I wish the person who mapped the Russian twitter bot network [1] would take a gander at Amazon reviews/reviewers. I used to depend on Amazon overall star rating, but these days scrutiny of the single-star reviews is required to detect the many cheaters. Note that this includes a bunch of "invitation only" Vine program participants. Reported a few, nothing ever came of it.
Yep - a review API is sorely missing - we've built a tool to enable reviewers to download their own reviews [1], and had to workaround many weirdness in the review system. I would say that besides obvious fraud detection, it is an under-managed part of amazon, with a lot of semi-rational behaviour from reviewers, because no one is sure what amazon actually does with those. Reviews routinely disappear, reappear on a whim - how you get to vine is not clearly understood. We've actually gathered a few interesting data on this topic, I should probably put a blog post about it sometime....
ha didn't see this edit before I commented - we haven't released the code , but I'll have a look at the node package mentionned above, maybe I can contribute a bit :)
I know, wishful thinking. A little scraping might go a long way. If the data were available, I'm certain the networks could be easily identified by clustering the overlap on 5 star reviews of totally unrelated items.
e.g. I noticed a highly unlikely overlap between multiple reviewers of a particular hardware product my wife had mistakenly bought. When reviewing how she could have made this mistake, I discovered the title was misleading and the many 5 star reviews were fake. Looking at 5 star reviewers history showed a bunch who shared reviews of completely different items (in the make-up/food supplement arena) all produced by the same manufacturers.
I second the "these days scrutiny of the single-star reviews is required". The knowledgable internet user is aware that it's the 1-star reviews which tell the truth (at least most of the time).
I'm pretty sure what the companies selling reviews are doing is unlawful in the EU under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive - the reviews would need to state they were done for a consideration and by a business in order to meet with legal requirements from what I understand.
>'A practice is unfair if it fails to meet the standard of "professional diligence" (the standard of skill and care that would reasonably be expected of a trader in its field of activity) and it materially impairs an average consumer's ability to make an informed decision, causing him to make a decision he would not otherwise have made.' (Out-Law.com, ibid) //
In some cases it may be illegal in the U.S. also. The clearest case would be if a direct competitor hires someone to post fake negative reviews intending to damage a competing business (and fails to hide the trail). In that case the "target" would have a good case that their competitor is engaged in some kind of tortious interference with their business.
I'd claim it is illegal, and fraud. If a seller buys positive reviews, then anyone buying the item has been led to believe that the reviews are independent and honest reviews. The seller didn't inform the buyer of information that the seller knew, and the seller materially benefited from not informing the seller, ergo fraud. It's a crime as old as the hills.
I say: would it not be possible to restrict reviews to users having effectively paid for the reviewed item? I know this may make things difficult for recently-released items but it would be a better option for consumers.
What are the drawbacks (apart from much fewer reviews of newer items)?
I think Amazon already make these reviews show more, with a "verified purchase" shiny badge on the review (And probably shows up higher than non verified purchases)
> What are the drawbacks (apart from much fewer reviews of newer items)?
Shill reviewers will then buy, review, and return the items, which will increase the retailer's cost of dealing with returns or and force them to either increase prices or institute more restrictive return policies that end up inconveniencing legitimate purchasers that have to do returns.
EDIT: another problem is that it prevents legitimate reviews from people who, e.g., receive the item as a gift, which might not seem like a big problem, but some items may be more frequently purchased as gifts than for use by the purchaser.
you could prevent reviews of >3 stars to be posted if you return the item. As a legitimate purchaser, you would return the item only if you hate it :in that case your review is sincere, or if you don't need it that much: in that case don't leave a review.
This wouldn't prevent shill reviewers to negatively review the concurrent items, but Amazon could easily identify an account that has a abnormally high return rate + negative reviews and forbid them to review.
(I guess requiring reviewers a minimum spending before reviewing would avoid shill reviewers to create an account only for the purchase)
"The suit also alleges Gentile told the customer that the seller could “simply ship empty packages in an effort to fool Amazon into believing the reviewer was a ‘verified purchaser.’ ”"
>The suit also alleges Gentile told the customer that the seller could “simply ship empty packages in an effort to fool Amazon into believing the reviewer was a ‘verified purchaser.’ ”
Amazon is missing an opportunity here. Yes, these reviews are a problem but they are also causing this problem because of the rules surrounding reviews and the way they use them.
I say this from first hand experience. One of the businesses I own sells on Amazon. We don't game the system but sometimes feel pretty stupid doing so. You would not believe the lengths to which competitors will go to cause damage to other sellers.
Rule: Anyone, regardless of whether they purchased the item or not, can leave a review.
Consequence: It is easy to buy reviews to either bolster your position or damage competitors. The fact that non-purchaser reviews are allowed means that people with no contact with your product are just as visible as those who do.
Rule: Reviews are anonymous.
Consequence: There is no accountability. Anyone can make up a pen name and go to town.
Rule: The seller is not given access to the reviewer's real identity and order number and cannot communicate with them except for public comments (which are always a bad idea as you can be baited into a flame war by a smart competitor).
Consequence: Again, anonymity means no consequences at all. A reviewer can call you a "fraudulent scam artist" and your product "fake" and they are nearly 100% immune from having to respond to their accusations. Again, this is gamed by nasty actors in the system.
Rule: Amazon will not remove reviews.
Consequence: Nasty or inaccurate reviews remain and there's nothing you can do about it.
Rule: There is no mechanism through which a seller can engage with an unhappy buyer to fix a problem before a review goes public.
Consequence: OK, this is more of a "would be nice to have this feature" than a rule. The point is that in the real world if a customer of yours has a problem they will usually email of phone you to discuss their grievance and, if you run a reputable business, you'll do all you can to make them happy. On Amazon they can come to the site angry, blast away and have no resolution whatsoever because the seller has virtually no way to identify them and reach out. In a better world a negative review would be routed to the seller with 48 hours for resolution before it posts. This would benefit the buyers and give sellers the opportunity to offer amazing customer service.
When selling on Amazon you are selling within a totalitarian regime with bipolar disorder. They don't even follow their own rules. On top of this Seller Support can sometimes be more dangerous then helpful due to lots of people in there being totally clueless or incompetent. Contacting them is an absolute last resort.
Example: We had a case where a customer ordered 3 units of one of our products and only received 1. They left a 1 star negative PRODUCT REVIEW pretty much stating that. Product review rules state that they are not for fulfillment reviews. They are for, well, product reviews. Do you think Amazon Seller Support removed that damaging review? Nope. They kept parroting the line "this is within published guidelines" and sent us a link to the guidelines. The third paragraph or so in the guidelines says, to paraphrase, "product reviews are not for fulfillment problems".
Why didn't we ship this customer the 3 units they ordered? Well, here's where it gets interesting. We don't ship anything! Amazon does! All of our product sits at various Amazon warehouses and we pay them for fulfillment! So, Amazon allowed a 1 star negative PRODUCT REVIEW to stick even though they screwed up fulfillment.
It doesn't end there. We wanted to contact the customer to ship them the missing 2 units for free and make good on the order. The problem is that Amazon does not provide sellers with the identity of reviewers or any order or contact information. We could not contact this buyer no matter how much we begged and pleaded with Amazon to let us fix this order. What's worst is that THEY refused to contact the buyer themselves....
Man. I was just looking at going into the Amazon store for some of the products a few friends of mine are thinking about selling online. This really opened my eyes.
After reading your post I decided to get some more insight into this and you're definitely not the only one. It is somewhat sad, especially the amount of people that rely on amazon for shipping and deal with shipping reviews.
As for myself, I often skip SF/F or Programming books that are less then 4. But as you said, there are plenty of people who give 1-stars for almost no reason. This puts a ton more time into my background research of a product.
Yeah, when a product has a lot of polar (5 and/or 1 star reviews) I often spend a few minutes looking into those people's other reviews, to see how they are. When there's almost no description and all 5 or 1 star, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that they are probably paid reviews.
It's a shame that Amazon can't just implement a weighting system with values based on how much a customer has purchased, how long they've had their account and the number and range of stars in reviews they've given. That would be a lot of map/reduce jobs over a lot of people, and reviews... but weighting the "overall" rating better would go a long way towards improving things for everyone.
> But as you said, there are plenty of people who give 1-stars for almost no reason.
I've seen studies that seen that (honest) ratings in number/star systems are strongly culturally correlated, and that American culture strongly favors giving the highest rating unless there are out-of-ordinary reasons to go negative, while some Asian cultures strongly favor giving middle to low ratings unless there is out-of-ordinary reasons to go positive.
So simple cultural correlations in awareness of and use of a particular brand of a product could result in very different review results with exactly the same customer satisfaction profile.
To be frank, this is something I hadnt really considered. But it does make sense. I would be interesting seeing more about the subjectivity of reviews based on cultures.
You really can't trust reviews at all. The best advice I can offer is to mentally average scores across two or three pages and use that to decide whether scores are being gamed or not. No product will produce 100% satisfaction. If you see something with 100% 5-star reviews it is almost certain it is being gamed in one way or another. 1-star reviews can be hard to evaluate. I know one seller who had a massive 1-star review attack launched against them. Their revenue went from tens of thousands of dollars per month to nearly nothing within 30 days. Horrible.
If your friends want to sell anything online my advice is to be a company that sells products online that just happens to also use Amazon. Don't be an Amazon seller exclusively or you might live to regret it. They can shutdown your account for almost no reason or any reason at all with absolutely no recourse whatsoever. They can suspend any of your listings and give zero reasons. They will hold on to your money and keep it hostage.
All I have to do as a competitor to royally fuck you up is have a few people buy your product/s and then contact Amazon to complain that they are counterfeit or somehow not as represented by the listing. Boom! Listing shutdown, account suspended or both. If you call Seller Support for help the story you are likely to get is the the "Seller Performance team does not share the reasons for which they take certain measures". Boom! Again. You just got shafted, have no clue why and have no recourse. All you can do is wait and see what the internal Amazon process might decide.
I have a friend who was in a similar predicament. He was forced to have all of his inventory destroyed because it would have cost so much in shipping to recover it from Amazon warehouses that telling Amazon to destroy it was a better option.
> Rule: The seller is not given access to the reviewer's real identity and order number and cannot communicate with
> them except for public comments (which are always a bad idea as you can be baited into a flame war by a smart competitor).
I agree with a lot of your points, but not this one. As a buyer on Amazon, I love seeing sellers respond politely to reviews. I've seen sellers offer refunds, repairs, and other things a few times and this has been hugely influential in the level of trust that I had in them.
On a few occasions, this has made it obvious that the original reviewer wasn't really being genuine or was just being overly critical as well.
I think it could be done in stages. Give the seller 48 hours to deal with the problem privately. If you buy one of my products I already have your name, address and phone number. All I need is to connect your review with an order number. So the argument for privacy might not hold water here.
All I want to do as a reputable business is serve you, my customer, as best as humanly possible. Amazon denies me that opportunity. And, if you think about it, they also damage you by not allowing direct private conversation with the seller. Why? Because often times it is impossible to help you due to the fact that it all has to be in public. Sellers are not allowed to post links or email addresses. Neither are you. And nobody would want to do that publicly anyhow.
Product reviews isn't where customer service should happen. It isn't the right place and it doesn't allow for proper communications.
Questionable competitors could (and do) use this public forum to bait a seller into responding and then start a horrible flame war that cannot be controlled. Amazon does not offer any moderation, editing or even the ability to delete false or damaging statements made in product review comments.
Their approach to dealing with grievances, small or large, is a great example of non-customer-centric thinking, despite what cool-aid Amazon management might be drinking.
You can post anything you can type. The issue is that it isn't allowed and you are risking the wrath of Amazon if they pick up on it. Believe me, this you do not want to mess with.
It would be nice if "Is this review helpful" numbers would weigh into the overall rating. So if 10 people gave 1 star because "I PLUGGED IT IN AND NOTHING HAPPENED" or "Seller sent me red instead of blue!! This is trash!" but they had very low "helpful" ratings, those 1-stars would count significantly less into the overall rating.
This would allow crowdsourced moderation (kind of an upvote/downvote for reviews).
39 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 86.5 ms ] thread[1] http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/04/02/analyzing-kremlin-t...
Edit: see also https://www.npmjs.com/package/amazon-reviews
[1] https://reviewers.mediapps.com/
e.g. I noticed a highly unlikely overlap between multiple reviewers of a particular hardware product my wife had mistakenly bought. When reviewing how she could have made this mistake, I discovered the title was misleading and the many 5 star reviews were fake. Looking at 5 star reviewers history showed a bunch who shared reviews of completely different items (in the make-up/food supplement arena) all produced by the same manufacturers.
References to related books can be used to calibrate reviewer taste.
There's a guide to the directive based on UK law at http://www.out-law.com/page-9050:
>'A practice is unfair if it fails to meet the standard of "professional diligence" (the standard of skill and care that would reasonably be expected of a trader in its field of activity) and it materially impairs an average consumer's ability to make an informed decision, causing him to make a decision he would not otherwise have made.' (Out-Law.com, ibid) //
edit: There's at least one case currently in the courts on a similar theory, http://tushnet.blogspot.com/2015/02/allegations-of-fake-inde...
What are the drawbacks (apart from much fewer reviews of newer items)?
Shill reviewers will then buy, review, and return the items, which will increase the retailer's cost of dealing with returns or and force them to either increase prices or institute more restrictive return policies that end up inconveniencing legitimate purchasers that have to do returns.
EDIT: another problem is that it prevents legitimate reviews from people who, e.g., receive the item as a gift, which might not seem like a big problem, but some items may be more frequently purchased as gifts than for use by the purchaser.
This wouldn't prevent shill reviewers to negatively review the concurrent items, but Amazon could easily identify an account that has a abnormally high return rate + negative reviews and forbid them to review.
(I guess requiring reviewers a minimum spending before reviewing would avoid shill reviewers to create an account only for the purchase)
"The suit also alleges Gentile told the customer that the seller could “simply ship empty packages in an effort to fool Amazon into believing the reviewer was a ‘verified purchaser.’ ”"
>The suit also alleges Gentile told the customer that the seller could “simply ship empty packages in an effort to fool Amazon into believing the reviewer was a ‘verified purchaser.’ ”
I say this from first hand experience. One of the businesses I own sells on Amazon. We don't game the system but sometimes feel pretty stupid doing so. You would not believe the lengths to which competitors will go to cause damage to other sellers.
Rule: Anyone, regardless of whether they purchased the item or not, can leave a review.
Consequence: It is easy to buy reviews to either bolster your position or damage competitors. The fact that non-purchaser reviews are allowed means that people with no contact with your product are just as visible as those who do.
Rule: Reviews are anonymous.
Consequence: There is no accountability. Anyone can make up a pen name and go to town.
Rule: The seller is not given access to the reviewer's real identity and order number and cannot communicate with them except for public comments (which are always a bad idea as you can be baited into a flame war by a smart competitor).
Consequence: Again, anonymity means no consequences at all. A reviewer can call you a "fraudulent scam artist" and your product "fake" and they are nearly 100% immune from having to respond to their accusations. Again, this is gamed by nasty actors in the system.
Rule: Amazon will not remove reviews.
Consequence: Nasty or inaccurate reviews remain and there's nothing you can do about it.
Rule: There is no mechanism through which a seller can engage with an unhappy buyer to fix a problem before a review goes public.
Consequence: OK, this is more of a "would be nice to have this feature" than a rule. The point is that in the real world if a customer of yours has a problem they will usually email of phone you to discuss their grievance and, if you run a reputable business, you'll do all you can to make them happy. On Amazon they can come to the site angry, blast away and have no resolution whatsoever because the seller has virtually no way to identify them and reach out. In a better world a negative review would be routed to the seller with 48 hours for resolution before it posts. This would benefit the buyers and give sellers the opportunity to offer amazing customer service.
When selling on Amazon you are selling within a totalitarian regime with bipolar disorder. They don't even follow their own rules. On top of this Seller Support can sometimes be more dangerous then helpful due to lots of people in there being totally clueless or incompetent. Contacting them is an absolute last resort.
Example: We had a case where a customer ordered 3 units of one of our products and only received 1. They left a 1 star negative PRODUCT REVIEW pretty much stating that. Product review rules state that they are not for fulfillment reviews. They are for, well, product reviews. Do you think Amazon Seller Support removed that damaging review? Nope. They kept parroting the line "this is within published guidelines" and sent us a link to the guidelines. The third paragraph or so in the guidelines says, to paraphrase, "product reviews are not for fulfillment problems".
Why didn't we ship this customer the 3 units they ordered? Well, here's where it gets interesting. We don't ship anything! Amazon does! All of our product sits at various Amazon warehouses and we pay them for fulfillment! So, Amazon allowed a 1 star negative PRODUCT REVIEW to stick even though they screwed up fulfillment.
It doesn't end there. We wanted to contact the customer to ship them the missing 2 units for free and make good on the order. The problem is that Amazon does not provide sellers with the identity of reviewers or any order or contact information. We could not contact this buyer no matter how much we begged and pleaded with Amazon to let us fix this order. What's worst is that THEY refused to contact the buyer themselves....
After reading your post I decided to get some more insight into this and you're definitely not the only one. It is somewhat sad, especially the amount of people that rely on amazon for shipping and deal with shipping reviews.
As for myself, I often skip SF/F or Programming books that are less then 4. But as you said, there are plenty of people who give 1-stars for almost no reason. This puts a ton more time into my background research of a product.
It's a shame that Amazon can't just implement a weighting system with values based on how much a customer has purchased, how long they've had their account and the number and range of stars in reviews they've given. That would be a lot of map/reduce jobs over a lot of people, and reviews... but weighting the "overall" rating better would go a long way towards improving things for everyone.
I've seen studies that seen that (honest) ratings in number/star systems are strongly culturally correlated, and that American culture strongly favors giving the highest rating unless there are out-of-ordinary reasons to go negative, while some Asian cultures strongly favor giving middle to low ratings unless there is out-of-ordinary reasons to go positive.
So simple cultural correlations in awareness of and use of a particular brand of a product could result in very different review results with exactly the same customer satisfaction profile.
All I have to do as a competitor to royally fuck you up is have a few people buy your product/s and then contact Amazon to complain that they are counterfeit or somehow not as represented by the listing. Boom! Listing shutdown, account suspended or both. If you call Seller Support for help the story you are likely to get is the the "Seller Performance team does not share the reasons for which they take certain measures". Boom! Again. You just got shafted, have no clue why and have no recourse. All you can do is wait and see what the internal Amazon process might decide.
I have a friend who was in a similar predicament. He was forced to have all of his inventory destroyed because it would have cost so much in shipping to recover it from Amazon warehouses that telling Amazon to destroy it was a better option.
I agree with a lot of your points, but not this one. As a buyer on Amazon, I love seeing sellers respond politely to reviews. I've seen sellers offer refunds, repairs, and other things a few times and this has been hugely influential in the level of trust that I had in them.
On a few occasions, this has made it obvious that the original reviewer wasn't really being genuine or was just being overly critical as well.
All I want to do as a reputable business is serve you, my customer, as best as humanly possible. Amazon denies me that opportunity. And, if you think about it, they also damage you by not allowing direct private conversation with the seller. Why? Because often times it is impossible to help you due to the fact that it all has to be in public. Sellers are not allowed to post links or email addresses. Neither are you. And nobody would want to do that publicly anyhow.
Product reviews isn't where customer service should happen. It isn't the right place and it doesn't allow for proper communications.
Questionable competitors could (and do) use this public forum to bait a seller into responding and then start a horrible flame war that cannot be controlled. Amazon does not offer any moderation, editing or even the ability to delete false or damaging statements made in product review comments.
Their approach to dealing with grievances, small or large, is a great example of non-customer-centric thinking, despite what cool-aid Amazon management might be drinking.
It looks like posting email addresses is possible? I have also seen phone numbers posted by sellers in cases like this before as well.
This would allow crowdsourced moderation (kind of an upvote/downvote for reviews).