> I wish Amazon would separate verified reviews (actually shipped item from Amazon Warehouse to this Amazon account who is writing a review) from unverified reviews.

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).

Doesn’t matter, won’t solve anything. The fake reviewers will email people and tell them to buy the product and they’ll be reimbursed. I’ve gotten a few emails asking me to do this (would never of course). They even explicitly mention that you need to buy it so it gets a verified tag. They’re not even trying to hide the scam anymore, Amazon doesn’t care.

There's a solution to this. Reviewers are anonymous to the sellers. Sellers should not be able to link a review to a purchase.

That wont stop them. They still require proof of your review before they refund the other 50% to you.

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.