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Re:Amazon ‘flooded by fake five-star reviews’ – report by Semaphor on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @04:22AM (#19672010)
While Amazon Germany (afaik) does not yet have many of the problems of Amazon US (I often hear on HN about fake products and the fake reviews of TFA), what really annoys me is the completely different products as one. I was looking at a drill, it's variants included a jigsaw. The reviews were almost all for the jigsaw and at some point, Amazon even removed the notice which variant was reviewed. Utterly useless.
Re:Amazon ‘flooded by fake five-star reviews’ – report by 2T1Qka0rEiPr on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @06:44AM (#19672516)
This! In many ways shared reviews for SKUs of the same product make absolute sense (if the blue bag is made well, so should the red one). But there seems to be huge abuse in defining the base product as you've highlighted. I presume sellers have complete autonomy to set them up, and Amazon might argue that it's "infeasible" for them to administer this, but from the perspective of the consumer I completely agree that it erodes confidence in "reviews".

Over the years I've noticed a shift in the products I most readily find on Amazon from well established brands to utterly unknown Chinese manufacturers. I've been burnt enough times by buying such products that I've reverted to mostly looking for products which satisfy 1) from reputable company, and 2) positive reviews.