More than 90% of ‘genuine’ Apple chargers and cables sold on Amazon are fake

Re:More than 90% of ‘genuine’ Apple chargers and cables sold... by thearn4 on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @11:32AM (#12744664)

Something that I've noticed over the last year is that there is sometimes a disconnect between the overall rating of a product, and a summation of the ratings given by the individual reviews. Like a product with have 4-stars, but the majority of reviews seem to be 1-star.

While returns are still pretty easy to do on the buyer side, I used to trust amazon a lot more than I do now, and am considering dropping my prime subscription.

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Re:More than 90% of ‘genuine’ Apple chargers and cables sold... by obsurveyor on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @04:48PM (#12747536)

Poster child of the rotten ratings right here:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01B6ZHV7C?th=1 (rated 4 stars but 87% of reviews are 1 star)

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Re:More than 90% of ‘genuine’ Apple chargers and cables sold... by PirateDave on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @05:59PM (#12748080)

I just looked into why that is the case and if you hover over the little dropdown carrot for the "3.8 out of 5" you see this:

Amazon calculates a product’s star ratings using a machine learned model instead of a raw data average. The machine learned model takes into account factors including: the age of a review, helpfulness votes by customers and whether the reviews are from verified purchases.

So a product would just need a small percentage of 5 star reviews in the beginning of the review period.

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Re:More than 90% of ‘genuine’ Apple chargers and cables sold... by thearn4 on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @05:14PM (#12747732)

Oh wow, that is absolutely blatant rating inflation!

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