> Next they need to get rid of grouping reviews for different product versions.

This is huge. It seems to be a common tactic for companies to get a product's rating up to 4.5 stars, then replace it with a lower quality version. I notice only when I filter for the most recent reviews.

I think this is a slightly different issue, which first entered widespread public discussion in the SSD market.

Basically Kingston (I think?) and a few others released a new SSD and used very high quality components in them, so that they exceeded advertised specification. After the early-adopter reviews came in with the benchmarks and whatnot, they altered the build to use lower quality / cheaper components. When discovered and confronted, their argument was that the lower quality builds still met spec, so it was appropriate to sell it under the old model number and listings, but the upshot was that they got to produce low quality products while benefiting from reviews and benchmarks that were run against a higher quality product.

I don't think there's much Amazon can do about this particular issue... although yes it would be a great help if you didn't see reviews for the 900x version of something while looking at the 1x version page.

Steam handles that problem by showing two scores for the item (games in their case): the total score, and the "past 30days" score. This way you can see if something is going wrong recently.

I love that mechanic. I think it's a lot more in the forefront with things like software that gets auto-updated, where the publisher pushes an unfortunate patch, or fails to follow through on a promise which was previously given the benefit of the doubt. I don't think physical products have yet caught up to the idea that this notion is relevant to them as well.

The especially difficult part when it comes to reviews for physical products in that it just isn't sexy to benchmark an old piece of hardware. What makes the situation even worse is that most reviews aren't centralized (that is, you google "productname reviews") and so to a large extent the visibility goes to whoever publishes first. Your brand new benchmark announcement gets clobbered by the pagerank of the reviews that happened right when everyone was interested in the product.

I had long assumed that Valve added the "past 30 days" aggregate to show when games had improved rather than gotten worse. (i.e. early access games) Kind of interesting that it helps clarify changes in both ways, and implies very different incentives for the game publishers/sellers.

It's a poor argument and they are misleading their customers. You don't buy on the specification you buy on the reputation. If $creditable_reviewer says it's one of the best drives they've ever used, you are going to go for it.

When you buy the exact same product and end up with something that has substantially lower quality parts than what the reviewer had, you've been defrauded.

Edit: it hurts the reviewer too, as I now have reasonable evidence that $review_body is unreliable. If the fraud never comes to light, I may stop using they publisher's reviews.

Poor in what sense?

People were certainly mad about it, but the companies didn't have to face a lawsuit, so as far as they were concerned it seems like it was a great argument :-\

> When you buy the exact same product and end up with something that has substantially lower quality parts than what the reviewer had, you've been defrauded.

How exactly do you define "substantially"? No matter where you draw the line, you'll get people who will toe it and that will be legal. And in any case it's very hard to argue fraud when the company itself didn't tell you that the device was that good. You'd just get companies (rightly) saying that they aren't responsible for purchasing decisions you made based on things that third parties have said.

From someone like Amazon's perspective, it's also not reasonable to declare that absolutely no changes can be made to a product to keep it under the same listing, which is really the only way you can make this a black-and-white issue. It would also be doing consumers a disservice if every time a trivial thing changed (e.g. logo placement on the box, or the manufacturer adds an extra screw to make the body stronger, or whatever) the entire history of reviews and ratings got reset. So the best solution we have right now is to say "look man, don't be an ass"... and unsurprisingly, people who want to be an ass are more than happy to disregard this in order to make an undeserved buck.

There's another solution, which is that reviewers who find that their good review is being used to flog a substantially worse product (and in this case, the reviewer themselves gets to determine what is substantial) disown/update that review and/or refuse to review that manufacturer's products in the future.

that would require a lot of thought and tracking on reviewers part that I'm not sure most reviewers would care to do. Esp since it's for the benefit of others (amazon/manuf) and not themselves. If you pay them then you throw off the balance.

Also, it would be too late!

From a few things I've read, I don't think this is specific to Kingston. It's apparently pretty common for offshore factories to optimize for cost while keeping the product apparently the same.

There is a principal-agent problem. The company whose brand is on the line needs to be diligent about catching it in QA.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that Walmart will ask the manufacturer to build a special lower-quality version of the same item to keep costs down. So a direct price comparison can be misleading.

Yeah, I wonder if it's always the fault of the brand, actually.

I remember that during the FTDI fiascos[0] one of the often-raised complaint is that many vendors don't even know they're using fake FTDI chips, because it's the factory that decides to replace the genuine chip with a counterfeit to cut down on costs.

Then again, a cynic in me sees this as a plausible deniability scenario - the brand can always say that they didn't know about the component switchup, "it's that Chinese factory that did it, and we're investigating!".

[0] - FTDI supplies the most popular USB-to-serial chips, which are present in pretty much any USB-connected device you have; on two instances they released driver updates that detected and bricked devices with counterfeit USB-to-serial chips.

There's a fine line here between "counterfeit" and "clone". It's only a counterfeit if it's sold as a genuine FTDI part.

Gomorrah ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/0312427794/ ) has an interesting discussion of the workings of the fashion industry in Italy. It goes like so:

1. A fashion label invites a bunch of clothing manufacturers to a pricing auction. They all meet somewhere.

2. The representative of the label describes the clothing they want. The manufacturers bid for the contract, with bids taking the form "X many items within Y period of time at Z cost". For example, 800 items / 20 euros per item / 1 month.

3. Eventually, the brand will accept a bid. At that point, every manufacturer may commit to fulfilling it. Any manufacturer accepting the winning bid is given the material for free.

4. Whoever delivers first gets paid. Everyone else is left with a partially-complete order that they can no longer sell to the brand that commissioned it.

(4a. Manufacturers who show a history of accepting bids for the free fabric and then failing to deliver get blacklisted.)

5a. The brand sews its label onto the clothes it bought and sells them at "high" prices.

5b. The slower manufacturers may sell their too-slow clothes to the mafia, which sews a counterfeit label onto them and sells them at "low" prices.

So now we have the mafia selling "counterfeit" clothing that would have been "real", if only it had taken a little less time to create. The fabric and cut are to brand specifications because the clothes were made at the brand's direction to bear their fancy label. Would you call those clothes counterfeit?

Bose totally did this with their MIE line of headphones. I bought a pair right when they were introduced. They seemed very well made and I loved them. Sadly, that pair got stolen. The next pair was the same but... different. Several pieces just seemed flimsier, cheaper. The cord was a bit thinner, the plastic remote was creaky, earbuds felt were less substantial, etc. Melted that pair on a radiator, unfortunately. On to pair #3. Everything feels cheap, which is annoying when you spend $120 on a pair of earbuds. Cord leading from the remote to the earpiece is approximately the thickness of dental floss and breaks inside of 6 months. No more Bose for me.

This gets at an important point in the Lean Manufacturing philosophy. The typical business chases profits and works to reduce costs. But Lean businesses focus on delivering value while reducing waste. For your headphones, somebody was cutting costs without regard to value vs waste.

I think one of the reasons this is so common that anybody can cut costs. ("Your budget next year is 10% lower. Make it work!") But it takes thoughtful experts to discover and eliminate waste.

> It's apparently pretty common for offshore factories to optimize for cost while keeping the product apparently the same.

It's called "value engineering" and is commonplace in every business. It's like taking working code, and then optimizing it over time. Finding ways to cut costs goes on all the time, and it does not necessarily imply cutting quality.

If they are caught they could:

* Drop the product from the store completely.

* Put a Warning Misleading Listing stamp on the listing.

* Penalize the seller in the results.

Add a negative "age" score that slowly increases over time, like how reddit articles are ranked. This will bias the average ratings towards newer reviews. This can also be done in the algorithm that decides which reviews to showcase.

> It seems to be a common tactic for companies to get a product's rating up to 4.5 stars, then replace it with a lower quality version

What you are likely seeing is not a seller "pump-n-dump" scheme.

Rather, it's more likely another seller came along and "attached" to the good listing - except they are selling a knock-off product of worse quality. Often these sellers are from overseas, but not always.

Amazon rotates the "Buy Box" (the "Add to Cart" button) winner on a "percentage-share" basis - meaning if there are 5 sellers attached to a listing, and all stats on the seller accounts are equal (volume sold, number of positive feedbacks, account history, etc...), then each seller will get 1/5th of the buy box time. When certain sellers are "stronger" than others (meaning their stats), they get a larger percentage of the buy box time. You can see this sometimes if you refresh the page several times while on a product page. The "Sold by xxxxx" may change.

So, it's likely some cheap knock-off seller has attached to a "hot" product listing, and simply based on Amazon's Buy Box system, they will get a certain percentage of sales. Unfortunately, this can ruin a perfectly good listing for the other sellers who sell the legitimate product, and is difficult to combat.

It pays to pay attention to a seller's own feedback rating. Not just how many stars on average, but more importantly the recent 30 day trend for their feedback ratings, as well as the number of total feedbacks, since it will give an idea of seller volume (most sellers average about <10% of orders leaving order feedback, and usually <1% leaving product feedback - my company has sold on Amazon for the past 7 years, and we seem to stay right in line with what other sellers expect as well).

There are also Amazon listings where they have completely different products sharing the same page, using the UI that is normally intended for color/size/quantity selection. The reviews get mixed together and it can be difficult to tell which review is intended for which product. It would help if Amazon added fields to the review to indicate which variant the review was written for. Filtering would be even better.

Or just boot terrible sellers off the Amazon store and stop being AliExpress.

This is unfair to AliExpress. Unlike Amazon, they know better than to mix reviews for products from completely different sellers.

The problem is, the "terrible" sellers are back on Amazon the next day under a different name/brand.

So spin off a secondary site for the bazaar and protect the Amazon brand for selling quality stuff and only include the top-quality sellers on the main Amazon brand.

There been many occasions where I didnt buy something because of this very reason.

Exactly. I tend to filter by critical reviews (with the default sort of recent) and that often gets the noise down to a manageable level.

This may also be a third party seller selling fakes.

Counterfeit / different products are a much bigger problem than fake reviews.

Fake reviews are fairly easy to spot because of the one star curve. Amazon can weight and sort search results accordingly, if they so chose. Amazon can add additional weights based on the user's history and using graph network analysis of that user's review distribution. Bad items don't necessarily need to be banned, but the negative weight can make the listings virtually invisible.

On the other hand, if the reviews are for a product other than what you are ordering, things get a lot harder. It is hard for a user to eyeball it, and perhaps equally as hard for Amazon to verify it at scale.

Prediction - AI plus high resolution imaging of the good at high speed.

> Amazon can add additional weights based on the user's history and using graph network analysis of that user's review distribution. Bad items don't necessarily need to be banned, but the negative weight can make the listings virtually invisible.

I cannot for the life of me understand why Amazon doesn't already do this.

It's entirely possible that they already are/ have looked at it, and found this move to be more strategically effective.

Ultimately, Amazon's goal is to maintain a strong brand and keep stockholder confidence. This presents a much stronger move without admitting as much weakness, compared to allowing the behavior to continue and trying to mitigate it with AI (since the layperson -- ie most stockholders -- has a poor understanding of the efficacy of ML techniques).

Additionally even if if they did, they are less incentivized to publicize it. Secretly diminishing the voting power of particular reviewers works just as well, if not better, if they don't know it's happening at all, and prevents creation of multiple accounts to avoid said penalties.

> AI plus high resolution imaging

Unless they are imaging every item sold I don't see how that helps. Unscrupulous seller uploads high quality images of the real item, and delivers counterfeits.

Conterfeits are the biggest reason I don't buy more on Amazon. I can't say I've ever received a counterfeit item, but the stories are so widespread that I always have that fear.

Counterfeits are one reason I like buying from Amazon: their refund process is painless and they're willing to foot the bill for the customer. It actually works painlessly.

Counterfeit is a big problem on amazon. They are growing way to fast and amazon cant keep up with customer support

Agreed, counterfeits are a bigger problem. Not least of all because when something is 'fulfilled by Amazon' they dump everything with the same barcode into the same boxes, including the counterfeits. I've bought headphones before, with Amazon as the seller, and they were fake.

So very, very true.

I'm actually aware of some large FBA players that intend to create thousands of new 'brands' in the next year in order to push their wares.

Even still, they'll get their reviews, policy or no policy.

I've been getting that, too. I understand why they do it, but some vendors are definitely more aggressive than others.

Anecdote: I purchased a dog hammock/cover for the backseat of my car last year and the straps melted over the course of the summer. The company replaced it for free, then emailed me every other day about updating my review... definitely before it'd gone through another summer, but even before I'd actually set it up in my car. I don't feel that a merchant holding up their end of their "lifetime guarantee" obligates me to update my review of their product (though I intend to once I'm satisfied that I've actually used it enough to warrant an update).

Anecdote. I bought a dinosaur costume for my toddler son for Halloween, they sent me the wrong size but I didn't notice until Halloween, it sort of worked anyway. Later they hounded me for a review. After five or so requests, I replied saying I wasn't going to leave a positive review because they sent the wrong size. That was all, I didn't ask for anything or leave a negative review.

They sent me huge rant about how I couldn't have a refund and what their return policy was.

Retailers are shady despite people most of the time.

Retailers are shady... but so are the customers too.

Source: my SO worked on phone support in her last two jobs, one was selling old books on-line, the other selling various appliances. Man, you wouldn't believe the horror stories I heard from her every other day. Having a phone number seems to somehow attract the worst subgroups of humans to it.

hope the dinosaur costume was awesome, though

Some shipping carriers require a phone number, so I believe that Amazon transmits your ship-to phone number with the explicit requirement to use it only for logistics purposes. I'd complain to Amazon for a seller who used the number for any other purpose and certainly for one who called me for a review.

I'm in England.

I'd be calling the Information Commissioner as well.

Amazon provides the phone number for all orders. It's whatever phone number you have listed on your account, or saved on one of your delivery addresses.

Sellers are supposed to use them to fix order-related problems, and can be helpful for the case when a customer does not respond to emails (such as when you've provided an invalid delivery address).

I don't think this is right... I've been selling on Amazon for years and have never seen buyer phone numbers. I just logged in, and it doesn't show it when viewing an order on the site, nor does it come through in the order management software I use. (In case it matter, I'm talking about Amazon.com not one of the non-US ones, and I have a Professional seller account.)

Edit to add: If there really is a way to get the buyer's phone number, I'd love to know. Some shipping methods need a phone number, and thus far I've always just put my own in when this happens since I didn't have the buyer's one, and hoped it didn't matter.

It previously came through the MWS order API. My custom order management software would pick it up. So you could only get it if you have a professional account.

However, I believe that amazon has discontinued the practice of giving out phone numbers as of early 2014 to sellers due to some idiot sellers harassing their customers.

But if you have someone's name and address, there is a decent change you can find it by googling their name. Especially if they have a land line.

edit: Yes, I also logged in just now and it does in fact show phone numbers. Not sure why I stopped picking them up through the api. They may have changed the field name. Also, it is strange that there are multiple complaints about not being able to see buyer phone numbers any longer in the seller forums. I think maybe they went away for a time and are back.

I just logged in, we can still see customer's phone numbers. Maybe it's because we have an olderish account? We're on V2 of the Order Manager pages in Seller Central...

Edit:

> Also, it is strange that there are multiple complaints about not being able to see buyer phone numbers any longer in the seller forums. I think maybe they went away for a time and are back

Amazon experiments with Seller Central a lot - it's possible some people were getting phone numbers and some weren't for a long while. We also signup for many of their "beta" programs, so perhaps that makes a difference...?

Weird. I definitely haven't seen phone numbers in our Pro account in 5+ years. I'll have to see if I can pull it from the API, but there's definitely no where on the site that shows me phone numbers.

I'm unsure why you don't see them. For us, it's on most order pages right below the customer's address. I've just always assumed when it's not there, the customer didn't provide one. Most seem to have a phone number, however.

We have a Pro account as well, and we see the phone number both in Seller Central as well as over the API (we currently are using a MWS API version from 2011, if that makes any difference).

Regarding putting your own number on the package - that is what we do with 100% of our shipments from our warehouse, and we've done it that way for more than a decade without issue.

The phone numbers are supposed to be mainly used for when there's an issue with delivery, but in our experience the carrier never calls (although it would be nice if they did sometimes... but I digress). We even put our phone number on international shipments (where I'd expect the most hassle due to customs), and never had an issue.

Of course, YMMV...

Can't talk about the US, but my local carrier sometimes calls when he doesn't find the right door.

Your phone number is on Amazon shipping label too

> Your phone number is on Amazon shipping label too

Probably for shipments shipped from an Amazon warehouse (sold by Amazon, or Fulfilled-by-Amazon/FBA).

For our own labels, we print our company phone number, and that's fairly common for many ecommerce companies (although certainly not all).

It protects the customer's privacy, and in the event there's an issue with delivery, it's best the carrier contact the shipper (us) anyway.

Whether your phone number appears on the shipping label is variable. Based on the 5 fulfilled-by-Amazon (sometimes sold-by-Amazon) packages in my hand, it appears on all the Amazon-as-trucker packages and neither of the USPS packages. I suspect the rules are even more complex than simply "what carrier", but it clearly varies.

Look again closely at your Usps labels. May seem like random numbers but it's there

If it's not on the label, it's in the system.

Some folks generate their own custom labels, and may omit things like that. The data is still sent to the carrier during the "End of Day" task (or equivalent) in whatever shipping software the shipper uses.

Alright. I can only speak from what I see. Thanks.

It's really not there. (My phone number is in the 617 area code.)

http://static-s3.sokoloff.com/random/amazon/IMG_1880.jpg

On other labels it's after the "DF3..." ID.

That's a custom label (ie. not stock from USPS), and is likely generated by the shipper's shipping software.

Apparently they chose to leave that field off the label, but it's still sent to USPS by the software.

The seller on that particular order was Amazon.com LLC; the box was an Amazon box, closed with Amazon branded tape and mailed USPS.

I have one simple rule: unless we've seen each other naked, or you've paid me money, the only phone number you get when you ask me for my phone number is the number of a pay phone at a gas station in Forks, Washington that was torn down a few years ago to make room for a new highway.

If you give your cell phone number out to random companies on the Internet, then yes, you can expect to get spammed. What in the world makes that seem like a good idea to so many people?

And yet you'll give them your address so they can send you a package hopefully containing something you want.

Spam my mailbox all you want. That costs you time and money, not me.

We all like to joke about mailbox spam, but it's certainly a serious issue - and the worst part is there's little to zero incentive for USPS to stop stuffing our mailboxes full of garbage.

As long as the junk mailer companies pay their postage, USPS is more than happy to deliver the junk to you.

I don't have any data, but I'd wager junk mailers are a sizable portion of annual USPS revenue...

So you give fake phone numbers to your friends?

He's actually a nudist and so are all of his friends.

Obviously some judicious exceptions are made on occasion, but never without thinking through the consequences.

Regarding the review hounding, I use Google labs experimental feature to auto reply to such posts. If any emails match the domain (something.amazon.com) and have the word "review" in them they get sent straight to the trash and get an automatically generated reply telling them that I will leave them a one star review on both their product and seller account on Amazon and to not further contact me.

I haven't thought about it since I did that, and I can only hope its sending a message that harassing your users without consent for reviews is not acceptable.

> They also need to ban merchants from hounding me to review their products. One of them even called me on my phone. I don't know how they got my number.

I would consider phone calls out of bounds. Did you complain to Amazon customer service about this?

No. I didn't know it was a violation. I did sternly tell them not to call me again, and wrote a negative review.

Even if its not a violation of a TOS I suspect complaining to Amazon will help address this issue. Remember Amazon's core value is customer obsession so they strive to make you happy. Don't hesitate to let them know when you are unhappy. :)

> They also need to ban merchants from hounding me to review their products. One of them even called me on my phone. I don't know how they got my number.

If you go into the "Address Book" in your account settings, you'll see a phone number listed with each of your addresses. I'm assuming that gets passed along to merchants with your order details.

I report any merchants who make unsolicited contact. It's extremely annoying/invasive, especially when they abuse your phone number.

I've been thinking about the review hounding on Amazon recently. I think the only way to make companies wary of soliciting reviews short of new rules and enforcement is if every solicitation carried a risk of the reviewer leaving what appears to be a legitimate review (not a diatribe) with a low score. Maybe creating low score reviews with text indicating the seller spams its customers would be enough.

That's actually a pretty egregious violation of Amazon's Seller policies -- if you report it to Amazon, they'll get their seller account blacklisted.

There's one or two power people in the Fulfilled by Amazon world who do podcasts/vlogs, and they were telling the people who subscribe to their podcasts to start stalking/tracking down the people who purchase their products and start calling them to ask for reviews.

Needless to say, it backfired when Amazon started cracking down on it...

> They also need to ban merchants from hounding me to review their products. One of them even called me on my phone. I don't know how they got my number.

Part of the shipping information, I guess. (I know it's "fulfilled by Amazon" but I guess the merchant gets that.)

I find it super annoying. I am not quite willing to go in and give them 1 star reviews for the outreach, but I have no qualms about marking the email as spam.

They also need to require manufacturers to publish a changelog for the product so we can tell if a product has changed materially since the positive reviews were first published. It's pretty much a strategy now to create a well made product, get good reviews and then cheapen the product.

I've only been called when I've left a negative review. At first, I was very annoyed but the company offered a free replacement or a refund. They didn't even ask if I'd update my review. One thing to note here was they were not the seller, just the manufacturer.

The flip side is that I'd started using these as a metric of products to avoid; if a retailer is playing this game, while they might be legit like flavor8 claims in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12631810 it's just safer to avoid if at all possible.

Although in general spending a bit of time looking at the reviews, 1 start, recent ones, etc., with a finely honed for decades BS detector is what allows me to continue buying a lot of stuff from them.

I can't _stand_ the reviewkick sourced reviews, and there is a substantive difference between those and those from "product niche experts". The person who subscribes to reviewkick to "get free stuff" is building a profile to increase their value, so that they can get more expensive free stuff which they can in turn sell on ebay (or, I guess, hoard.) The reviewer who actually _uses_ the product, on the other hand...

Personally, given the choice between products I'll definitely avoid those with obvious fake reviews. I bet it's common behavior to do so among those who actually take the time to consult reviews, and I bet Amazon saw the writing on the wall via their analytics.

Huh, I can't say I've ever even seen one. Perhaps I don't dig deeply enough into reviews, but I'd think these reviews would bubble up to the top.

Tech accessory. I couldn't even buy a Brush for my grill without wading through those fake reviews!

Amazon passes your phone number along to merchants, mostly incase there's any shipping issues. Amazon hides almost all of your information from merchants, but it does share your phone number.

Amazon encouraged this via giveaway scam.