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Re:Have Online Reviews Lost All Value? by goatinaboat on Monday September 30, 2019 @07:50AM (#21114219)
I was looking for something on Amazon the other day, my searches revealed dozens of odd-sounding brands that I had never heard of before, all of which had lots of 5-star reviews, all of which seemed to be for a different product than the one listed.
Re:Have Online Reviews Lost All Value? by notacoward on Monday September 30, 2019 @09:26AM (#21115084)
You're looking at a confluence of two problems. One is that drop-shipping directly from Chinese manufacturers has become so cheap and easy (because of an international-postal-rule exemption that has been discussed here before) that everyone's doing it. Including the manufacturers themselves, some of whom I'm pretty sure make up the brand names literally at random. It costs them nothing at all to make up a few dozen brands, each presenting the product in a slightly different way, in hopes that one of those presentations will catch a few more eyes. It's basically the same incentive structure that gave us junk mail and (even more so) spam email.

The other problem is "review washing". Some vendors do the "bait and switch" themselves, but there's also an actual market for Amazon listings with good reviews attached. All an unscrupulous vendor has to do is buy one of those and change literally everything that goes into it, from contact details to the actual product. It's like if you could buy the right to a best-seller book cover, replacing the content for books already in brick-and-mortar stores with whatever you want. That's why sites like ReviewMeta and FakeSpot are absolutely essential for anyone shopping on Amazon nowadays.

Re:Have Online Reviews Lost All Value? by hnick on Monday September 30, 2019 @09:00PM (#21121076)
If you have some spare time and are going for an item that's hard to make wrong, this can serve you too. I bought an item that was using a brand name in the title on eBay, but what I got was a cheap knockoff. The box itself had the Chinese branding so it was very obvious.

I ended up getting a full refund and it works fine. I was annoyed at the deception more than anything - the item is fine, but they may have cost a sale to a legitimate supplier by abusing the trademark.

Re:Have Online Reviews Lost All Value? by ReviewMeta on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @12:17PM (#21127175)