- a lot of companies don't manufacture the product themself
- they don't even manufacture two products from the same subcontractor
- sometime, the same product, between two batches, is not produce by the same sub-contractor
- big players just don't care. Cisco is not going to lose business because you chose to not buy, and most people won't follow you to allow the boycott to have enough wait
- PR firms are so powerful now they can make any brand great again. See Microsoft. I guaranty there will be people that will want to answer this comment stating how they really are a good firm now. And cite great things they do. Yet I bet in 10 years, we will learn about some other horrible things they did. Again. It's been like that for decades. PR works extremely well now, people genuinely live the feeling they've been lead to by those amazing consent manufacturer.
- a brand is dead ? Don't worry, it will be renamed into another one. Or subcontract for another one. You will buy its product again, you will just don't know you do.
In rhetoric this is what's known as "inoculating the argument", or "inoculation theory". You take a reasonable criticism of what you've said and present a weakened version of what someone might respond with in order to suggest that means that response is invalid.
The thing is though, in this case, you've not really presented a solid argument. All you've said is "Microsoft might be doing terrible things!", which is potentially true, but it's a bad reason to ignore the obviously good things that we can see. What your argument boils down to is that once a company loses your trust they can never get it back regardless of what they do. In which case you're removing yourself from the conversation because you're only ever going to be negative.
These things might be unpreferable to you, but none of them are "wrong".
Let's see how long it takes until that is illegal in your country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_o...
From the wiki page, there are three levels that include 6 stages (two each):
Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)
1. Obedience and punishment orientation
(How can I avoid punishment?)
2. Self-interest orientation
(What's in it for me?)
(Paying for a benefit)
Level 2 (Conventional)
3. Interpersonal accord and conformity
(Social norms)
(The good boy/girl attitude)
4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation
(Law and order morality)
Level 3 (Post-Conventional)
5. Social contract orientation
6. Universal ethical principles
(Principled conscience)And as you noted, I designed it specifically so that my comment would not be inundated with answers from the accounts of PR firms paid to say MS is great.
You can now state that those could be real accounts, and that MS is really a great company and that it's just being defended by people that like it for real and I have no proof of what I advance.
And I have no way to contradict you.
Pants, one of my co-workers recommended a brand of pants from a Danish store called shaping new tomorrow, they have two real stores and their own internet business. They are the only pants I buy now, because they fit my needs. I used to buy pants at various places, but these guys really hit the nail on what I need, and as such their brand is immensely important to my pants buying.
Blood Bowl, I play it and I buy 3rd party miniatures. In the blood bowl community there is a lot of talk on who build the best 3rd party miniatures. I prefer willys miniatures and Greebo Games myself, and typically only buy their stuff. Again these are small mom and pop companies with their own little web shops that have become successful through their brands being associated with high quality.
T-shirts, I used to be a shirt guy. But a couple of years ago I started wearing t-shirts with prints. These are perhaps the best example because you can buy from so many places. And I did, I’ve bought t-shirts from about twenty different shops, but these days I mainly buy from qwertee because their fit suits my body best. Again their brand and the product I associate with it is important.
I used to buy things of amazon, and stores like it here in Denmark. But because it’s almost impossible, or at least takes a lot of time to associate sellers and quality on those platforms I almost never use them now. This was all anecdotal, but if I’m not alone in this, then brand matters quite a bit these days.
I'd go further and say that branding is now often the product itself.
Nike can sell a hat for 20X more than a generic hat when it has their swoosh on it. Perfume is basically a generic chemical wrapped in a huge amount of marketing. Apple makes excellent products, but there's no question that at least part of the premium you pay is not for better quality, but for the brand itself.
While the value of a brand often revolves around vanity and advertising, there are often other factors that are also not directly linked to product quality: such as "fair trade" coffee, buy-one-donate-one shoes, or humanely raised animals for food.
We're moving from a pure "consumer society" into something a bit different (but definitely still consumption based), where consumption is not just for the direct benefit of the consumer, but is also used to signal deeply held values.
Naively, I though he was trying to make well designed clothes for rock climbers. As a geek, I though he was trying to solve a problem.
No. He just bought Chinese low quality t-shirts, and sticked logos on that and spent all his energy developing the brand itself: communication, aesthetic, mentality, target, etc.
I couldn't see the value of doing such thing, since we have enough of this crap. But it worked: friends around me started to wear the damn thing.
It makes me so uneasy, but it's a good lesson on how humans work.
It's an even better lesson on how business is "taught" vs. how business is done. Everyone on HN, at business school, or wherever will tell you that you should start a business to "solve problems" or "fill a gap in the market".
The majority of the people actually starting businesses are doing so to make a buck. That's it. if you're starting out, you'll learn more about selling from starting a business providing a me-too substitute good in a crowded market than you will trying to build a completely new product segment with no market validation and no established price points.
Yes, absolutely, since the invention of brands, at least some brands were the product rather than a signifier of quality.
However, in the last 10-20 years, largely due to globalization, high quality goods have become widely available. Before, that Nike hat may well have been much higher quality than the generic, but now they are indistinguishable. As overall product quality has improved, the only thing left to sell is the brand itself.
The thing is that as it is said over and over in this thread, you cannot trust reviews, and I would add that you cannot trust most of the smaller blogs/review websites because most would say anything about a product as long as they are paid.
If I buy the new Sony noise cancelling headsets, I know I will not get disappointed: it is a reputable brand, and it is the high-end of the range. This strategy is not perfect, far from it, and some brand are taking advantage of it. In that case, vote with your wallet. You can't really do that with no-name brands.
I'm saying brand loyalty has lost its power now.
Sony is a good example. You say it's a reputable brand, yet sometimes they just lose it do something absolutely terrible. The first one that comes to mind is infecting willingly their customers with a rootkit in 2005 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...), but it's just because I don't follow up on those things as much. I'm sure there are ones in the last 5 years, although with PR firms doing their job as well as they do now, a quick google search will seldom return anything.
Companies don't have a customer first mentality anymore.
Loyalty doesn't mean anything for them, and so you being loyal to them makes no sense.
And it does mean a more complicated world, because you constantly have to reassess where to buy from.
The fact that you're bringing up a 15 year old incident proves that doing bad things can sting, perhaps scar permanently.
It's foolish to think there's a company that will always "do right". They are run by humans.
Their Särmä-brand "common jeans" are just that; classic straight cut jeans with a medium waist, no stone-washing or other artificial wear, and a little bit of stretch for comfort. For someone like me who has large thighs from lifting weights, there are many otherwise nice pants I just can't wear, but these are perfect. Most brands these days have 5 different kinds of slim/skinny fit, and 1 straight fit if you're lucky.
Their "tactical jeans" are even better, with roughly the same cut and the addition of a crotch gusset for mobility and discreet extra pockets. There's a bit of polyester in the fabric for durability and a bit more stretch too. They're literally as comfortable as sweat pants, it's uncanny. If they last as long as promised, I doubt I will ever buy other jeans again.
Overall, I would say don't trust brands, trust quality, and don't trust reviews on big sites like Amazon.
> sometimes, the same product, between two batches, is not produce by the same sub-contractor
This is how branding has always been. Gomorrah details the manufacturing process for high-end fashion brands: any number of clothing factories simultaneously accept a contract to deliver X items of clothing in Y time at Z unit price, the brand gives free materials to everyone who accepts, and the first factory to deliver the X items gets paid. Every other factory who accepted is stuck with a bunch of clothing rejected not for quality reasons, but because they turned it in slower than the first factory.
A lot of that clothing is then sold by organized crime using unauthorized brand labels. But is a shirt with a fake Calvin Klein label -- manufactured for Calvin Klein exactly to their specifications -- really "counterfeit"?
There is no value for me in having a big Superdry or whatever logo blazoned across my chest. Instead I choose clothing with no logos, aside from what's on the tags inside. I make a small exception for polo shirts, because it just seems like it's integral part of the design to have a small logo on the left chest. I do try to choose high-quality shirts with small unobtrusive logos.
This has served me quite well for a while now.
Case example: I have two pairs of a specific model of cycling gloves, both are subtly different in materials and have different labeling styles, as well as different "made in" statements (one European, one Asian). Had I bought them from Amazon I might wonder which one is fake and it wouldn't be clear at all. But I got both pairs directly from company HQ stocks, the closest thing to a definition of "authentic" we have in today's inscrutable networks of subcontracting.
But the brand is responsible for the quality as perceived by the customer. They retain any good brand image by properly managing supply/subcontractor chain with quality control.
For the end user expiernce, it is not important who manufactures what but what assurances about the quality are made.
Of course, my argument falls apart if we can't spot counterfeits on Amazon.
Well, yes in an era where any kid in their early 20s can be CTO of a startup, and get their 5 min of fame for saying Webkit is the new IE, thinks IE era meant IE 7 and never developed a thing during Pre IE6. Of coz they get moved by PR and Marketing. For those of us "old enough" who have been burnt, or at least old enough to be a little less idealistic. I am not really seeing the power of PR.
On the subject of Microsoft, it isn't really a powerful PR I mean you have to give them credit Satya's Microsoft is a lot different to Mid 90s Microsoft. There are lots of signs they are moving in right direction ( even though it is still bumpy ). From Xbox, Gaming, Windows, Azure, Open Source. While the quality still isn't there yet, but at least they know their quality is not good enough. And that is much better than old Microsoft where nothing is a problem as long as the sales are moving.
I do the same. I wish I didn't, but I don't know what the practical alternative is. I guess it's the whole reason that brands were created in the first place.
I do source some of my stuff from smaller brands and shops, whenever I can. But that's not always an option.
When it comes to software, I'm not entirely satisfied with Apple's "walled garden." But for hardware, I know that if I get something at the Apple Store, or from apple.com, I generally don't have to worry.
It's because of this that I wish Apple† would go back into some of the product lines it has abandoned. Wifi routers. Servers. Printers and scanners. Even AA batteries and blank DVD's (I still have some of both). I'm at the point where I'll pay extra for confidence in the product.
† Or some other tech company that cares about its brand.
"To enable SSH on an AirPort base station you just need to set the dbug property to 0x3000, like this:
python -m acp -t {ipv4-address} -p {password} --setprop dbug 0x3000
python -m acp -t {ipv4-address} -p {password} --reboot
Then connect to the device with the username root and whatever password you use to manage the device."
So far so good on the latest one but it's annoying to deal with so many replacements
Emphasis on generally. Apple still sells many (most?) of its iMacs with spinning rust drives. Just picking up something from Apple Store and paying tons for it does not guarantee it meets minimum quality standards one might expect.
Related: I try to buy Amazon Basics for a lot of items.
thanks for the reference as it's often seen in many places of society and culture
It is doubly apt considering what is going on in the political realm currently as well. Not a lot of understanding or willingness to fix things within the constraints of a system, just promises to tear it all down and replace it with utopian versions.
Anything that can be faked will be faked in bulk.
They can make a dent in the problem short term with more manual review but as the spammers evolve better automation, if all Amazon has in the race are humans, they'll keep losing.
As more and more of these types of stories come out, over the course of years now, I keep expecting to hear about a big push from Amazon to clear out the noise. And it keeps failing to happen.
The knee jerk interpretation is that Amazon doesn't care about fake products because they still get paid. But, historically at least, Amazon is smarter than that. Part of their dominance comes from understanding that, long term, there is more profit in happy customers even if it that means accepting otherwise avoidable costs.
I wonder if this is the result of a changing culture or of it's an indication they've become too large and inefficient to respond to problems and iterate at modern tech company speed.
One of the reasons ML worries me is because it can sprinkle just enough of something that vaguely resembles quality into the pot to take the quantity (spam) scaling to a whole new level.
I've had to start doing this with violin strings. The sort of strings I like are pretty damn expensive (~$120 list price), so originally, any chance I could get to save say 10% I would take. But I heard way too much about fakes being shipped from Amazon 3rd party sellers, so I've started just buying everything from Shar (which, it turns out, provides steep discounts fairly regularly; you just have to wait for them).
However, Amazon also permits sellers to operate from countries that ignore US court orders. It is also possible to run 100s or even 1000s of Amazon seller accounts at the same time in contravention of Amazon's rules on this. It is also possible through fictitious entities for citizens of countries under US sanctions to operate Amazon businesses.
There is no way to enforce a judgment beyond grabbing any US based assets. You cannot, for example, extradite, prosecute, and imprison a Chinese citizen for poisoning US kids by selling Tas-T-Lead counterfeit Pbikachus.
This general type of problem is just more acute with Amazon and other ecommerce platforms than it is for other things like web media. If a Belorussian bot network embezzles $2 million from a US ad network, no one dies. When you sell dangerous physical products, people can and do die. Problems of addressing hackers and the like who are hiding in judgment-and-extradition-proof countries become more obvious and serious in the eyes of the public when the harms go beyond just businesses suffering abstract financial harms.
Something that would help here is if Amazon would display the seller's country more prominently (or at all). It's a lot more problematic if you're not even aware that you're buying something from a seller in country without a functioning legal system.
China for example does have a functioning court system. Like many countries, they don't cooperate with US court orders as a matter of sovereignty. Not even when Nike is trying to collect a couple billion dollars from counterfeiters: https://www.thefashionlaw.com/home/in-18-billion-case-over-c...
As you note though it's actually an important distinction about the retailer, because the retailer carries most of the product liability. Amazon makes people fill in a check box stating that they have liability insurance once the seller gets to a certain size, but they do not really check this at least to my knowledge. I encounter a lot of people who should have liability insurance, certified to Amazon that they did, but do not. There's not much wrong with a seller located in a country that cooperates with the US selling into the US because they can be held liable for any bad stuff that they do. They at least have a stake and can be held accountable. Not so when they are retailing from a safe haven.
But then if they commit fraud the US associate gets arrested, and it's hard to find volunteers to do that.
Amazon's prices are too low to do this verifications per product.
> The scammers and amazon profit.
Is short term thinking and Amazon would never think like that.
The problem is harder than you give it credit for. It's a constant arms race.
Have you price compared when buying basic household goods recently? I haven't found Amazon to be significantly cheaper than local big box stores, who also happen to actually care even a little bit about their supply chain.
So Amazon are undercutting by skipping supplier verification. How is this a "hard problem"? If I make my restaurant cheaper by not checking food refrigeration, that's not a "hard problem to solve"
And it is indeed an arms race, like everything that happens on the internet at scale where money is involved.
But I disagree that the problem is prohibitively hard to solve. In my experience you can always stay just ahead of the black hat players. They're rarely smarter or more talented than competent software engineers and data scientists.
Amazon's failure to stay ahead in this area is, to me, an indication that they're using the wrong strategies, probably because people with the wrong skillsets are being assigned the job of figuring out how to solve the problem.
Right now, I'm paying a premium for the convenience of amazon. I'm willing to pay a reasonably large premium for convenience; taking that premium is a sustainable business, but if I'm paying a premium, I expect the product I ordered.
But you know what? safeway is just down the way, and they do deliveries, too. CVS does deliveries, and doesn't seem to have this issue.
I mean, sure, an everything store is great, but if you have enough quality issues, I'm going to go back to maintaining accounts at each vendor.
(all that said, the problem is below my threshold right now. I have been sent the wrong product, but... it doesn't happen often.)
It's so weird to me, though 'cause here I am, totally willing to pay extra for convenience, and amazon seems to be throwing that premium away.
Clearly, it's not an impossible problem to solve, 'cause basically every other major retailer (and for that matter, nearly all minor retailers) has solved it. It's only the places where they try to both sell their own stuff and be a marketplace of shady third party sellers where I have problems, and even then, most places that try to do both do a better job of segregating the real business from the 'let's compete with ebay' business than amazon does.
I mean, it seems to me like this would be costing amazon money both in the short and long term. If I were an amazon shareholder, I'd demand they drop the third-party garbage until they figured out how to solve the problem as well as target does.
To take an extreme example, as fears surrounding the Coronavirus spike, people are trying to buy 3M masks from Home Depot, not Amazon. It tells me consumers already have a trust issue building with Amazon when they are buying a product that needs to work.
The problem is that currently it's profitable for Amazon to host goods from fraudsters; if (when) any get discovered, they kick them off but keep the proceeds. Society and law should ensure that Amazon loses money when hosting goods from fraudsters, so that the motivation is properly aligned.
I love imagining the surreal consequences of a world where reputation is far more valuable than the products themselves... but that must be unsustainable.
That has largely the same result. Most satisfied customers don't bother to leave a review, so real reviews tend to skew towards people who have had issues.
If you bribe satisfied customers into leaving a review then your reviews are no longer from the same sampling population as your competitors' reviews and you end up looking better than you really are by comparison. Plus, if the incentive isn't offered to everyone then people who get it (and then are disproportionately likely to leave a review) will tend to like the seller more because they liked receiving the incentive.
It would only be fair if the same incentive was provided to all buyers for leaving reviews of all sellers.
I live downstairs from someone who gives 5 star, raving reviews in return for "free samples". I'm not sure if it's for profit or for fun or what, but the rate at which Amazon delivery people deliver packages to our building is truly staggering.
I knew this was a problem mostly in the US, but just like one of the initial commenters noted, it's starting to happen even in Germany, and Amazon is now filled with all kind of weird cheap brands that have 4,5+ stars and 500+ reviews, you can't get any proper stuff like a humidifier or some small kitchen accessories without being flooded with spam. Well, back to local shops and retailers.
It's sickening.
This is not even mentioning incentivized reviwers who may be posting exaggerated (if not fake) reviews for promos, discounts, etc.
This is called brushing and there have been several articles written about it. Scammers create fake accounts for real addresses and then ship fake merchandise to those addresses to get the "verified purchase" for their review.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-brushing-scam-couple-rec...
However, real crooks just compensate verified buyers by paying them via Paypal, Payoneer, etc. You can't protect against that except through court order or by private sting investigation. Amazon does sue organizers of these schemes and has untangled some in that way, but that is challenging to scale.
When you list a product on Amazon, you have to pay 10-20 of those Amazon Employees to review the product at arms length.
Say each reviewer is given 2 hours for each product, before you can list a product on Amazon you have to pay $2 x 20 x hourly rate.
These should be the only reviews.
Or you can sell your product with no reviews.
But also, you don't want people to be too close to a range of products so they can be somewhat objective. For example is swimming shampoo a real thing? or is it just normal shampoo that costs more?
Here is Australia there is a range of over the counter pain killers, all the same brand, all with the same active ingredients, but marketed at different kinds of pain, and at different price points.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/help https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
It's essentially an ad, not a review.
My impression is: you pay, you get 5 stars. They buy a product themselves and didn't like it, you get 1 star.
Maybe it's just not an issue for most people because they don't know that reviews could be bought, so any and all reviews are great for making the sale from Amazon's perspective. If the minority that chooses to shop elsewhere grows too large, they can always make a dramatic gesture, punish a dozen people with fake reviews and donate to a children's hospital.
Simply limit "review rights" to users who have made a certain amount of purchases, are already subscribed for a certain amount of time, etc.
And the people who answer one of the questions with "I don't know", too. Why did they bother typing anything at all?
My theory is that some people can't imagine that people aren't talking specifically to them. You see them in chat rooms answering every question as if it was posed them to directly, even when it was obviously directed at someone else.
Maybe reviews should be limited only to certified buyers or only those should be added to stars /rank.
If you want to test longevity Amazon could track warranty repair / replacement claims.
And this will effectively be Amazon's undoing. Given how much central power and authority they control over global retail, this is a good thing. Competition is good for the consumer.
Essentially all a Brand says is that they got money for it. It how it was made or that they won't decide to cut corners for their next quarterly earnings no matter how many years it was good.
In practice given how often the "counterfeits" are made in the same factory by the same workers with materials from the same supplier the money going there is no guarantee of either product quality or righteousness.
Trying to use brand for delegating quality control is doomed to failure in the real world.
I suspect the better approach towards product identification would be going by verifiable specifications like manufacturers and doing both shopping and any enforcement based upon that. It would be hard as hell to transition society towards that as a norm though with marketer saturation, time investment, and every manufacturer having a financial incentive to try to decommoditize themselves to improve yields and protect themselves from competition.
Then I noticed that aliexpress actually made some pretty good page design choices. Since you can see how long a seller is registered and how many they have sold (both directly on the product information site), it is pretty easy to find a at lest decent trader there
I would argue that in some ways, AliExpress is better than Amazon. Vendors seem really responsive, even for tiny purchases, and they are eager to avoid negative reviews.
But you’re right about brands. When it comes to certain products like phone chargers, the manipulation is so rampant I stick with the same supplier.
Amazon cares, but Chinese sellers are paying Amazon customers to write fake reviews for them. There's an article about it here:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/her-amazon...
This practice basically makes it impossible to tell fake reviews from real ones.
The other day I came across something interesting: two comments, for two different but related products (dynamos). One comment was in German, the other in Italian, but they both had the same non-sequitur in them.
Apparently scammers reuse comments across products (not surprising) and languages (more surprising).
About brands, we’ve seen the rise of comparison sites and review videos that allows unknown products to raise to the top. I’d say that’s pretty in line with your expectations towards user reviews. We just have more experienced, less influencable/buyable reviewers (in general). For instance the top vacuum cleaner on wirecutter doesn’t need to be a Dyson to get recognized.
The main issue here is really Amazon messing with the supply chain and injecting fakes where they could be guaranteeing genuine products instead. In a sense, looking at a wirecutter like site and buying directly from the maker is the best of both worlds.
[0] https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
More and more I find Amazon to be closer and closer to a Chinese Bazar of cheap quality items (kind of an AliExpress or dx but with a different perceived quality).
I believe they will gain a lot of customers among people who just want cheap stuff (or don't care if it is original as long as the brand is clearly visible and is cheaper) but definitely they will lose customers that use Amazon for convenience (more or less the same price, better refund policies, availability of products...)
It's a pity. Hopefully others will fill that space.
In Spain, El Corte Inglés with its new on-line platform is getting closer and closer.
Totally agree. I think a lot of people feel this way, which is why it's so lucrative for Amazon and sellers to cheat on reviews.
A real store with some special online exceptions, but those exceptions are never going to be Amazon or Ebay.
There are some shady real stores selling shit too of course, so I have to be choosy, but I'm feeling pretty safe at a national supermarket chain, or Kmart.
So if I were the big retailers and cosmetic manufacturers (etc.). I'd be banding together to help fund more docos like that on netflix and elsewhere.
That'll scare people over to physical retail without mucking the image of any specific brands.
Another advantage of physical is the great advice you get and being able to act straight away (tale the thing home.). For example for a DIY project you often realise you don't have something mid job, just go and get it, get some advice on how to install it, and finish the job off on the same day.
Well one of the things big brands - especially in the consumer products industry like the one I work in - do quite religiously is product testing during research and a lot of q/a during manufacturing to eliminate as far as possible risk of safety issues.
We sometimes take competitive products through the same tests and while what some of the small producers sometimes produce wouldn't be illegal, we'd never run with those standards. Bigger competitors tend to be largely fine.
Amazon used to be that brand for me, I trusted that I'd get a real product vetted by real reviewers and by Amazon. Adios
I assume that sold and shipped Amazon has a greater chance of being real. For example, my wife was looking to buy some masks (I know, give into the fear) but I refused to buy from 3rd parties since I have a low level of trust.
So I built an app to help me and friends quickly tell if from a 3rd party or Amazon. Welcome to try and let me know how it can be better. https://www.trueseller.co
No, no, no! They do care, and a lot!
Amazon has been busy catching up to, and undercutting Alibaba on China-US direction for the last 5 years.
Amazon has managers whose full time job is to poach vendors from Alibaba.
I'm getting spammed by their salespeople non-stop
The snag is that they aren't headquartered in mainland China.
I can also say that the company where I work at, had already multiple times problems with Amazon. True they are maybe a bit of a different kind but I think that dollars is the most important thing for them. Even if you have to fk with customers or third party sellers in one or the other way. That's also why I only buy at Amazon if it's really necessary and it's from a big company, like Nintendo or so.
There's also now the law in Germany (or soon) which prohibits the destroying of brand new stuff just because it did not sell. That happened mainly (I'd say) because of Amazon where it went public that 2 trucks left a single warehouse on average per day, filled with only that kind of products
You can't use the word "platform" at Amazon, nor the word "marketplace", it's in violation of the mandatory legal training for FTEs.
Also came across Facebook ads that asks you to buy random crap and leave positive review in exchange for a full refund, and they call this "free samplimg".
And the way you can tell Amazon doesn't care is because they have no way to report this to them.
I've tried. They just don't care if someone offers you something off platform in exchange for a good review.
Maybe that's why Amazon beat eBay. When I worked at eBay 17 years ago we had systems in place to combat this exact type of fraud (off platform exchange for a good review).
It's interesting that you say this, since Amazon itself is a brand--but not the kind of brand you're looking for. You are looking for reliable quality, and Amazon's brand is quick and cheap.
Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more and more Chinese products flooding Amazon (Germany) with products that have hundreds of well-written positive reviews. I have to assume that most of them are fake because there's no way that some niche product can have more reviews than let's say a PS4 or Nintendo Switch, which is sold millions of times.
Really a shame that Amazon does not seem to care much about this, maybe a chance for the smaller shops to take back some lost business though. I find that I buy more in smaller e-commerce shops, because I find they're much less affected by the review fraud and often ship things just as fast as Amazon.