Consumer reports is ok but I’ve found it’s better for the I’m lookin for “any” car in x segment type person. If you research your purchases deeper than the average person it’s not worth it IMHO.
I agree for average buyers it’s better than anything else. Especially for the uniformed.
I’ve gotten a lot of value from reading their rating rationale. Sometimes they bring up good points I wouldn’t have thought about. Other times I’ve gotten good values from suggestions like “this electric toothbrush is $40 cheaper than the high-end model from the same manufacturer, but its timer only vibrates and doesn’t make beeping sounds, so you can save $40 if you can live without a beeper”.
Used to be. Amazon threatened to shut it down and then spun it off.
I think the official reviews by professionals (very trusted) have affiliate links to AMZN but it is not hard to look up gear at B&H or Adorama.
People have asked "whatever happened to forums?" and they are alive and well at dpreview. It's a community of photographers that inspire me and help me out in a pinch. I went to a volleyball game that was a total loss for me, asked for help, and got exactly the crystalized knowledge and perspectives that I can't get from books at the library and I'm going to back with the right gear and the right tactics and turn it around.
Between the pro reviews and the contact with photographers at and beyond my level I get a clear picture of the gear and the people who are reviewing it.
On AMZN or Best Buy on the other hand I have to process reviews through this lens: you get people who leave bad reviews who just don't know what are doing or don't have the correct expectations, there was the guy who put the paper in a photo paper upside down, got an inksplosion, blamed the printer and returned. Well, I put the paper in upside down and got the same results, the difference is I knew it was my fault. There's also the strange problem that a certain fraction of certain products just aren't up to spec, circa 2008 it seemed that Sigma lenses for Canon were usually good but maybe 20% of people got a bad one.
I don't see a problem with dishonest reviews on AMZN for that kind of stuff but I find dpreview easy to parse.
US-based but I've been bribed multiple times to get a gift card in exchange for changing my review to 5 stars. Usually I change the review, take the gift card, and then change it back to fewer stars indicating that seller bribed me.
It's the only way I can think of that actually financially discourages the practice.
Reason being those are supposed to be reviews of the product. The same reviews will be shown if a different seller is selling the same product. Seller-specific reviews hurt completely independent sellers
Amazon has suspended big sellers like Mpow and Aukey for this practice, so they do take action on these tactics
> Reason being those are supposed to be reviews of the product.
I understand that, so I only leave reviews on the product if it's a single seller, selling their own product. I think "this product comes with a scam offer" is a valid review of the product.
I also leave seller reviews, of the seller, on the seller's page. (Many people don't realize you can do this.) These are deleted too.
Once you realize the full scope of reviews that Amazon deletes, it's hard to take anything left behind as credible whatsoever.
I went down a long odyssey recently of trying to get a refund for a food item that was four months expired the day it was delivered. Amazon refused. I escalated it. Amazon refused again. I tried to leave a bad review. Amazon deleted it. I reviewed the seller itself. Deleted again. Kept trying over and over again for several days, making ever so slight tweaks to conform to the policy. I came to the conclusion it was simply impossible to leave a negative piece of feedback.
I left a mostly complimentary review for a home video camera (brand is EUKI) but also mentioned that the battery life was not as good as advertised. Not only was the review removed, but I am now blocked from reviewing any of that manufacturer's products. This is despite being in the top couple percent of reviewers overall BTW. The manufacturer can't block me that way; only Amazon themselves can. Conclusions about Amazon's trustworthiness (or ethics generally) are left as an exercise for the reader.
I have stopped using them for goods with an expiration date, and have severely curtailed my other purchases. It's a crap platform.
I hope for a future where their monopoly position is litigated away so that there is a fair marketplace with other options for next day delivery for common household items. I prefer to shop in brick and mortar stores, but there's definitely a legitimate use case for next-day delivery of household supplies. I have a family member currently experiencing severe mobility issues who lives several hours away from me in a rural area, and unfortunately Amazon is the only way I can get things like household medical supplies to her door on short notice.
But Amazon don’t make this obvious or as easy as writing a review. This is an incentive mismatch at work that just happens to work in favour of Amazon and their shitty sellers… cough enshitification cough
If they actually wanted to manage the issue the option to report the product you received to CS would be right there as close to next to the leave a review button as possible.
Yeah, naa. Not really a thing. Especially for the junk non-brands. The Chinese sellers run rings around Amazon rules. They're completely ineffective for what they're meant to do. And honestly, Amazon wouldn't care. Why would they? It has been going on for a solid decade and hasn't hurt their platform reputation in the slightest.
Amazon doesn't give a toss about anyone or anything outside of their platform image (and subsequent bottom line).
I guess I'm happy to live in a country where Amazon showed up too late (Sweden). Their offering for non-Chinese brands seems like a joke in comparison to the online retail landscape here. It's good for cheap noname (weirdname?) Chinese electronics (think e.g. TPA3116D2-based amplifier boards) though.
AMZN is actually not that good in much of the U.S.
If you live in a ZIP code full of congressional staffers, sitcom writers or stock market analysts you get 1 day shipping with Prime. If you’re not so lucky (say you live in the same ZIP code as the warehouse) it could be 5 days.
I just ordered the lens that I need to shoot volleyball games, a famous camera store can get it to me one day sooner than AMZN can despite being closed for a Jewish holiday. AMZN would sell me a ‘refreshed’ lens but the last one of those I bought from them failed in six months.
All the time I see something on the shelf at Target for $45 that is $65 on AMZN. The chattering classes who are bought off with 1 day shipping wax about AMZN’s logistics network (always seems to use USPS, UPS and FedEx to reach me, maybe they get a better deal because they threaten to leave…) or payments (hmmm… Visa, Mastercard, American Express, …) but it is gaslighting end-to-end.
Once a store gets one of those membership programs they quit thinking straight (how do I make money off sales?) and wind up thinking crooked (line goes up…)
The only thing harder than canceling your Prime is making an order without being signed up for a “trial” subscription which is one more reason to shop elsewhere.
Not too long ago, my daughter at college lost her favorite headphones. For reasons not worth going into, we needed a replacement fast so I went to Amazon. I figured that Prime shipping would be able to get the kind she likes to her before I could get there myself (I was some hundreds of miles away but planning to swing by on my way home). Isn't that what I paid the subscription fee for? Well ... no go. IIRC the best they could do was four, maybe five, days. And not because they were out of stock. Then I went to B&H, who could get them there next day for a better price. No prizes for guessing who got my business that day.
Amazon was a pretty decent bookstore once, then a pretty decent "everything" store, then they just enshittified the hell out of everything. While it's good that anti-trust actions are finally being taken, it would have been even better if the practice of predatory pricing sustained by VC money (not just at Amazon) had been nipped in the bud long ago.
What the US needs is a great price comparison service. That is how we get by in Sweden before and after Amazon. Google Shopping is not it.
Such a price comparison service needs a large team manually curating categories and most of all: the product metadatas. So much manual work. Yet it all made sense, even in a country of just 10M people. (The company is called Prisjakt and is now starting to go to shit for unrelated reasons.)
I’ve had offers to remove a review. Bought a highly rated kettle that broke in a couple of weeks which I returned. Left a review saying such and started to receive offers to remove the review. Started at £20 and they kept coming even though I reported them. No, I didn’t take the offer.
As of this moment, I can say that I've never received a penny for writing a review. I have a small number of Amazon affiliate links on my website, but they're all for products that I personally researched, bought at the advertised price, and now recommend. No one can credibly accuse me of conflict of interest. If I say I like a thing, it's because I genuinely like it.
Getting a few bucks from a scammer isn't worth the reputational risk to me.
Yeah I could have, maybe should have, probably silly for not. Although I’ve done enough stupid stuff in my life to know where my line is and what is worth my time or not. This was definitely a no for me, report and move on.
The kettle I bought off of Amazon… the first one was obviously used (hard water deposits inside). The second one was presumably counterfeit as it stank of organic solvents. I ended up buying the same kettle directly from the manufacturer for a few bucks more and all was well.
More recently I succumbed to the temptation of fast shipping. Unfortunately the delivery wasn't so fast when the delivery driver decided to text me maniacally while I wasn't home instead of ringing the door buzzer for someone to let him in. So I bought elsewhere and now I had two of these shower knobs to look at. The Amazon one was indeed counterfeit. More flashing, text was a completely different typeface.
At that point I was down to buying an occasional small item when Amazon dangled a free prime membership in front of me. I've had reason to return every one of those orders I've placed in the past four years.
I'm in the US. Before I stopped buying things from Amazon (this is one of the reasons why I stopped -- a minor one, but one nonetheless) I'd say this happened with about 1//3 of my purchases.
I never left a review, but would report the practice to Amazon. If Amazon cares, they didn't indicate it to me.
Afters year of not doing so i bought something off of amazon (here in the uk). A lawn mower with a large number of positive reviews. And a heat blower. Both where atrocious when they arrived. Went back to reading the reviews and in depth i noticed that a large number of review images were obviously fake. Left then reviews stating as such and guess what? Amazon rejected the reviews.
This makes me think that all of these issues on amazon are a feature not a bug. Amazon allows this to happen to drive a wide offering. And of course no consumer protection agency taking proactive steps to prevent this. They do issue refunds, but after you’ve wasted time waiting for and testing the product and then returning or threatening them.
I don't understand what you guys are purchasing and how the experience is so different if this is a real probability. I've had an Amazon account at this point since the late 90s, been a Prime member I think since 2004, wouldn't be surprised if I've exceeded six figures in total purchases after a quarter century considering several degrees worth of textbooks, furniture, appliances, clothing, the fact that both my family and my wife's family have been putting kids birthday and Christmas wish lists on there for close to a decade now. I have never once been bribed to leave a review. Obviously, this does actually happen, but it buggers belief that 1 in 10 is a real expectation and yet it never happens over the course of thousands of purchases in over 20 years. Unless there is something special about Great Britain in particular.
I'm not saying I trust the reviews on Amazon, but why even read them? I'm trying to think of purchases I made recently of stuff that actually mattered. I got all of my Minisforum Ryzen small-form factor PCs for my homelab cluster. Le Creuset cookware to stock my kitchen. I think I probably got the Dyson v7 Fluffy that's sitting in the corner of my room staring at me right now. My wife got our Litter Robot boxes from Amazon. When a bunch of my DeWalt power tools got stolen, I actually tried to restock from Home Depot, but they were out of a bunch of shit and Amazon wasn't. All of my Aruba Instant-On access points came from Amazon. Clearly, not everything is reputable and you should avoid certain categories of things. I know my wife was trying to get skin care products from there at some point and says it was all obvious knock offs that were watered down and she could get the same stuff but actually real from department stores and just started doing that. But best I can tell, high quality durable goods from well-known brands sold by the actual brand with pre-existing reputations are perfectly fine. Go to Gamer's Nexus or L1 Techs if you want honest word on the best PC parts. My dad was a plumber for 45 years. If I want to know what brand of tools to get, I ask him.
This has pretty much been my experience too, although I only read the low-star and 4-star reviews, I assume everything 5-star is fake/bought (or someone that hasn't put much real thought into the review).
I suspect it largely comes down to the brands purchased, the shadier brands will be lower quality, and more likely to be underhanded, with the more respectable brands being less likely to bribe, and more likely to be 'reasonable to good' quality.
All that said, I do purchase no-name brand chinese products occasionally, but have never really had much of an issue with that other than the occasional 'didn't arrive'.
I've spent a solid 10 minutes following the rabbit hole of linked studies/papers and have not found any paper or study or figure that actually makes the "up to 10%" claim like the article says. I can't even find in any of the linked papers any sort of "1,500 person survey" like the article mentions.
I started looking into it because of the weasel word "up to" in the title. "Up to" doesn't mean anything. 1% is "up to" 10%. 0.0001% is "up to" 10%.
And what do you know? When I try to dive into an article with a weasel worded title to find the actual data they're referring to, it's nowhere to be found.
I was offered $30 for a 5 star review of a digital caliper I had bought. I never review anything, but it was a good product and worth 5 stars so I took the money. The $30 was like 75% of the purchase price or something
I just shop at AliExpress instead of Amazon. All the same exact stuff, but typically half to a tenth of the cost. I just have to settle with longer shipping times, which is fine, if I need something now-now, I can just go buy it locally.
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[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadI agree for average buyers it’s better than anything else. Especially for the uniformed.
I think the official reviews by professionals (very trusted) have affiliate links to AMZN but it is not hard to look up gear at B&H or Adorama.
People have asked "whatever happened to forums?" and they are alive and well at dpreview. It's a community of photographers that inspire me and help me out in a pinch. I went to a volleyball game that was a total loss for me, asked for help, and got exactly the crystalized knowledge and perspectives that I can't get from books at the library and I'm going to back with the right gear and the right tactics and turn it around.
Between the pro reviews and the contact with photographers at and beyond my level I get a clear picture of the gear and the people who are reviewing it.
On AMZN or Best Buy on the other hand I have to process reviews through this lens: you get people who leave bad reviews who just don't know what are doing or don't have the correct expectations, there was the guy who put the paper in a photo paper upside down, got an inksplosion, blamed the printer and returned. Well, I put the paper in upside down and got the same results, the difference is I knew it was my fault. There's also the strange problem that a certain fraction of certain products just aren't up to spec, circa 2008 it seemed that Sigma lenses for Canon were usually good but maybe 20% of people got a bad one.
I don't see a problem with dishonest reviews on AMZN for that kind of stuff but I find dpreview easy to parse.
Rtings.com for electronics.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?reviews/ for high-end audio products.
It's the only way I can think of that actually financially discourages the practice.
When this happens I leave a review saying so, either on the product itself or on the seller's page.
Amazon always deletes these reviews. So, Amazon knows about the practice, and approves of it. Not much you can do at that point.
Amazon has suspended big sellers like Mpow and Aukey for this practice, so they do take action on these tactics
I understand that, so I only leave reviews on the product if it's a single seller, selling their own product. I think "this product comes with a scam offer" is a valid review of the product.
I also leave seller reviews, of the seller, on the seller's page. (Many people don't realize you can do this.) These are deleted too.
I went down a long odyssey recently of trying to get a refund for a food item that was four months expired the day it was delivered. Amazon refused. I escalated it. Amazon refused again. I tried to leave a bad review. Amazon deleted it. I reviewed the seller itself. Deleted again. Kept trying over and over again for several days, making ever so slight tweaks to conform to the policy. I came to the conclusion it was simply impossible to leave a negative piece of feedback.
If you did stop buying from them, I hope more people follow your lead!
I hope for a future where their monopoly position is litigated away so that there is a fair marketplace with other options for next day delivery for common household items. I prefer to shop in brick and mortar stores, but there's definitely a legitimate use case for next-day delivery of household supplies. I have a family member currently experiencing severe mobility issues who lives several hours away from me in a rural area, and unfortunately Amazon is the only way I can get things like household medical supplies to her door on short notice.
All those fake positive reviews also go along with the new product.
Therefore the only logical thing to do is to associate these reviews of the practice with the original product, as an indication of review quality.
If they actually wanted to manage the issue the option to report the product you received to CS would be right there as close to next to the leave a review button as possible.
Amazon doesn't give a toss about anyone or anything outside of their platform image (and subsequent bottom line).
If you live in a ZIP code full of congressional staffers, sitcom writers or stock market analysts you get 1 day shipping with Prime. If you’re not so lucky (say you live in the same ZIP code as the warehouse) it could be 5 days.
I just ordered the lens that I need to shoot volleyball games, a famous camera store can get it to me one day sooner than AMZN can despite being closed for a Jewish holiday. AMZN would sell me a ‘refreshed’ lens but the last one of those I bought from them failed in six months.
All the time I see something on the shelf at Target for $45 that is $65 on AMZN. The chattering classes who are bought off with 1 day shipping wax about AMZN’s logistics network (always seems to use USPS, UPS and FedEx to reach me, maybe they get a better deal because they threaten to leave…) or payments (hmmm… Visa, Mastercard, American Express, …) but it is gaslighting end-to-end.
Once a store gets one of those membership programs they quit thinking straight (how do I make money off sales?) and wind up thinking crooked (line goes up…)
The only thing harder than canceling your Prime is making an order without being signed up for a “trial” subscription which is one more reason to shop elsewhere.
Amazon was a pretty decent bookstore once, then a pretty decent "everything" store, then they just enshittified the hell out of everything. While it's good that anti-trust actions are finally being taken, it would have been even better if the practice of predatory pricing sustained by VC money (not just at Amazon) had been nipped in the bud long ago.
Such a price comparison service needs a large team manually curating categories and most of all: the product metadatas. So much manual work. Yet it all made sense, even in a country of just 10M people. (The company is called Prisjakt and is now starting to go to shit for unrelated reasons.)
As of this moment, I can say that I've never received a penny for writing a review. I have a small number of Amazon affiliate links on my website, but they're all for products that I personally researched, bought at the advertised price, and now recommend. No one can credibly accuse me of conflict of interest. If I say I like a thing, it's because I genuinely like it.
Getting a few bucks from a scammer isn't worth the reputational risk to me.
More recently I succumbed to the temptation of fast shipping. Unfortunately the delivery wasn't so fast when the delivery driver decided to text me maniacally while I wasn't home instead of ringing the door buzzer for someone to let him in. So I bought elsewhere and now I had two of these shower knobs to look at. The Amazon one was indeed counterfeit. More flashing, text was a completely different typeface.
At that point I was down to buying an occasional small item when Amazon dangled a free prime membership in front of me. I've had reason to return every one of those orders I've placed in the past four years.
Lesson learned. Stop buying from Amazon.
I never left a review, but would report the practice to Amazon. If Amazon cares, they didn't indicate it to me.
This makes me think that all of these issues on amazon are a feature not a bug. Amazon allows this to happen to drive a wide offering. And of course no consumer protection agency taking proactive steps to prevent this. They do issue refunds, but after you’ve wasted time waiting for and testing the product and then returning or threatening them.
I reported it to Amazon, and they've done nothing yet but to take down my review that said the seller tried to bribe me.
https://www.fakespot.com/
I'm not saying I trust the reviews on Amazon, but why even read them? I'm trying to think of purchases I made recently of stuff that actually mattered. I got all of my Minisforum Ryzen small-form factor PCs for my homelab cluster. Le Creuset cookware to stock my kitchen. I think I probably got the Dyson v7 Fluffy that's sitting in the corner of my room staring at me right now. My wife got our Litter Robot boxes from Amazon. When a bunch of my DeWalt power tools got stolen, I actually tried to restock from Home Depot, but they were out of a bunch of shit and Amazon wasn't. All of my Aruba Instant-On access points came from Amazon. Clearly, not everything is reputable and you should avoid certain categories of things. I know my wife was trying to get skin care products from there at some point and says it was all obvious knock offs that were watered down and she could get the same stuff but actually real from department stores and just started doing that. But best I can tell, high quality durable goods from well-known brands sold by the actual brand with pre-existing reputations are perfectly fine. Go to Gamer's Nexus or L1 Techs if you want honest word on the best PC parts. My dad was a plumber for 45 years. If I want to know what brand of tools to get, I ask him.
I suspect it largely comes down to the brands purchased, the shadier brands will be lower quality, and more likely to be underhanded, with the more respectable brands being less likely to bribe, and more likely to be 'reasonable to good' quality.
All that said, I do purchase no-name brand chinese products occasionally, but have never really had much of an issue with that other than the occasional 'didn't arrive'.
I started looking into it because of the weasel word "up to" in the title. "Up to" doesn't mean anything. 1% is "up to" 10%. 0.0001% is "up to" 10%.
And what do you know? When I try to dive into an article with a weasel worded title to find the actual data they're referring to, it's nowhere to be found.
I have otherwise ignored all bribes.