I had a recent scenario lately where I bought a small consumer electronic device through Amazon based off of reviews. There were thousands of reviews for this item at the time of purchase. Once the item arrived I realized it didn't work so I went back to the Amazon page and there was now only one 1 star review which was someone wondering what happened to all the reviews that were there a few days ago.

There are some questionable things going on with dog food as well. For example I recently purchased a case of a certain dog food my dog has been eating for years. If I click on the product link in my Amazon order history it says that it is sold by the manufacturer of the dog food, but in the Amazon order history itself it says a different store that I've never heard of. The inside of the can looked a little different, less gravy and it made my dog start vomiting almost immediately.

The same product can be sold by both amazon and 3rd party. The reviews will be mixed together.

Ex: amazon sells tshirt. People post reviews. 3rd party sells tshirt with the same product page as amazon's and the quality is poor. Reviews are mixed together and you can't see the seller on which the review is based.

I don't understand why Amazon did this? Surely it's to their benefit to drive sales from good suppliers (if there is more than one supplier) as that leads to more customer satisfaction.

It's a bit fraudulent really, like a bait and switch.

In reality each page needs a product and supplier rating, and people need to be guided to rate both. Instead you get "this company sacked my daughter; 1 star" and "the postman dropped it; 1 star" type ratings.

It makes logistics easier I'd think. The mistake Amazon is making is that Product A is Product A is Product A. It means they have 2 less things to track quantity of and they can have 1 count that matters instead of 3. On the surface it seems 100% logical...

Reminds me of story where (and I'm going to butcher parts of this) a town is making a huge vat of wine (or maybe it's food related) and everyone household is supposed to bring a bottle to pour in. A couple of people decide to cheat the system and bring water instead expecting to hide under the radar. It turns out way more people than a few take this path and so the "wine" just tastes like water with a hint of wine in it.

Is it "easier"? I'd have thought with their robots-and-bins it was notionally identical, save a few minor modifications to the front-end.

As it's Amazon, presumably they tested and found this to be the best mode for profit.

> I'd have thought with their robots-and-bins it was notionally identical

Is it really identical? They do have quite a bit of warehouse which means that shipping can be quite longer and more expensive.

Let say I'm a third party and I got 100 shirts in Amazon warehouses in north America and they got 100 too. That means that in average there's 2.6 shirts per warehouse (I found there is 75 warehouses but that can be a wrong number) but we each got 1.3 in averages! If someone buy 2 of mine, most likely they'll have to ship one from somewhere else, while they could just take one of theirs and consider it the same.

At the end of the day though, it doesn't means that I was truthful and my product is actually the same, which can hurt their orders.

The ratings on the product page are meant to be purely about the product. Reviews that mention the seller are often removed. This is actually the main way sellers get rid of bad reviews: most one star reviews will include a reference to the seller and so amazon will usually remove them if the seller asks.

There is a separate review system for sellers, and the score is shown when you look at the buying options, but it's little used and much less visible.

I've seen this lots and lots of other places as well. For instance, Walmart's website will return hits for searches, and when you look at the product page it will invariably have "Sold by SomeNobody." These huge supply-chain-engineering companies just rake in listing fees now that other parts of their business model are solved.

Doesn't amazon make it fairly obvious when you're ordering from a 3rd party or not?

There's still a measure of control in who the supplier is, and the reviews for that supplier too.

Your missing the key part. You can order from the manufacturer through amazon, and they will ship you the part from the 3rd party (that may or may not be legitimate) if the have the same ID number. Even though you ordered from the manufacturer, you may get a fake product. They commingle inventory, to make it easier for them to ship from nearest warehouse, but don't really put enough work into ensuring the products are actually identical.

The funny thing is Chinese e-shops don't do that. You can find a bunch of the same goods at e.g. JD but if you buy from the JD itself ("Joy Collection" in the English JD frontend joybuy.com), it would never be fake and it would never be co-mingled - and the reviews are separated too.

They combine inventory for the same item from different sellers. Even if the item you bought says it is being sold by Amazon that doesn't mean that the product you receive will be one that they sourced. It could easily be from a third party seller instead. Unless you're buying something like they're own Amazon Basics brand you have no way to reliably tell where something actually came from on Amazon.

>Doesn't amazon make it fairly obvious when you're ordering from a 3rd party or not?

I would say "no," because pretty much everyone I know thinks Amazon is a store with a single source of goods, not a "marketplace." This is probably intentional.

It’s actually worse than you think. Amazon often stores their “sold directly by Amazon” inventory with “fulfilled by Amazon” product sold by third party sellers. This would make getting a knockoff just a matter of bad luck, even if you order from Amazon themselves.

I haven’t ordered from Amazon since I learned this months ago, with two exceptions for birthday presents.

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/be-careful-amazon-...

Yes it makes it clear (but they can "commingle" the same product from different sellers, as said in the related comments).

However let's say you want to buy a product. But the reviews are mixed. Some are 5-star reviews, but there are 1-star reviews as well. And there are 5 sellers. From which one do you buy? All the reviews are mixed.

Perhaps a bad review is caused by a seller sending fake product. But perhaps the review is a valid review and it highlights a defect in the original product. You can't know.

Yes, but with mixed bins from multiple sellers, you don't know whose item you actually receive.

You should never buy any kind of food (for humans or animals) on Amazon...

Amazon purchasing rule of thumb used to be: "no electronics."

Then it was updated to include "nothing that goes on or in your body."

Then it was updated to include "nothing that goes on or in any living thing."

Then it was updated to include "nothing you wouldn't by from a random stranger standing outside a fly-by-night flea market."

For thousands of years, brick-and-mortar stores have lived and died by the quality of their merchandise. Amazon is just learning this.

Ugh. There are still a couple of canned food items I buy regularly on Amazon. Supposedly they are from the US and Europe, but, yeah, I guess with Amazon you never know.

But because Amazon is hitting conventional, traditional retailers so hard, now I have to wonder: could Amazon's behavior with regard to counterfeit products and commingling influence my local brick and mortar retailers to do the same thing?

yea i never thought about this happening to canned food either.... until i heard stories of shipping containers full of counterfeit redbull being caught by customs at a terminal.

If it's branded and there is a decent profit margin, i guess we should assume some questionable actor will steal that margin given the opportunity.

Poor doggo! It should be a criminal offence to sell (or facilitate the sale, if you reasonably should have known, and Amazon should) of dangerous counterfeit goods. Hope he or she recovered.

It could just be a bad batch or something, I'm giving the company the benefit of the doubt still. I've never heard of this dog food being counterfeited. My dog did recover pretty quickly as well and has been enjoying eating roast chicken instead the past few days.

if you still have the packaging, it might be worth sending all of it to the real company to see if they can determine 1. if its fake, 2. if so, how they teach consumers/wholesalers to catch it and destroy it.

This has happened to me a couple times as well!

I'm at the point now where I've gone from trusting a review consensus to seeking an individual reviewer on a product that seems thorough and reliable.

My favorite example might be trying to find outdoor solar-powered lights. Mountains of garbage, with a lot of sellers just re-branding the same garbage. The silver-lining is that there are power-reviewers out there doing complete tear-downs and reviewing wiring/soldering quality. These people are the true heroes.

The fact that you are the one who has to sort through all those reviews to find the one review that is actually truly helpful... kind defeats the purpose, doesn't it? Isn't Amazon supposed to solve the problem for you, instead of making you solve it?

Totally this! Int he past in the UK - you had a choice for something similar - maybe head to the local Garden Centre and pick up a garden light for an OK price, if nto head somewhere like John Lewis and get a really good one for maybe twice the price, or head to 'local discount store' and get something that might last the summer. But at each price point you knew what you were getting. You didn't have to mess around like this as other than the discount store, the other shops knew that the way to get you to return was to sell quality. At best you'd return the item, at worst you'd never shop there again.

My wife used to work in fashion, where they'd cut a square out of the back of every shirt sample that they went on to order, so that they could be sure they got the same material when they got the wholesale order - I wonder if Amazon is going similar?

The problem is then you can't always tell if you're getting the same product as that reviewer.

A lot of products also have this problem where the listing page will have selectable variations that are totally different products. So naturally one could be total rubbish but the overall review score hides it. Amazon does it with their own basics items so it’s not something just scammers do. Sidenote, their powered usb hubs are garbage.

https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-4-Port-USB-2-0-Ultra-Min...

Right, that has happened to me before. I've just returned the item in that case. It seems less likely to happen if the item is fulfilled by Amazon.

Do any of these people have their own sites for these reviews? The problem is that they are getting buried on Amazon, but I would still like to read them.

The circuit I've been following recently for categories I know nothing about is finding a related subreddit, then looking for review sites or YouTube channels they find reliable.

I like outdoor solar-powered lights, could you link a reviewer doing these tear-downs? I'd love to see.

I recently ordered ~$100 of cables from Monoprice and paid $20 for shipping (even though I have prime!) because I don’t trust Amazon. Really, Monoprice wins on discovery too. They offer one of everything at a good price.

> I recently ordered ~$100 of cables from Monoprice

Wow, how did your 3,918 cables arrive? Was it a full-sized goods truck or a couple of crates?

(This is, for the unaware, a joke on how inexpensive-yet-still-excellent Monoprice's cables are. Every time I order a clutch of Ethernet or USB cables, I wind up ordering three times as many just to make the order total greater than the shipping total and to have spares for later use.)

I like Monoprice, but their affordable RCA cables are pretty bad. The connectors are stiff and brittle. So the first time you fit it, it requires massive force to get it in place, and if you unplug it a few times, it's so loose it makes no contaact and can't be recrimped.

OTOH, fancy RCA cables sell for next to nothing at thrift shops now.

monoprice is inexpensive but be certain of ordering what you need because returns are not economical. i ordered two items (among others) that i wasn't sure would work for my application. they didn't, so i requested a return. the return shipping cost was as much as the cables/cords themselves, so now they're just lying around adding clutter to my life.

this is true on amazon as well. $20 mouse cost me $8 to return.

I've stopped buying electronics from Amazon - it's not like I don't use Amazon for loads of other things (books, audiobooks etc.) but the risk is too high for anything electrical.

Recently bought some auto parts from Amazon. What I got was low quality, and threads stripped as I was installing. That's now another category of things I won't buy on Amazon.

Don't worry. You can still get low quality parts from other places as well.

I had to replace the water pump in my car twice in a year because the factory installed one failed, and then the one I installed after that failed within six months.

I just wish Amazon offered a "verified brand" tag. Sometimes I'm willing to take a gamble on a third party seller to save money or on something that's just for me, but when I'm buying gifts, I want to KNOW the thing I'm buying is really being sold by the manufacturer (or someone they've got a relationship with). It's obscenely difficult to figure this out on Amazon, which has driven me to buy from Walmart.com more often than I would otherwise.

They do, the system is just complicated and focused on high-value branded items.

Agreed, and add on top of that add in the litany of sponsored items, not just at the top and bottom of the page, but randomly embedded in search results with a light gray (rgb(118,118,118)) "Sponsored" label.

In a recent report, it was reported that 18% of Amazon's revenue is from these 3rd parties thru fees and services. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/13/amazon-and-publishers-hurtin...

I wonder how much of that revenue they would lose vs people who would just buy the sold by Amazon equivalent.

Have you tried comparing with something like fakespot? https://www.fakespot.com/