> I have the manufacturer of a product (a @wirecutter pick, no less) that I reviewed 3 stars, who has been emailing me offers of increasing amounts of money to take it down. The most recent offer is well over what I spent on the product. I revised my review down to 1 star.

Meta-scam: Buy cheap items that are review-scammed and write a thorough, plausible 1-star review, hold out for profit. Rinse, repeat.

Your 1 star review will get auto deleted.

I've been an Amazon customer for 15 years. Have literally bought $50,000+ worth of stuff from them. In other words: rock solid reputation.

Amazon has deleted even my critical reviews. Go figure.

Same with me - I'm over $80K in purchases based on my data request to them (excluding business where I admin a business account with multiple purchasers).

Critical reviews do get taken down (I've no idea why). My reviews are legit - I don't have time or interest in anything other than providing feedback. Most stuff is fine, but some is obviously fake or junk. I'm always specific, they could literally buy the product and test it themselves.

What if friends of these fake review circles get themselves hired into Amazon to be on the teams that validate the reviews? It is possible that Amazon is so big, they would not detect this problem.

You could be a good corporate drone and do your job for 97% of the time, and in 3% of the cases delete bad reviews for your friends. Unless someone is doing really great statistical analysis, this could fly under the radar for a very long time.

I think it's possible. There was a case back in September [1] where six "third-party sellers consultant" were charged with allegedly bribing up to ten Amazon employees to restore deleted items.

Of course, those people were caught and that goes against the "not detect this problem" part. But if you were to scale down this operation from 16 people down to just one or two, it seems like it could work.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-marketplace-fraud-scheme...

> Of course, those people were caught and that goes against the "not detect this problem" part.

We just never heard about the ones that weren’t caught ;)

The question seems to be: what can we do to limit Amazon?

Buy from alternatives and give them feedback. Shopify has made it pretty easy for anyone to start a e-commerce site and then there are other places like etsy.

One little thing left: notify users about the existence of these sites.

Do we need to build a hackernews/social aggregator for new shops?

And good luck finding them on Google...

While I understand that people find any reason to believe they hold status higher than others but they shouldn't believe that when they are faced with a company with billions of customers worldwide. If you continued to buy from Amazon (racked up $50K in spending for 15 years), it's clear that removing your review didn't matter to their bottom line so no reason to care.

Your missing the point. It has nothing to do with their identity, it's the fact that telling apart fake reviews from ones written by real people is a hard problem, but generally you won't find a bot account with 15 years of history. The implication here is that if Amazon truly cared about surfacing legitimate reviews only, they would've kept the one from that account since there's very low probability of it being fake.

Don't bother; if this person was serious about making a point (instead of just ranting) they would've used their real account.

> Your missing the point.

I am not. You should re-read my point. Whether their review was rejected or not didn't stop them from spending $50k on amazon. They are as replaceable as warehouse workers.

Your point (if coherent, hard to say) was not articulated well.

The $50k thing has nothing to do with status, it has to do with amazon already possessing a very good signal as to whether or not this account is "real".

It is potentially interesting in the context of whether or not amazon is in fact serious about improving SNR in their review system.

I agree.

I am just saying Amazon has no reason to differentiate between real people or bot people if the OP continued to buy from them despite their critical reviews being rejected. Amazon doesn't care about their past purchase history as long as they buy more from them in future. Whether they spent 50k or not didn't make a differentiating factor for Amazon.

> if the OP continued to buy

Again, the goal isn't to "stop bots from buying", but rather to stop them from posting fake reviews. You're reframing the whole discussion to something that has zero relevance to the discussion.

OP is saying that Amazon has exactly zero reasons to change its ways if it makes zero difference to their income. They deleted the reviews of a reputable customer. Will he keep on buying from Amazon like he did before? Yes. So will there be any downsides for Amazon for deleting reputable customers' reviews? No. Money will keep flowing, resentment is irrelevant. So, they will keep deleting reputable customers' reviews, because changing that takes effort, and effort costs, and cost have to lead to more profits to be justified.

The exact same logic goes for fake reviews. If no profit is harmed, no need to take action.

Businesses make decisions on the margin. The $50k is history, it's the next dollar that counts.

We are not talking about whether I will continue to buy from Amazon or not; but whether my reviews could be fake or not, and whether there is signal in my reviews or not. That is what I meant with the words "rock solid reputation".

Leave a 5 star review, but in the comments, make it clear extremely clear it's a 1-star product.

I've actually seen this- I didn't know why they did it.

Unfortunately when your review is lost in a sea of fake 5-star reviews, no one is likely to see it.

Make it a 4 star reviews. I bet people who read reviews will skip the 5 stars and check the rest. I know I do that.

there are lots of current one star reviews that prove otherwise. If anything I surf one star and two star reviews of products I am buying and factor in the date of the review to see if a product improved or got worse.

Now what I do find inexcusable are reviews that are obviously not for the product I am looking at. I will report abuse on those but I do admit that I do not go back and check if they removed

I have in the past independently bought something on amazon and later found out the reviews were fake (because every single person leaving a review had left reviews on the same few products - it was only 7 reviews total or so, so it was easy to check) - I reported this and I also left a 1 star review on the product I had bought. It got taken down. The fake reviews stayed up

Yeah, I look more at the 1-3 star reviews and see what they are complaining about. A lot are bogus (they got what they ordered, not what they expected) or not related to the product (shipping errors etc) but once you weed out the junk they provide a much better picture of the product than the highly rated ones do.

Just adding information, I have had this happen

There is a different reason as well, most of these stores highlights reviews of 1 and 5 star. Some people (well I guess all people that leave reviews) like to be highlighted, so they only leave 5 or 1 star reviews. This was a pain when I was managing a Google app and part of the performance review was the average rating. This was a small app with few reviews so the jokers that liked the app but left 1 star review to be highlighted really made a negative difference.

Just to be clear, I was OK with users leaving 1 star if they didn't like it or even better had some constructive feedback. But many were like "great app": 1 star, or "Hi single guy here, and ladies around?": 1 star.

If you force users to provide feedback, even if optional, expect many invalid results

In my experience, users won’t go out of their way to leave a worthless review. So if your app doesn’t nag, you have less spam. But that also means you miss a lot of legitimate people who don’t have the time or knowledge to leave good reviews.

Gift and curse etc

> If you force users to provide feedback, even if optional, expect many invalid results

I understand what you mean, but the phrasing of "forcing" someone to optionally do something is odd.

A pop up is forcing users to acknowledge rating the app. It’s not truly optional when you get spammed once a day to submit a rating. So you get angry people submitting unhelpful ratings because they don’t understand the UX

There was no nagging, never asked the user to leave a review. They really used it as a dating service all on their own.

Yep, I got offered $50 to change my one star review on a ~$20 product.

Last cable I ordered I was offered $20 for a review on a $12 item.

We need a google spreadsheet shared with everybody. If I know of Amazon items I can buy, leave 1 star review and they will contact me to offer more than I paid, and keep an item - I need to know as many of these products as possible :)

I went to find the SKU for ya and was happy to find the seller is no longer on the Amazon marketplace! Maybe forwarding the emails they sent to jeff@amazon actually worked?

Where is that quote from?

Whoops, sorry I should have linked it: https://twitter.com/sharding/status/1325914278596112384

> As always, if you follow the money, Amazon has little interest in doing so...

They had little short-term interest in doing so. Now people know the reviews are fake, and Amazon's reputation WRT finding good products and believing you'll get an authentic product is edging towards the gutter. I know I'm very careful of what I'm buying from whom on Amazon now. Combined with them not always being the cheapest for a long time now, and there's less and less reason for me to give them first consideration.

Interestingly I've found Amazon shipping has gone to the dump too, which was one of the final things they had going for them. At first it was completely understandable with the pandemic, but they seem to have taken that as an excuse to just give up on the Prime shipping promise period indefinitely. I was starting to order everything sensitive, from electronics to health, elsewhere anyway over counterfeit and fraud worries. But now I find other places ship massively faster than Amazon, "Prime" shipping on Amazon routinely takes a week or even weeks, plural, even when it says "in stock". Other places ship right away and have it my rural area in days.

So for me at least Amazon has finally exited default territory, because it doesn't even have the "well it's more risky, but it's fast and reliable" rush argument anymore. Of course I don't expect the general population to move instantly, and it's not like I've dumped them entirely either. There are even some manufacturers I like who use them for fulfillment pretty exclusively (at least for small orders). But I do wonder in cases like this whether we'll see a non-linear curve: everything seems to be going swell for a business, right until some tipping point is reached and suddenly things go backwards fairly quickly. And that can be hard to recover from. Of course Amazon does have some moats overall, I don't expect them as a going concern to have any real trouble particularly on the service side, AWS and all that. But the moats actually seem weakest for Amazon-as-a-B2C-market, there isn't really anything inherently sticky there beyond habit.

Amazon Prime shipping transit times have been rock solid for me throughout. There was a period when their estimated delivery dates were pushed way out, but the actual delivery was never late.

The delivery issues may be regional, or maybe it's just certain product categories. Where I live, Prime shipping from March-May was about a week to 10 days, but now it's back up to 1-2 days for almost everything. I'm in the North East though where there's a warehouse about 15 miles away, and at least half a dozen major national shipping hubs within ~100 miles.

Same in terms of delivery. It was bad for awhile, but got better a few months back. I'm in the southwest; local warehouse is about 30-40 miles out but not everything is in the local warehouse so I often get stuff from other states' warehouses. Still getting the 2-3 day thing in general for those, 1-2 if local.

The north has been waaay more affected by lockdown restrictions than the south. We have not seen a single slow down in prime deliveries

Same here. Recently, if it's anything that's health related, I absolutely avoid Amazon because of the mass of fake products out there. I needed some vitamins recently and my first thought was that I'm better off paying CVS or Walgreens prices and being practically guaranteed that the product is legit, versus trying to weed through the fake reviews and counterfeit products on Amazon.

That thought has occurred with increasing frequency over the past few years as Amazon continues to completely ignore the issue.

Do be aware that CVS and Walgreens stock homeopathic garbage for any symptom that doesn't have a good OTC remedy, and aside from a little fine print and weird units on the "active ingredients" the packaging is identical to real medicine.

Their reputation is shot. I wanted to buy a NAS, and look at the prices in Canada. I stopped myself from going to Amazon because I was too wary of weird reviews and long discontinued products with completely strange prices.

I went to Canada Computers instead.

I know what you mean. There’s some category of purchases for which I still look at Amazon—basically <30$ and doesn’t-matter-if-it’s-fake type items. Anything that doesn’t fit those criteria, and especially brand name electronic items, I’m buying elsewhere. Knowing it’s genuine is worth a higher price.

This has basically meant that I went from a Prime member making 5-10k$ worth of purchase per year a few years ago, to a non-prime member spending only a few hundred $ per year at Amazon. I suspect I’m not unique in the HN crowd, but I’m shocked at how often I see friends, family, and coworkers continue to trust this company with large, important purchases.

> Now people know the reviews are fake

I am not 100% sure about this, I wish it were so. Maybe it's just that we get this feeling because of the people we usually talk to, the people in our close circle of connections who are likely to be like us in terms of this kind of rasoning/thinking. I think most people may not be aware of it.

> They had little short-term interest in doing so

I just want to add a possible scenario here and I would like to hear opinions about it:

As we all know, people really tend to buy products with 4.5+ stars and we think twice if the product has 3 or even 4 stars. On the other hand, let's suppose that since everyone is selling on Amazon now, worse products are likely to be put on sale, so the average scores start to decrease.

Having said the above, if I, as a user, periodically look for products on Amazon, I will probably start seeing/finding bad products, so it may be that in a long period of time, I will start looking for alternatives other than Amazon and may attribute the image of "not high quality products" to Amazon as an e-commerce.

[Edit]: So if my two previous scenarios are correct, if you follow the money, they actually have some long-term interest in allowing some fake(good) reviews and eliminating some real bad ones. In the end, most people will not be aware of these fake reviews and the quality of the products will be perceived as higher, resulting in more sales and in a better reputation of Amazon products, thus avoiding the scenario discussed in the second answer.

> I am not 100% sure about this, I wish it were so.

Well, not everyone, but there's growing knowledge about it, and popular media podcasts that do whole episodes on it, etc.

> I will probably start seeing/finding bad products, so it may be that in a long period of time, I will start looking for alternatives other than Amazon and may attribute the image of "not high quality products" to Amazon as an e-commerce.

I think that depends on whether the ratings are for product quality or product accuracy/authenticness/amazon fulfillment issues.

> they actually have some long-term interest in allowing some fake(good) reviews and eliminating some real bad ones.

I think the important part of that is some. While it may be in Amazon's interest to manipulate the reviews to some degree, it's definitely not in their best interest to let people know or assume they or anyone else is doing so.

Not just that, but the last 3 things I bought (workout stuff) last week from Amazon each had a little notecard inside with a bait for a review and a hinted at alternative dispute resolution system; and none of the items was particularly expensive which suggests the customer acquisition cost of having a high ranking Amazon item must be so low it makes sense to defend it aggressively with gift cards and such.

Jokes on them, I never look at 5 or 1 star reviews. By convention I think rating systems are fundamentally flawed in that they are anything but a ubiquitous concept. The people struggling to piece together how they feel about something in a binary construct generally have the most insightful comments. There's no way to stop someone from gaming the system though. If the economic incentive is to cheat, cheaters gonna cheat. Eventually plugins like FakeSpot will become as common as ad blockers, imo.

That's my approach as well, the 4 star reviews are usually the most informative.

I try to take 1, 4, and 5 into account with mine. I mostly discount 5s but it's still good to see what people are saying. 4 will let you know what issues the product really has, and 1 will give you an idea of how frequently the product breaks or arrives broken.

Well, if Amazon were to crack down on this sort of thing, it would incentivize unscrupulous sellers to solicit fake 5-star reviews (through a 3rd party) for their competitors so that they would be punished. The only reason we have to doubt this is happening now is that there's no incentive to do it, since Amazon seems to be turning a blind eye.

It's a hard problem. The solutions most likely to work are also expensive. Amazon could create internal product review teams staffed by employees instead of letting users do it all for free, but it's hard to make that scale. It's also less transparent; one of the big appeals of Amazon early on was the novelty that you could go to a retailer and if you don't like one of their products you can say so for the world to see. Now most other retailers do the same thing and we sort of take it for granted now.

It's not that hard - look at systems like Fakespot that could automatically verify reviewer credibility (without even access to the internal data that Amazon holds).

Or just offer systems for buyers to report suppliers doing exactly this - buying reviews.

Or honeypot it, and just put some fake addresses on sites that sell reviews and then ban companies that send you stuff.

I mean there are loads of solutions, but all of them involve Amazon taking down 5 star reviews that help them sell crap, so the incentives are obviously conflicting here.

He's talking about getting your competition banned by false-flagging them. It's much harder to figure out who is placing the fake reviews than that they are fake.

By that logic Amazon (or any other site) can never crack down on unscrupulous behavior committed by a 3rd party.

I don't know, they are doing something, just not anything useful I think. Over the past few weeks, I had found a group that posts 'deals'...on crap I don't need, but usually promo codes to buy things for a dollar or two. I've become a bit prolific reviewer since my wife and I compete for reviews/helpful/ranks(stupid, I know).

What do you know...Amazon started deleting my reviews. 20 or so deleted so far, and a lot of helpful votes gone as well. If I try to re-review any of those, it tells me I'm not allowed to review this item from my account. So great, I'm a scammer now.

Between fake reviews, and now this - Amazon effectively having wasted my time it took writing reviews, I've been ordering more from Walmart. Sure they aren't great, but they aren't Amazon.

I've been contacted several times after leaving negative reviews by sellers that they would refund me 50% or more (and even 100% in one case) if I changed the review to be positive.

Same here. They used a multitude of email addresses so every time I blocked them they eventually used another one and got through. Refunding me 100% of the cost of the USB cable doesn’t replace the port it broke so no thank you. I’d rather people be warned.

I've made a habit of reading the 2* & 3* reviews first. They are almost always helpful and never paid reviews.

And look for patterns of bad product traits being reported. Most people complain about one thing they didn't like, or one thing they wish the product had (even when the description said it didn't, go figure). If everyone is complaining about the same thing, then I know I should probably be wary.

Jokes on them, I never look at 5 or 1 star reviews. By convention I think rating systems are fundamentally flawed in that they are anything but a ubiquitous concept from person to person. Shit, I bet half of the hacker news crowd thinks anything less than an A is a failing grade. The people struggling to piece together how they feel about something in a binary construct generally have the most insightful comments. Kinda like the students who got a couple bad grades in college probably had more interesting lives. ;)

Yeah - just go to vipon.com. They run an entire platform for this.