I imagine that writing this report makes their boss very nervous because I would also be nervous if I had to repeatedly tell Jeff Bezos that I was failing to stop the slowly increasing flow of people's trust away from Amazon's retail site.
As much as I hate that hack Edison, he's right: you're reporting you've discovered X new ways to not solve the problem.
I feel like none of them can be trusted because most have never touched any of the umbrellas, but they are just doing a top 10 list and rewriting opinions they read on Amazon. Of course, they don't even consider products outside of Amazon because they wouldn't receive commission on sales. So, no one is talking about the small companies producing high quality, handmade umbrellas throughout the country, but instead every source funnels traffic to the same made in China Amazon clones.
If there is one, then I'll check the sidebar there, read through some posts, search for a few keywords. Basically spend 15 minutes researching.
Reddit still has shills and astroturfs, but for a lot of niches they're often aggressively moderated out of the community.
To go along with your umbrella example:
Unfortunately /r/umbrellas isn't a thing, but I did find this thread[1]. Sprinkled throughout the comments are links to sites that seem to be on the up-and-up.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/comments/a4afrg/guys_d...
How can one be sure those subreddits don't have any paid posters?
When you have a popular post that reaches the Reddit front page, you may receive messages from people asking if you'd like to promote their products.
My guess is that they eventually will (and I'm sure some already do). However, one thing that kind of helps weed out the fake reviews is the fact that you can inspect a user's post history.
On reddit or other more general sites, you can see their entire comment history. Hopefully you'll notice that a tiny tiny portion of their comments are related to products or reviews.
In other words, you can get a feel for if the person is genuine or not.
Of course, that doesn't 100% rule out paid shilling by (otherwise) honest people, but you do get a much better sense of the veracity of reviews on a site like reddit than you could ever get from Amazon.
This is always the way: once something has a large enough audience it will become a target for exploitation. This is why ad networks are juicy targets for hacks (wide spread of potential victims) and popular sites, or specific areas on those sites, like reddit can quickly become overrun by shills.
If the thing is open and understood, then I will have a much better time. If not, it will probably soon go on the abandoned trash heap.
This works especially well if the domain is not niche, but has wide general-population applicability. Say, dieting. The amount of content-marketing bullshit on the general Internet makes general topical searches near useless. Whereas just browsing the collected knowledge (pinned posts, wikis) of various dieting subreddits let me quickly find one appropriate regime for me, and then its specific subreddit taught me how to apply it safely.
(Yes, it was /r/keto, and yes, it worked.)
When TV shopping, I used the reviews from https://www.rtings.com/
They pointed me to issues and concerns with TV quality, provided me with an understanding of the trade-offs at various price points, and then directed me to a TV model that I purchased and have been incredibly satisfied with. Maybe we need a reputable internet equivalent to consumer reports. We obviously have demand, the question is how to finance it.
I think consistent, ethical, non-conflicted third party quality reviews can be a solid lifestyle business. Won't be a unicorn, but it'll keep a few people gainfully employed and make the world a bit better.
Why does valuable information that takes a lot of time and expense to produce need to be free? That attitude is the root of most of what's wrong with the web today.
s/internet/web/
I subscribed to CR for a month when I was shopping for a new dishwasher. After I found what I wanted, I unsubscribed. That seems functionally equivalent to what you want, at least when applied to large ticket items where the cost of a month of subscription is a small percentage of the total cost of the purchase being made.
This is a strange comparison. I'm amazed there are any worthwhile investment news items available to purchase for less than the cost of an annual CR Digital subscription ($35). It's so cheap it's hardly worth worrying about if you're going to use it at all.
In other areas, I found that up until a point, the price is generally correlated with quality. I had great success in avoiding frustration and waste by following the saw "I'm too poor to buy cheap".
As someone who uses a $20 knife, I feel the same way about a $145 knife.
Dull knives require multiple times of stress, and sawing motion to abrade through the thing. And with more power means accidents are easier and more damaging.
A proper chefs knife (I prefer santokus) should be professionally sharpened, honed before each use, and will be razor sharp. I only need to lay the knife on a steak and pull, and it cuts right through. The cheap $20 knives are usually serrated (nigh unsharpenable) and double as hacksaws.
While you may be statistically correct, anecdotally my family has hurt themselves way more often with sharp knives than we have with dull knives. It's probably due to being used to a dull knife before switching to a sharp one, but I still can't stand by that adage from our history of personal use at home!
As demonstrated perfectly by Kiwami Japan.
Their electronic reviews are fine but their other categories leave a lot to be desired. The whole point of a good review site is to find the low/medium priced item that is more than adequate for the task. Recommending a Mac or Wusthof knife is a safe bet that most won't challenge - I want them to find me the needle in the hay stack.
Of course, wirecutter claims that's not the case.
However, most of the time, I spend very little and make few purchases. The ones that are low-value - lets say vegetable peelers and compressed air canisters - I don't need ratings for. The large ones (Appliances, Misc Electronics, Suits, Cars, etc.) I research online anyways.
So if I'm not using their product 95% of the time, their subscription business model doesn't line up with my expected use-case. So I don't use it. I would love to pay for better rating data and don't mind shelling out for information, but I do need to pay for it when I'm consuming it, not in a prophylactic manner.
It works the same way when brand X has sub-par releases.
We have one. It's cr.org
I don't know what the rules are around that.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MH9HPTR
Over 3000 reviews... most of them for products completely unrelated to the one on sale. I see reviews for a bicycle lamp, a phone screen protector, and a voltage converter.
This seems like a bug. Surely Amazon shouldn't allow sellers to transfer product reviews over from other products?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gflpf0DrCgw
Par for the Amazon course, cheap Chinese knockoffs. If they had anything other than a highly permissive refund system, they’d already be drowning in lawsuits. They must bleed refund money though, and I thought Bezos was all about right margins?
That's the part that worries me. Amazon surely knows this is a problem, and I'm sure they know much more about it than we do. And yet they allow it to continue. It genuinely makes me concerned for the future of their business, where they know actually providing a quality experience is going to hammer their revenue/profits.
If you return too much stuff amazon will cut you off: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/05/23/a...
I suspect it's more likely to be done on total purchase _price_ - I spend a fair amount of money on things that are very difficult to counterfeit (video games), so they are obviously never returned, which probably tips the balance back in my favour (the fact that I'm in the EU, and have a statutory right to return (for any reason) may also be a factor).
Honestly, after reading the facts, I was shocked it took Amazon so long to take action.
But it certainly seems the average shopper/returner has nothing to worry about.
Since any seller can list on any listing. Some sellers will list their products on listings that are out of stock, and gain editing priviledges.
Then they will edit the page to whatever other products they want, and merge it with a new listing they create.
The end result is that they get a listing with hundreds or thousands of reviews. So unsuspecting customer will purchase based on social proof.
> https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MH9HPTR
> Over 3000 reviews... most of them for products completely unrelated to the one on sale. I see reviews for a bicycle lamp, a phone screen protector, and a voltage converter.
And it's "Amazon's Choice for 'iphone headphone charger splitter'"!
Archive link in case the product morphs again: https://web.archive.org/web/20190226210646/https://www.amazo...
However these sellers are essentially stealing old, expired listings of products and collecting all the reviews associated with them to pump up their rating and review count.
This has been going on for over a year. I really don't understand how Amazon hasn't figured out a way to close the loophole at this point...
EDIT: Funny how completely broken and anti-customer the Amazon review system is given that the #1 leadership principle at Amazon [1] is the following:
"Customer Obsession - Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers."
Just goes to show how these things are always BS.
[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/our-leadership...
Unless you're selling 20 dollar bills for $5, you'll naturally get negative reviews.
I've had to pull several products off Amazon because someone left an early, nonsense review that killed sales. (E.g. "Fast and easy" - 2 stars or "Works perfectly. Thanks!" - 1 star)
It's very, very easy from an operational perspective to focus on the data-driven decision to sell crap, to ignore fake reviews etc. because that's what sells 'today'.
But an A/B test (short view) does not capture users recurring behaviour, and response to that experience overall.
If the A/B test encompassed a 'year long study' they might find a different set of data: upset customers who don't come back.
Which could lead to systematic 'sand in the engine' that could seriously erode Amazon.
The only way this would be resolved really is if Bezos himself makes a pretty firm commitment to it, which is hard obviously because 'quality' is a difficult thing to put a number on.
That said, it's hard to conclude how truly damaging this is. Once people are hooked on something, it takes an alternative for them to change their behaviour.
They have gone the way of being a market and are not to be trusted. They robbed me out of $630 through a combination of fraud and my CC company being wankers.
Once a lot of other larger companies figure out how to do cheap and quick delivery ... what advantage will Amazon have?
People think Amazon has a leg on Wallmart. I'm not so sure!
Wallmart has a 'distribution centre' (aka a store) only 5 miles from every American!
Wallmart already has the wheels greased for the things we really need.
Wallmart can sell razors, groceries and diapers every day while Amazon sells the not-so-common stuff.
I'm amazed Wallmart hasn't figured it out already ...
I used it when my printer broke and I needed one. Same day pickup for free. They list dozens of printers, but it was easy to sort on ones that were in stock in my local store so I could get same day pickup. I went just a few minutes out of my way, and had a working printer when I got home from work. Sure on amazon I might have bought a different printer with some nice to have feature, but I wouldn't have got it today. Target is just as easy (maybe easier).
I don't know why anyone would look to Amazon first anymore. Sure for obscure things amazon (or ebay), is more likely to have it. Even then I go to obscureProduct.com where the staff knows something about their products and I can read their buyers guide and get a good brand (They probably are biased to selling some brand which is worth more profit to them, but they at least keep me away from the junk brands which is in itself worth far more to me than a few buck extra profit to them)
Why? How do we "know" they have the data? How do we "know" that can act on whatever data they have? People here seem to ascribe a level of omniscience to tech giants that I'm not certain they deserve.
I'd describe it as a level of basic knowledge about their own product. You don't have to be a god to analyze Amazon's data, especially if you're Amazon.
Amazon is consistently allowing multi-hundred unverified 5 star reviews for new products to persist, and my wife and I are starting to drift to other, more reputable resources. After a decade+ of Prime membership, this is a really disappointing betrayal of trust.
Ideally I’d like to simply filter out all fake reviews and recalculate the stars rating.
It seems like it should be easy to track the content coming in with an additional barcode sticker. You scan that barcode when the order is fulfilled and based on the user review/return/etc. ban that seller for counterfeit goods. It just seems like Amazon isn't interested in solving this because it becomes fairly trivial. I think the long term goal is to erode confidence in now Amazon branded products as they have different SKUs. Additionally, most people are lazy and won't bother returning something < $25 and will just pitch it but Amazon still collects their fees.
A friend in the ecommerce industry tells of some pretty dark patterns - some companies won't allow negative reviews to be posted at all. Attempts to leave negative reviews trigger chat or other communication methods instead of posting the review.
Amazon also won't allow most negative reviews - I've had many 1 star reviews denied by their automated system, but this has never happened with a 5 star review.
This is why app stores only show reviews/scores for the current version of the app. There's no such thing as "versions" of a product, though. (Or, well, there are product revisions with distinct UPC codes, but an OTA firmware update doesn't qualify as one, and yet should be a new "version" for the purposes of reviews.)
It's not justified, it's just a way to swindle consumers.
I hope Amazon sees this and many similar complaints. I feel the greater population will catch on to this in due time and they could very well fall from their throne. In fact, if they don't, I hope they do.
In the meantime, I'm more than willing to pay more get products directly from the manufactures and stores in person (e.g. Apple, Apple Store, Best Buy, Target, Nike, etc...).
Not sure how this affects their other holdings such as Zappos.
There are two universes in Amazon. Recognized name brands, and unrecognized name brands.
In the recognized name brand universe, the reviews are pretty reliable.
In the unrecognized name brand universe, the reviews are not reliable. Generally speaking, with the no-name cheap stuff, you are generally getting what you pay for, irrespective of the review scores.
When I did incentivized reviews (stopped after rule change), I always gave a score based on value for the price. Four stars for a $20 pair of headphones should not be the same as four stars for a $300 pair of headphones, because the expectations for quality should be much different at the higher price point.
Generally speaking, though, the vast majority of the no-name stuff I got was pretty good for their selling price (but I was also picky about what I accepted for review). At most, I only got one or two pieces of junk, and scored those products accordingly.
Generally speaking three star reviews are the most informative to me.
I noticed this once when repurchasing a space heater I'd bought multiple times in the past. Several reviews mentioned the temperature sensor failing, but this particular heater had no temperature sensor.
That isn't the only product I've seen with suspicious bad reviews, and I've read pieces of investigative journalism that confirm it's fairly widespread.
Sure, it's around here in there. But back in the day if you were going to write about why you didn't like something, you were going to write an article about why it "sucks".
I've been seeing all of these posts about gamafication of Amazon reviews and don't understand why Amazon just don't limit the reviews on a product to people who've actually purchased it from Amazon?
Ironically, I came across a small eligibility requirement, (but otherwise seems to allow reviews by anyone for anything):
> To contribute to Customer features (for example, Customer Reviews, Customer Answers, Idea Lists) or to follow other contributors, you must have spent at least $50 on Amazon.com using a valid credit or debit card in the past 12 months. Promotional discounts don't qualify towards the $50 minimum.
Amazon's clearly able to disallow reviews unless you've bought it from them. They're also big enough to add incentives to people who have purchases (eg. maybe 1-5% of product value that goes toward future purchases), to encourage reviews. They could even gamify the 1-5% based upon the "I've found this helpful" response, encouraging quality reviews.
I just don't get it. Have I missed something?
Is it just me, or is it harder to sort by critical nowadays? I find I have to click into all reviews to reveal the option for "all critical".
And recently when looking at one product, when I tried to pull the "negative" reviews, they included several five star reviews.
I'm seriously considering ditching Prime and signing up for a Target credit card - there's no annual fee, you get the same prime style free shipping, and there's a base level of quality to the products at Target that just doesn't seem to be present in Amazon's offerings.
Here are just a few examples:
https://www.amazon.com/VOWSVOWS-Microphone-Earphones-Headpho... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MF81QMS https://www.amazon.com/VOWSVOWS-Microphone-Earphones-Headpho... https://www.amazon.com/Headphones-Microphone-Earphones-Compa...
Does anyone know why they don't do this?
Honestly, that's a useless metric. Since banning incentivized reviews, the situation is actually _worse_ than it was before.
All of the vendors who were sending out products for incentivized reviews now reimburse reviewers after they buy the product and leave a review, which means the review gets a "Verified Purchase" tag. This is against the rules, but it's happening.
In the age of incentivized reviews, those reviews did not have a "Verified Purchase" tag.
Source: Used to be an incentivized reviewer (stopped after rule change).
I don't think there's really a solution at all. As long as people are free to do outside deals there's always going to be review manipulation.
The one thing that could help this is Amazon getting rid of third party sellers or go the route Target announced today and only partner with trusted companies.
So, a good product, with multiple sellers, might get dinged due to one bad seller.
Or, one bad seller out of four sellers is shipping counterfeits. Because of commingling, all sellers and the product get tarnished.
1. Mom-and-mom brand buys fake reviews
2. Mom-and-mom brand displaces well-known brands on amazon search
3. Well-known brand buys amazon ads to appear higher in search than shit brands with fake reviews
It's not uncommon to hear about folks targeting competitors with lower star reviews as just getting 5* reviews isn't enough to stand out.
But then - it maybe competitor efforts of course.
When I do research nowadays I have to deliberately select the 1 star reviews to see if there is a real issue that's glossed over by the paid reviews.