & buy it from Target or Walmart directly (not a 3rd party seller on their platforms). Other categories like memory cards, kids products, I'll also avoid Amazon (especially since Amazon reviews of those products often claim they received a fake).
The online version of Walmart now sources from a range of suppliers like Amazon does. I was tracking down the supplier of a used laptop and discovered an eBay posting with exactly the same text and photos.
I buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, some of it I know is a cheap knockoff, but at least I’m paying cheap knockoff prices.
But things I won’t buy on Amazon are SD cards or water filters for my fridge. You end up paying full price for a cheap knockoff. I’m sure there are others, but these two stand out in my mind.
Also just anecdata, but I’m the same way. I don’t mind buying commodity goods off of Amazon, but if I need to know that I’m truly getting product X of brand Y, I now typically go elsewhere, because I just cannot trust that I’m not going to get a counterfeit product. Over the years, I’ve received two counterfeit books and three counterfeit hardgoods from Amazon. That may not seem overwhelming, but it’s enough to break my confidence.
the question really is whether buying brand name goods vs consumables is a bigger market.
amazon might be OK with people going to a different place for brand name goods but continue to buy low cost, no-brand goods from amazon if that market is much larger.
> Over the years, I’ve received two counterfeit books and three counterfeit hardgoods from Amazon.
What I've been ALWAYS wondering when people say such things:
Did you seriously get them when buying from Amazon itself as vendor or are you conveniently leaving out the fact that you bought from some random company which uses the Amazon marketplace?
Because I really cannot believe that something as big as Amazon would be dumb enough to sell counterfeit goods under their own name, and people usually don't mention if they bought from Amazon or not when they say such things.
> Did you seriously get them when buying from Amazon itself
Does it matter ? I go to amazon.com, I give my money to Amazon, I receive a package from Amazon, so for me (and the average user) the one selling me a counterfeit is Amazon.
I see it and treat more like a platform now, a marketplace. Like ebay. It just so happens that one of the biggest sellers there is Amazon itself. My usual process of buying - search for the product I need (generic term for simple items, or exact model), click on "prime only", this filters out a lot of shipments from China. Then either filter out, or carefully look at the seller of each product. Takes some time and getting used to, especially that UI isn't favouring this workflow.
Stock commingling means that you may buy a product that's sold and shipped by Amazon and still get some other seller's counterfeit. That seller simply claims to sell the same product as Amazon, with the same product code, and places it into an Amazon warehouse. Amazon will ship from the place closest to you so they might just ship what they think is the correct item from another seller's stock even if it's actually a counterfeit, and do the clearing later. They later assign one genuine item from the Amazon stock in another warehouse to the seller's stock.
As a buyer you have no control over this and Amazon does their best to be opaque and not allow buyers to publicly flag issues beyond a return and refund because it would reflect poorly on Amazon's image and make them look like peddlers of cheap knockoffs.
Yeah, this whole "marketplace" thing needs to die. I'm watching the exact same thing taking place in real time with a local shopping website that has started including external sellers and "facilitating" or "fulfilling" the order for them through their marketplace. One of the main things I'm noticing is that this "marketplace", as with Amazon, is being flooded with Chinese, unbranded knockoffs with fake pictures. Each actual product * every conceivable variation/renaming of product * every seller willing to sell it = huge explosion in products. (Okay, exaggerating a bit for effect there, but true to some extent).
The marketplace thing only kinda works if you have "dedicated" or "focused" or "themed" sellers that functioning within clearly defined niches/segments. Instead, you get a seller that randomly sells 15 kitchen towels, 3 garden ceramics, 50 woodwork jigs (really only 5, 50 variations), and 1 food product. Next thing you know, I'm searching through 50 pages of "school supplies".
If you can't do the due diligence of even reading the one word that declares from whom you're buying then yes, it matters, it is your fault to be that careless.
What I hear you saying is that Amazon can't be trusted to police their own marketplace, their brand is worse than worthless in that it is an active signal of distrust, and I might as well go to eBay - actually I might better go to eBay, who have much more experience with this same problem and are much more likely to address it effectively. Duly noted.
> If you can't do the due diligence of even reading the one word that declares from whom you're buying
I'm buying from Amazon. From my point of view the other company is not more than a supplier.
If I am the one at fault is not really the point. I will learn my lesson and shop elsewhere, in the end it is Amazon that suffers: if I shop from a big brand's website I expect them to be the ones to do the job of filtering out the crap, not me.
(And this is not even taking into account the issues of amazon commingling the inventory and not fighting properly the fake reviews)
If I use "marketplace", the company that appears on the credit card bill is Amazon. So they're the one with the contractual relationship and who should be held responsible.
Maybe if Amazon made it easier for buyers to filter out marketplace vendors, or didn't automatically co-mingle inventory between themselves and Fulled by Amazon vendors, it would be a lot easier to cut them some slack?
Same. I thought if you bought directly from Amazon instead of a third party seller, then you'd be safe from counterfeits. But it turns out they just mix all the third party stock in with the first party
https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/external/G2001414...
So now it's not safe to buy SD cards and USB sticks directly from Amazon either now
Get SD cards from B&H or Adorama. They serve the pro photographer community, who are ferocious about storage quality largely thanks to war stories from 20 years ago when flash memory really was a crapshoot - also why any new camera body released with only one card slot provokes a million old dudes to fuss about that one wedding shoot they lost in 2003 or whatever. But in this case it's to your benefit, since the media you get from those sellers will be what they say it is.
(I get mine from Micro Center. Kinda feel bad about not going to my local camera store, but the guy who owns the place doesn't really seem at home with technology. I don't even know if they carry UHS-II cards, but I get all my used gear there, and with the margin on that stuff it's not like I'm hurting them by getting a $80 SD card elsewhere...)
This might also be helping their Amazon brands. Easy to stand above the crowd in terms of quality this way. Also, they have all the data they need to target the most profitable / fragmented segments.
Amazon is basically my last resort these days. Unfortunately, the ongoing pandemic means there are times where I can’t justifying going out to buy something. But I wonder if they’ll be taking a bigger than expected hit once things clear up.
Maybe there is a big difference between the US and Europe, but here the only things I can't find anywhere but amazon are typically the cheap Chinese knockoff things (e.g. new cushions for my bose headphones), for everything else there always is a cheaper solution by going with one of the smaller online retailer.
That way I don't have to go through the horrendous amazon interface, which I have the impression tries to actively prevent you from finding what you want. Similar to the strategy of large supermarkets that rearrange goods to maximize customer time at the shop.
Even here in Europe, Amazon still has the monster competitive advantage of Prime. If not for that, I would probably be buying all my gear from Saturn, Mediamarkt, etc.
It's also worth nothing that European Amazon has waaaay less stuff available in general than US Amazon.
When it comes to Amazon reviews you never go by the average you go to scroll down to the actual reviews and read what the one and two star reviews are complaining about and decide if that is acceptable assuming it will happen with your purchase, IMHO.
Sort reviews by new. It’s amazing how many “5 star” items have an average of 2-3 stars when you look at the latest reviews.
I was looking for some L plates for my car. A lot of reviews called them “beautiful”... it is a white square with a letter L that sticks to your car... trying to find one which didn’t fall off or damage the car was far from trivial. Fortunately newer reviews mentioned damage or falling off or does the job which gave some steer.
I have been purposefully shopping elsewhere recently. Other sites are usually cheaper and there is less doubt about what is actually going to get received.
I change the sort URL parameter from &s=review-rank to &s=review-count-rank and tend to put more weight against products with thousands of decent reviews; if nothing in the category has hundreds of reviews, that's a sign to look elsewhere. Perhaps false optimism or a flawed heuristic, but seems to work out for certain categories of stuff.
A lot of reviews raise a red flag in my mind. Particularly, for products which are new. I’ve been burnt with counterfeit and low quality products with a large number of reviews.
This attitude comes from a place of privilege. You can afford a brand-name coffee maker, many can't.
If you look at the median Westerner, most don't have that kind of disposable income to afford those kinds of goods. Amazon offers a cheaper (commodity) price, which drives overall increase in sales.
Amazon is going after Walmart, the lower-end market at the cost of loosing parts of the niche higher-end market.
Sorry, what? The situation we're complaining about is more like this:
> Steve can't normally afford nice things, but he saves up to buy a nice coffee maker on Amazon, paying close to $100 and expecting to receive a product that will last decades. However, Steve receives a counterfeit product in the mail that breaks just a few days after the return window.
With most of these products, you're paying full price but getting an inferior product in return.
> Amazon loves fake reviews as long as they are 5 star.
Do they? It's not immediately clear that an Amazon where the average item has 4.7 stars would sell more stuff than an Amazon where the average is 4.2 stars. Consumers mostly compare items against others on the same site and it's possible that all grade inflation does is make the top performing items harder to separate out and makes buying harder.
As a counterpoint, Uber suffers from ridiculous grade inflation and it doesn't appear to have made riders love them any more. It's simply resulted in everyone adapting to 5 = slightly above average, 4.9 = average, 4.8 = run away screaming.
> It's simply resulted in everyone adapting to 5 = slightly above average, 4.9 = average, 4.8 = run away screaming.
Just out of curiosity from someone who doesn't use Uber, is this an exaggeration or meant pretty much literally? (Not with regard to running away screaming... but is 4.8 genuinely a terrible score?)
Jesus Christ. What's even the point of a 5-star system then? It should be a very simple two option system. Was the ride safe? Did you get where you were going? Then hit the thumbs up button. Otherwise hit the thumbs down button. Or even better, no rating system at all and just provide the option to file reports in bad cases, with that report information being made public in some sense. This idea that rideshare drivers need to be offering entertainment while they drive in order to ensure 5 stars is offensive. When people took cabs, nothing like this happened. A cab pulled up, you got in, they drove, if they tried to take a long route you complained, then you paid your money and got out. End of transaction. Most were good, some were bad. The fact that the cabbie was able to hold and maintain their job was the source of trust you needed to have confidence you would arrive intact.
> This idea that rideshare drivers need to be offering entertainment while they drive in order to ensure 5 stars is offensive.
I find that especially annoying because I don't want to be entertained. I want to get from point A to point B while minding my own business (looking through the window if I'm in a new city or reading something on my phone if not). I don't want to hear about the driver's cryptocurrency adventures, and I don't want them to apologise to me if some other driver cuts them off or something.
Of course I'm gonna give them five stars regardless because I know how ride shares work.
I had a driver once in Poland who told me she was avoiding Asian riders because they didn't give 5* scores, while other customers did, and it was affecting her rating. For some reason in western countries it's assumed no problems == 5*. Would be good if there was a baseline to be able to separate what is "alright, nothing to complain but nothing special either" and "exceptional".
My local Toyota dealer has contacted me after I've used them for a service to ask that I give 5/5 on the feedback form that I get sent. They say that if they get lower than 5 from a few customers, they get a visit from head office. But 5 is "excellent" while 4 is "good", and being British, I tend to go with "good" when they did just what I asked.
Yeah. "All went well" should be a totally acceptable base line, with room above and below. (especially since the "above range" can be quite subjective and/or down to luck)
"If your average rating falls below a 4.3 after your first 25 trips, your profile will be deactivated and you will need to take a quality improvement course in order to be considered for reactivation."
Amazon has become exceedingly dishonest over the last few years.
They deleted my negative review of the Kindle with no explanation or recourse.
Since maybe November, a couple of things I've ordered (shipped and sold by Amazon) were listed as new but were very clearly used. One of these items was a piece of safety-critical equipment that was dangerously damaged and could very likely have caused death or dismemberment if someone with less experience had received the item and tried to use it. I assume some clueless Amazon warehouse worker eyeballs returns and tries to figure out if they can plausibly trick the customer into thinking it's a new item, and if so they put it back up for sale as "new".
If you look at the review average, Amazon skews the numbers anyway. It’s a weighted average.
If they sorted this out and the average reviews started to drop, they could very easily adjust this algorithm and never tell anyone and they’d be fine. I don’t think this is the problem
the actual seat and back rest was wrapped inside a plastic bag. The fake leather just smelled toxic. Literally the whole room would stink and it would give me headaches until I packed it up for a full refund.
In the past 3 months I have ended up returning 80% of my purchases from Amazon because the 5 star reviews did not match with the actual product's performance or quality.
What’s the deal with people answering questions completely irrelevantly on Amazon? Do they boost your review karma if you answer a bunch of questions or something?
When a question is asked Amazon will email blast some small percentage of people who have purchased the product and people selling the product. If a customer who got this email blasts chooses to respond to this email, they may answer the question the only way they know how - completely irrelevantly. Beyond that, I've definitely seen answers where the answerer clearly thinks they are answering a human and not posting to a public page for everyone to read.
I'm surprised you can still write reviews for products and services on Amazon you haven't bought from Amazon.
How much of this racket on places like Amazon and Yelp would be killed if you had a unique generated ID assigned to you once you purchased a good or service and it was verified as delivered?
They should definitely package a unique QR code for verified reviews in the delivered package.
Right before Christmas this year, my dad got a package of some iWatch bands he didn't order, and some other small accessories. It was addressed to him, from some random name he didn't recognize. He asked around all of his friends and family to see if anyone ordered pseudononymously. Presumably this was done in order for someone to be able to generate a fake "verified review" at the peak of Christmas shopping.
Amazon needs to stop allowing review to be left by people who do not have a verified purchase of an item on their accounts. If you really think about reviews, without honesty, trust, and verification the entire review system is meaningless.
I only trust reviews of persons I personally know. At least I know the person exists. However, many of these FB likes seem to be over-motivated by some campign trick, but I also know already who are usual suspects there, so can filter them out.
Right now probably some remote indian village is employing people (like mechanical turk ironically on amazon as well) to write X amount of reviews per day sort of like moderation. In the not so distant future someone will do a GPT3 version of this. Time to reinvent the reviews.
Here's an idea that would never work: how about a financial incentive straight from Amazon for leaving negative reviews?
Let's imagine a universe where Amazon does away with the star rating system and replaces it with a pro/con "tag" list. (e.g. "high quality" "smells bad" "broke quickly"). They then only allow reviews from verified buyers of an item. Amazon then contacts some percentage of said buyers proportionate to the number of reviews the item has has/how recently it was listed (to establish a baseline) and offers a small account credit for a reviewer to clearly state at least one thing they didn't like about the item, requiring a response other than "nothing". This would identify trends or common failure points. The more negative reviews a product has, the higher the reward that Amazon hands out. Scammy sellers would have to consistently "beat Amazon's offer" to get fake positive reviews.
In this hypothetical universe... would sellers setup shell accounts to purchase their own inventory and tank their other products' reviews for Amazon credit? Or would they buy out their own inventory to increase the ratio of positive to negative reviews? Would the cut that Amazon takes for using their platform outweigh the cost of paying off buyers/purchasing their own inventory? Would the cost to Amazon be worth the increased customer engagement?
What does Amazon really offer now: 1) Search convenience, which is really not that big of a deal and 2) Fast delivery but everyone is catching up and do we really need that thing in 2 days instead of 3?
I never buy on Amazon and I don't feel as though I'm missing out.
I haven’t bought anything off of Amazon in 2 years. Granted I use eBay a lot, but the only time I’ve been burned is when I’ve bought something used and the seller never shipped. Otherwise I’ll buy things from Part-express, Vitacost, Target, Best Buy, Sweetwater, etc.
Living in "Servicewüste" Germany I would still buy from amazon, even without the first two points that you mentioned. Because customer support... isn't a thing here. On top of that there's things like higher prices, and more expensive and slower shipping usually slower by up to a week, not by a day or two.
Amazon's customer support goes way and beyond to help you out, I've had hundreds of euros worth of stuff sent to me again right away, no questions asked - because I called them and said that the official delivery information saying that it's been delivered to me personally an hour ago is not true, and I don't have the items.
That all being said, I do wish amazon would take care of fake reviews, and mixed inventory from different sellers.
I'm just spitballing, but what do you guys think about this as a fake-resistant review system?
To list your product on Amazon as a seller, you pay $500 per year as a "review incentivization fee." The algorithm randomly selects buyers and emails them 1 month after their purchase. They are offered $10 to write a review. The chance of being randomly selected as a reviewer auto-adjusts to target a goal of 50 reviews per year, and no one except those people is allowed to post reviews. Also, reviewers can update their reviews later if their impression of the product changes.
If a seller wanted to keep farming reviews, they would now have to buy up the vast majority of their own inventory in the hopes of being selected. Also, my system prevents people who are experiencing one-in-a-million problems (or who are just habitually disgruntled) from dominating the conversation.
It's different because it has Amazon randomly selecting who gets paid to write a review, and the reviewer doesn't have any incentive to lie since they get the $10 regardless.
Sellers are currently paying people (in money and product) for 5 star reviews, which is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve.
It might reduce the incentive for the seller to deal with post-sales problems after that 1-month period. Once they see a person hasn't been selected, they can ignore any of their support requests without worry of a bad review.
They could still leave seller feedback. Amazon has both seller feedback and product reviews two separate metrics and seller feedback impacts a sellers standing on Amazon where as product reviews only reflect on the product.
Many Amazon sellers openly solicit good reviews with a card included with the purchase promising discounts or gifts for good reviews.
This method would just increase that. "We'll pay you $100 if you get chosen and write us a 5-star review" would be a reasonable offer for both buyer and seller.
If I got that offer I would post the 5-star review, claim the $100, and then edit my review to say "They tried to bribe me. 1 star. Photos attached as proof."
But you're right, I think that's a legitimate issue. I'm not saying my plan is perfect, but I'm pretty sure it improves on the status quo.
The GP proposed revamping the review system entirely. What makes you think their revamped system would include a possibility for the seller to delete reviews?
The only fake-resistant review system is one read by critical people.
The problem the star average is used as the only proxy for quality. Even without fake reviews it's completely meaningless since different people like different things (relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/937/).
When I buy things I look at what people complain about when they dislike the product. Is this electronic badly grounded and gave you an electric shock? I'll look somewhere else. Did you give this gay bar a 1-star review because they didn't let you in with the rest of your hen party? Awesome!
Sounds good, may want to tweak the parameters. $500 is a lot to get skin in the game for a small seller, $10 seems good, but then a month is probably not long enough. I buy a lot of tools and machines and gadgets, those are probably best reviewed after 1-2 years of use.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] threadAmazon used to be the place I went to learn about the quality of a product. If it looked good, well, here I was already on the product page...
Now, with the counterfeit product problem I will no longer consider amazing for anything health, safety or food related.
With the fake review problem, I no longer look at Amazon to figure out if a product is quality or not. Which leads to more purchases from physical stores or other websites.
Between the two of those issues, my use of Amazon has dropped pretty significantly (to the point that I cancelled Amazon Prime during the pandemic).
I think this is exactly the risk. Amazon didn’t become huge chasing quarterly or short term gains. The damage they’ve done to their reputation over the last several years may take another 5-10 years to show up in the numbers in a significant way, but by that point it’s much harder to turn around.
It’s hard to know what the long term damage will be, if any, though. I’m certainly not their representative median customer.
If there is a pattern of failure ,quality, or issues and its not worth dealing with I wont buy the product. Also if the issues are common among vendors or products then I go with the cheapest. Why pay more if they are all crap or just as risky to buy and it sets a more accurate expectation of the product.
I also typically ignore the negative reviews complaining about the package arriving damaged or late as that can happen with anything as long as I don't need it by a certain date.
I also look for customer pictures of the product if available.
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[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54063039
It also depends on the cost of the product and the PITA it would be to return if defective on how deep I go into looking a the low to mid range reviews.
Anyone who has worked on planet scale anti-abuse systems knows this is a very tough and never ending problem.
You think there are obvious signals for good or bad - the 0.01% cases where this does not hold up turns to 20 million daily mistakes if your product has 2B DAUs. You think you built something that works, spammers need to figure out just one loophole to game the system. Sometimes they don't even have to look at a technical loophole, if the economics works out you can even pay normal users small sums of money and the bad activity is now masked by troves of genuine user activity.
It is a little painful to see how HN loves to vilify people working on these issues, but its a little like saying we have police but the crime is not 0 yet. And if the argument is it happens too often that is actually most likely not true - a 99.999% accurate system will make a mistake 600k times every month for 2B DAU activity assuming one user interaction a day for the product. Which is often a big underestimation for many large products.
I do think like any other area there is a lot we can do better and that we are already working on it. But man it sucks to have spent 6 months working 12 hour days just to see someone making grandiose statements on how something is an easy issue to fix when you know its absolutely false.
I guess its fine though, FANG pays well and I enjoy my work and think its a net positive to the society.
/rant
This is a straw man argument, because only relative terms matter. Nobody cares about the absolute numbers except your boss. The customers care about their percentage chance of encountering spam and fake reviews.
You're saying it's too hard to achieve 100% success (0% failure rate), and that we should settle for 99.999% success (0.001% failure rate). Multiplying these by big numbers is irrelevant. It could be a trillion. Who cares? The implication is that the system is nearly perfect.
Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template.
The same argument applies for Medicare: The citizens don't care about the absolute budget, they just care about their individual tax increase or decrease. Only a handful of people in the treasury care about the absolute numbers.
The equivalent in your example would be saying we have medicare for all but for some people the system does not work. Thats the state of the world we are in, we are making efforts but they will never be 100% perfect.
>> Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template.
See thats the thing, the only people who know this for certain is the ones who have access to Amazon data. You or I dont know the experience for "most online shoppers". If anything looking at data has repeatedly made me realize that we in tech have a very bad understanding of "generalized overall population" cohorts.
a) with 100% accuracy, and b) without involving humans at all
but I noticed the trend of fake Amazon reviews some time ago, and some patterns were very evident. I'd click on the profile of a five-star reviewer, more often than not every review they left was five stars. And every product I'd click through on also had a deluge of suspicious five star reviews. I even started scraping data into a graph database but then discovered that Amazon tries very hard to resist scraping attempts and gave up.
I think it would be very possible to set up some kind of basic pattern analysis along these lines. Clearly, merchants are buying positive reviews in bulk, so detecting sudden spikes in positive reviews and working out correlations with other product review dumps wouldn't be difficult. Once you've got a sense of it, you hand the data over to human investigators who take it the rest of the way. But despite its insane wealth, Amazon is clearly not interested in spending the money required to do that.
I mean seriously, in the past several years we've learned that "at scale" is actually a public hazard.
Its not the best example but even our country/state/local level justice system has cases where it fails. In addition to judges actually making incorrect verdicts, there are many ills that cause this - eg. Police not following procedures, poor people not having the money to right wrongs by appealing decisions, being bullied or scared into pleas etc.
That does not mean we should not have a justice system at all. Just like us, the systems we build are not perfect. That does not mean they should not exist. There is immense value in the valley between non existent and perfect.
If Amazon sells 10,000 Acme Widgets and sends an email to just 1% of those customers asking for a review. How is Acme going to game that? Pay all 10,000 purchasers of their product so that the 1% that get the Golden Ticket to write a review give them 5 stars?
The problem seems to me to be that the reviewer gets to decide to post a review. Turn it around and have Amazon select reviewers at random and you've made it much harder to game.
I'm not in the industry but I'm willing to bet there are flourishing communities that participate in this type of trade. And it's as sophisticated as it needs to be to get around Amazons countermeasures.
How else are we seeing so many corrupt reviews? Not like Amazon is just passively watching this happen. This is a huge issue for them since it's a bad user experience and Jeff Bezos is obsessed with satisfying customers.
You might only show 80% of all user reviews - but if 10% of your reviews are fake - then you're only hiding 10% of real reviews.
Who cares? Amazon definitely doesn't have a problem of not having enough reviews. It does have a problem of having too many products with almost entirely fake reviews.
However, why doesn't Amazon only allow those who have purchased to leave reviews?
And to ban any company offering monetary or equivalent incentives to leave reviews?
I suggest they are not even trying to tackle the problem.
Its personally been instrumental for me. Coming from a solidly lower middle class background in a developing country - Google was the only reason I could get better at my work and eventually do well financially. It gave me access to information that I could not afford otherwise, books were too expensive for my families income.
Even now I see how much services like search and Youtube help people learn. Youtube created a vibrant community of content in a local language that has helped many of my friends learn things. I recently spoke to a teenager who learnt to repair household electronics by watching tutorials on Youtube - in our local language.
Google has a lot of problems. I mean a lot. But its certainly a net positive in my opinion. While its fun to participate in (legitimate) first world discussions on web standards being killed by Google, it has undoubtedly improved the lives of millions of people from my home country.
Just like people, companies have the ability to do good and bad at the same time. For me the scale for Google is pretty heavily towards good.
But if you look at e.g. seller forums at Amazon, there are a lot of large threads about the opposite problem - Amazon taking out lots of reviews the sellers consider legitimate.
So clearly they are doing something, and it might even be that only a small minority of fake reviews get through, but due to Amazon's scale there are still a lot of them.
What's interesting is the Chinese companies are actually getting better at this. It's usually multi-part.
* Post a meaningful deposit / security to list, more if you list more.
* Pretty involved complaint resolution process and tracking inventory by actual seller (no comingled inventory).
* Product spot checks by platform itself for stuff that sells a better
* Product spot checks let you also pick up the free product offers for good reviews game players this way.
* Real human support for review bombing situations and de-listings. If you can start untangling the knots a lot of the scam folks are all cross linked.
I've got plenty more, and no one is paying me $100K. So these platforms are mostly just lazy.
Eventually someone will build a knock-off amazon with more trust, and we'll all move there and just use amazon for AWS compute.
The incentives and payoffs are far, far greater than any type of consequences to the seller. Worst case, they can shut down and start another shill store.
This is hilariously common.
After getting scammed a few times by products that seemed to have good reviews I decided to just keep shopping local instead where I can actually see the product and speak to human beings who used it.
Amazon will forever be the one stop shop for cheap counterfeit shit until they actually address these issues.
I'd love to buy tyres and oil from the local shop but the 50 to 100 percent price difference is not worth it.
I also stopped buying anything health/body related after receiving some "organic bees wax" for some DIY candles that smelled like a chemical plant and melted at the wrong temperature (who knows what it was) and some vitamin D pills that were all melted.
I've tried raising the issue repeatedly with Amazon, but I've now given up and look forward to the random crap I get sent almost on a monthly basis.
I didn't, but did report it to Amazon (no idea if they cared at all.)
They could ship an empty box if they just needed a tracking number. If the customer isn't coming into the feedback loop, they don't need the product.
The people who work on this at Amazon read HN, but this article won't be their first exposure.
I signed up with a throwaway e-mail account. They sent a step-by-step guide to go to Amazon, enter a specific search term, scroll until I found their product, purchase it, and then send them the receipt for reimbursement.
They didn't ask me to write a review. They only wanted to generate the appearance of organic search traffic to their product.
So in order to even make the first few sales they need to generate a bunch of fake reviews.
This is extremely well known phenomenon especially in the Chinese market where it is also extremely standard to get a bunch of fake reviews to get the ball rolling on sales. Guess what, it happens in the US too.
I don't endorse it, but the sellers are just doing what the buyers incentivize them to do.
It's not just store reviews that are broken - web search is also completely broken because of affiliate spam
I spent far too much time at the moment with each purchase researching and tracking down trusted reviews.
EDIT: NextDesk scandal aside, when was the last time you saw WireCutter recommend a product that did NOT offer affiliate commissions (let’s just call a spade a spade: these are kickbacks).
I don’t use WC anymore so I can’t answer that myself. I stopped using them when I saw some companies completely ignored in 2 different industries with which I’m familiar. Those companies did not have kickbacks.
I guess the paid alternative is consumer reports, but I feel like they’re not noticeably better.
I am sure there are plenty of honest reviews on the internet, tucked into enthusiast sites or on personal blogs. It's hard to find them unless you're a member of their community. Unless they review a lot of products, you have no continued relationship with them. This means you can't evaluate your opinion of their reviews (as to trustworthiness, or even just taste).
Surely anyone who devotes a lot of time and money to reviewing products is going to want to be (and deserves to be) paid. That means direct payment has to come from the customer, or the business.
The "business pays" model has an incentive to exclude businesses that don't pay, to push you towards more expensive items, and in general to get you to buy shit you don't need. But at least the reviewer has some skin in the game, since you won't continue to buy through their referral links if they recommend too many products that are too bad.
The "customer pays" model seems to solve a lot of the incentive problems, but it's always hard to get people to pay for something that others are giving out for free (even if the free ones are occasionally subpar or even harmful!)
Ultimately, I'm not really sure I see "buyer pays" review sites as terribly unfair? Surely they'll just pass the cost on to customers. Some of the businesses, like NextDesk, seem to find the process unfair. I have some sympathy for them, but the reality is that the products I've bought based on Wirecutter recommendations tend to be better. I don't have the time, or even the ability these days, to pick through search results trying to figure it out for myself.
Maybe I will give Consumer Reports a try, but is the cost of the subscription (of which I don't know the utility), and the lock-in, worth the marginal cost of missing out on great products like NextDesk? Does Consumer Reports even give more complete surveys of options than Wirecutter? Hard to say. I think I would go insane if I spent any more time than I already do looking for "truth" on the internet.
https://www.test.de, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung_Warentest
Their reviews are more trustable than from a regular affiliate site but a lot of products score quite well despite being mediocre at best.
The biggest flaw I see is their product selection process, it always involves looking at the amazon top sellers. Those are usually filled with astroturfed, paid and bribed reviews.
I don't mind spending the time researching things because the frustration of owning something that isn't up to usually snuff costs more time, grief and money.
All that being said, here are a few sources I still respect:
* Appliances: Consumer Reports * Kitchenware: America's Test Kitchen * Hardware: Project Farm (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2rzsm1Qi6N1X-wuOg_p0Ng/vid...) * TVs/Monitors/Audio: (https://www.rtings.com) * Gym Equipment: GarageGymReviews (https://www.garagegymreviews.com) * Laptops: (http://www.notebookreview.com)
https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
The real action is 3 star reviews. Those people have really given a lot of thought to the review.
Also the reviews with pictures tend to be useful.
That's presumably why they said "read" the negative reviews. Obviously you don't then base your decision off negative reviews that turn out to not matter.
Recent example, shredders all have great 5 star reviews but only the odd negative will point out the obvious problem that cheap shredders are made cheaply and will break in a short space of time.
There's a good chance that the items you're most ignorant about are also the items your friends are most ignorant about (or at least enough of them that it'll significantly reduce the quantity of the feedback).
Also, once this became a thing, once it became monetizable, my web of trust would shrink drastically. I mean, geez, I'm even suspicious of my doctors prescriptions.
Maybe we need professional reviewers with a transparent system in place to protect against manipulation (as much as possible). Something like Consumer Reports on a larger scale.
Since Amazon is not providing this, one example of a place to shop is Costco in person. Things sold by Costco are generally reliable enough. On top of that, Costco has a generous return policy so I can buy whatever I need. If it was truly unusable/broken, I can return it easily.
Anything over £100, I tend to default to John Lewis rather than amazon.
Employ a group of people to go undercover with these firms, who are purposefully violating your platforms TOS, and enact draconian measures against the brands your employees encounter.
The risk would quickly not be worth the reward.
These “brands” are sometimes a few guys in a garage in China. Shut them down and they popup with a new name the next day, like whack-a-mole.
Amazon could clean this up and then watch the average drop. From the removal of the fake fives but also it makes it look more "socially accpetable" to leave 4 and 3 star reviews. So it costs Amazon to do the right thing by the people parting with money for stuff so they don't.
Amazon are well aware of /their/ incentives and when their incentives align with what looks to me a lot like fraud they'll play the plausibly deny game.
Or perhaps I'm wrong they don't know and there's nothing they can do. Amazon employees will probably confirm that.
There. Problem solved.
Nice people who want to help others out, and angry people who want their money back.
Should just be thumbs up, thumbs down. Maybe a "meh" in between.
Alternatively, ask for ratings as 5 star, treat 4 as a meh, and anything 3 or below as a thumbs down.
"Product was awesome, but shipping took three days, not one".
There are other reviews I've found useful, for example ones that point out minor flaws. That ability would be lost if you had a simple "good/bad" reaction only.
Product has <huge major flaw>. 4 stars.
Product was a slightly different shade than the picture. 1 star
Google's "does this place offer wifi?" type questions seem better than reviews
High quality, curated, independent reviews is probably something that most people would enjoy and appreciate.
That said, the current system is fairly worthless, and what little worth it has is based on hacking it by looking at a specific subset of reviews.
It’s funny because Amazon normalized folks needing reviews on things before buying it.
That's what we have done at the marketplace I'm running in the UK. There are no seller ratings and users are encouraged to share feedback.
This is, of course, in addition to other issues with removing reviews, such as lacking nuance on why something was returned, etc. I've seen some stellar reviews on Amazon that went out of their way to list the minutiae of a product and the experience of using it, and that's helped me out a lot in the past.
I wonder if anyone is deliberately paying for bad reviews of their competitors' products?
It would be interesting to know how often this happens compared to buying the 5 star reviews. My guess would be that the fake negative reviews for competitors are less than 10% of the total fake reviews.
I carefully check reviews, use fakespot, etc.
There is a point where the eroding of trust will be significant enough to affect the bottom line. Eventually most people know to not trust Amazon reviews, soon it will be.
It might cost more in shipping and delivery time, but it's strongly preferable to having my desk catch fire due to missing or defective safety components, which are very common among knockoffs. At least there's someone to sue if that happens with an authentic battery.
If you can run a shopify site as part of a known brand that helps of course.
I last (foolishly) tried again a few weeks ago for some SR44 cells. Should be easy, right? Nope, after digging into scores of bogus products and reviews, Fakespot, etc., it was just obvious that there are zero trustworthy products in that category. I found another battery specialist supplier, even tho they had a bit longer lead time and no free shipping.
(and don't even get me started on Amazon's lame search and sorting functions)
It's hard to attribute the lame search and sorting to incompetence at this point, it's starting to seem more like active malice.
On the batteries, even the common 18650 is a hopeless cause, at least if we want to get a battery that is what it claims.
A long time ago, it was useful to sort by average review, but now, I need to look at summing the percentage of 1+2-star reviews, and eliminating the high scores, then among the least-bad, check those for bad reviews (e.g., shipping failure, not the vendor's fault, etc.).
It has become a massive chore to use Amazon and hope to get something that is not crap, so evidently, the management there is optimizing for quantities of crap over quality.
It's not always "Nike" or some big brand, often it's smaller brands who have built up a reputation but don't have the legal team to fight with Amazon and protect their product from pirates.
My brother was gifted some magnets (strong like bull).
He wanted more, so Amazon had them. They’re not that expensive, but they fell apart. My brother contact the business owner and sent some pictures.
They were counterfeit..
They small business owner sent my brother new ones though, which was nice of him.
Order directly when you can.
I didn’t want to buy a toilet cleaner that would fall apart and make me fish it out of the toilet, so we went and got them from Target instead.
Both marketplace types are useful (especially for books), but consumer goods need some kind of notice when you're buying from anyone other than Amazon.
Pick out a few random words here: https://www.randomlists.com/random-words . Put those few random words into Amazon's search bar and then order the list from most to least expensive. Then scroll down a bit. This should give you a pretty good selection of a random set of 'real' items. Do this, say, 3-4 times to get ~10 random items not influenced by your search history (presumably). Open them up in new tabs for easier organization. Now, go into a few of those items and try to say that they are 100% not 'fraudulent'.
How many could you get through before you gave up in frustration? Personally I got to about 5 before I gave up trying to determine if they were junk or not.
We definitely spend less at Amazon because of lack of trust and counterfeit concerns, and it seems directionally true for the HN crowd. That's got to be a worry for anyone at Amazon - if the people who were early adopters are starting to leave your platform, that's got to be concerning...
But things I won’t buy on Amazon are SD cards or water filters for my fridge. You end up paying full price for a cheap knockoff. I’m sure there are others, but these two stand out in my mind.
amazon might be OK with people going to a different place for brand name goods but continue to buy low cost, no-brand goods from amazon if that market is much larger.
What I've been ALWAYS wondering when people say such things:
Did you seriously get them when buying from Amazon itself as vendor or are you conveniently leaving out the fact that you bought from some random company which uses the Amazon marketplace?
Because I really cannot believe that something as big as Amazon would be dumb enough to sell counterfeit goods under their own name, and people usually don't mention if they bought from Amazon or not when they say such things.
Does it matter ? I go to amazon.com, I give my money to Amazon, I receive a package from Amazon, so for me (and the average user) the one selling me a counterfeit is Amazon.
As a buyer you have no control over this and Amazon does their best to be opaque and not allow buyers to publicly flag issues beyond a return and refund because it would reflect poorly on Amazon's image and make them look like peddlers of cheap knockoffs.
The marketplace thing only kinda works if you have "dedicated" or "focused" or "themed" sellers that functioning within clearly defined niches/segments. Instead, you get a seller that randomly sells 15 kitchen towels, 3 garden ceramics, 50 woodwork jigs (really only 5, 50 variations), and 1 food product. Next thing you know, I'm searching through 50 pages of "school supplies".
If you can't do the due diligence of even reading the one word that declares from whom you're buying then yes, it matters, it is your fault to be that careless.
I'm buying from Amazon. From my point of view the other company is not more than a supplier.
If I am the one at fault is not really the point. I will learn my lesson and shop elsewhere, in the end it is Amazon that suffers: if I shop from a big brand's website I expect them to be the ones to do the job of filtering out the crap, not me.
(And this is not even taking into account the issues of amazon commingling the inventory and not fighting properly the fake reviews)
So now it's not safe to buy SD cards and USB sticks directly from Amazon either now
(I get mine from Micro Center. Kinda feel bad about not going to my local camera store, but the guy who owns the place doesn't really seem at home with technology. I don't even know if they carry UHS-II cards, but I get all my used gear there, and with the margin on that stuff it's not like I'm hurting them by getting a $80 SD card elsewhere...)
That way I don't have to go through the horrendous amazon interface, which I have the impression tries to actively prevent you from finding what you want. Similar to the strategy of large supermarkets that rearrange goods to maximize customer time at the shop.
It's also worth nothing that European Amazon has waaaay less stuff available in general than US Amazon.
I was looking for some L plates for my car. A lot of reviews called them “beautiful”... it is a white square with a letter L that sticks to your car... trying to find one which didn’t fall off or damage the car was far from trivial. Fortunately newer reviews mentioned damage or falling off or does the job which gave some steer.
I have been purposefully shopping elsewhere recently. Other sites are usually cheaper and there is less doubt about what is actually going to get received.
If you look at the median Westerner, most don't have that kind of disposable income to afford those kinds of goods. Amazon offers a cheaper (commodity) price, which drives overall increase in sales.
Amazon is going after Walmart, the lower-end market at the cost of loosing parts of the niche higher-end market.
> Steve can't normally afford nice things, but he saves up to buy a nice coffee maker on Amazon, paying close to $100 and expecting to receive a product that will last decades. However, Steve receives a counterfeit product in the mail that breaks just a few days after the return window.
With most of these products, you're paying full price but getting an inferior product in return.
I am very wary of buying anything electrical on Amazon.
Do they? It's not immediately clear that an Amazon where the average item has 4.7 stars would sell more stuff than an Amazon where the average is 4.2 stars. Consumers mostly compare items against others on the same site and it's possible that all grade inflation does is make the top performing items harder to separate out and makes buying harder.
As a counterpoint, Uber suffers from ridiculous grade inflation and it doesn't appear to have made riders love them any more. It's simply resulted in everyone adapting to 5 = slightly above average, 4.9 = average, 4.8 = run away screaming.
Just out of curiosity from someone who doesn't use Uber, is this an exaggeration or meant pretty much literally? (Not with regard to running away screaming... but is 4.8 genuinely a terrible score?)
I find that especially annoying because I don't want to be entertained. I want to get from point A to point B while minding my own business (looking through the window if I'm in a new city or reading something on my phone if not). I don't want to hear about the driver's cryptocurrency adventures, and I don't want them to apologise to me if some other driver cuts them off or something.
Of course I'm gonna give them five stars regardless because I know how ride shares work.
from https://qz.com/1038285/uber-will-make-riders-explain-when-th...
(citation is dead - not sure where Uber keeps this info now and is it even public)
from https://qz.com/1038285/uber-will-make-riders-explain-when-th...
(citation is dead - not sure where Uber keeps this info now and is it even public)
Another quote from that:
"If your average rating falls below a 4.3 after your first 25 trips, your profile will be deactivated and you will need to take a quality improvement course in order to be considered for reactivation."
They deleted my negative review of the Kindle with no explanation or recourse.
Since maybe November, a couple of things I've ordered (shipped and sold by Amazon) were listed as new but were very clearly used. One of these items was a piece of safety-critical equipment that was dangerously damaged and could very likely have caused death or dismemberment if someone with less experience had received the item and tried to use it. I assume some clueless Amazon warehouse worker eyeballs returns and tries to figure out if they can plausibly trick the customer into thinking it's a new item, and if so they put it back up for sale as "new".
If they sorted this out and the average reviews started to drop, they could very easily adjust this algorithm and never tell anyone and they’d be fine. I don’t think this is the problem
It smelled toxic. Smell didn't dissipate after a month. Returned it and found out buried under all the 5 star reviews of people citing the same issue.
In the past 3 months I have ended up returning 80% of my purchases from Amazon because the 5 star reviews did not match with the actual product's performance or quality.
Dwight, as a reviewer of X, can you help this customer? Rene asked <the question>
So it's like it's been directed at you. So people will answer with "don't know" or "I didn't buy this" or whatever.
How much of this racket on places like Amazon and Yelp would be killed if you had a unique generated ID assigned to you once you purchased a good or service and it was verified as delivered?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushing_(e-commerce)
Right before Christmas this year, my dad got a package of some iWatch bands he didn't order, and some other small accessories. It was addressed to him, from some random name he didn't recognize. He asked around all of his friends and family to see if anyone ordered pseudononymously. Presumably this was done in order for someone to be able to generate a fake "verified review" at the peak of Christmas shopping.
Let's imagine a universe where Amazon does away with the star rating system and replaces it with a pro/con "tag" list. (e.g. "high quality" "smells bad" "broke quickly"). They then only allow reviews from verified buyers of an item. Amazon then contacts some percentage of said buyers proportionate to the number of reviews the item has has/how recently it was listed (to establish a baseline) and offers a small account credit for a reviewer to clearly state at least one thing they didn't like about the item, requiring a response other than "nothing". This would identify trends or common failure points. The more negative reviews a product has, the higher the reward that Amazon hands out. Scammy sellers would have to consistently "beat Amazon's offer" to get fake positive reviews.
In this hypothetical universe... would sellers setup shell accounts to purchase their own inventory and tank their other products' reviews for Amazon credit? Or would they buy out their own inventory to increase the ratio of positive to negative reviews? Would the cut that Amazon takes for using their platform outweigh the cost of paying off buyers/purchasing their own inventory? Would the cost to Amazon be worth the increased customer engagement?
What does Amazon really offer now: 1) Search convenience, which is really not that big of a deal and 2) Fast delivery but everyone is catching up and do we really need that thing in 2 days instead of 3?
I never buy on Amazon and I don't feel as though I'm missing out.
Living in "Servicewüste" Germany I would still buy from amazon, even without the first two points that you mentioned. Because customer support... isn't a thing here. On top of that there's things like higher prices, and more expensive and slower shipping usually slower by up to a week, not by a day or two.
Amazon's customer support goes way and beyond to help you out, I've had hundreds of euros worth of stuff sent to me again right away, no questions asked - because I called them and said that the official delivery information saying that it's been delivered to me personally an hour ago is not true, and I don't have the items.
That all being said, I do wish amazon would take care of fake reviews, and mixed inventory from different sellers.
To list your product on Amazon as a seller, you pay $500 per year as a "review incentivization fee." The algorithm randomly selects buyers and emails them 1 month after their purchase. They are offered $10 to write a review. The chance of being randomly selected as a reviewer auto-adjusts to target a goal of 50 reviews per year, and no one except those people is allowed to post reviews. Also, reviewers can update their reviews later if their impression of the product changes.
If a seller wanted to keep farming reviews, they would now have to buy up the vast majority of their own inventory in the hopes of being selected. Also, my system prevents people who are experiencing one-in-a-million problems (or who are just habitually disgruntled) from dominating the conversation.
> If a seller wanted to keep farming reviews, they would now have to buy up the vast majority of their own inventory in the hopes of being selected.
They already have 100 people buy their product and fully pay for it for a review.
Sellers are currently paying people (in money and product) for 5 star reviews, which is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve.
Your system may have minor chance of success if there was no way for the sellers to contact customers.
This method would just increase that. "We'll pay you $100 if you get chosen and write us a 5-star review" would be a reasonable offer for both buyer and seller.
But you're right, I think that's a legitimate issue. I'm not saying my plan is perfect, but I'm pretty sure it improves on the status quo.
Way too short time for almost anything that's not a direct consumable.
>They are offered $10 to write a review.
That's too low (or too low depending on the product), negative experience is a lot more likely to be vented.
The problem the star average is used as the only proxy for quality. Even without fake reviews it's completely meaningless since different people like different things (relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/937/).
When I buy things I look at what people complain about when they dislike the product. Is this electronic badly grounded and gave you an electric shock? I'll look somewhere else. Did you give this gay bar a 1-star review because they didn't let you in with the rest of your hen party? Awesome!