This actually raises a core part of the problem: why does Amazon need literally dozens of sellers for every piece of junk on the site? For any sort of commodity on the site, there can be thousands of results. All the same. All within a few percent of the same price. All completely indistinguishable through any mechanism in the search facility. There have been so many times that I've been looking for something with a specific feature, and it's just page after page after page of stuff I don't want, that I finally give up and just buy the crap they're shoving at me. That brutally-carnal competition for every nickel and dime is a big part of the motivation to flood the platform with fake reviews.
What made Amazon great at the start was the fact that they DID NOT carry every conceivable item under the sun, from every single person who wants to spin up a mercantile account and give it a whirl. I've gone back to buying most things from brick-and-mortar stores because THEY are still doing the curation. They're not going to carry 17,000 different USB cables, and the ones they do are going to be high-enough quality that they don't have a high rate of return. I wish Amazon all the worst. To paraphrase Yogi Berra: No one shops at Amazon any more; it's too crowded.
When I buy stuff on Amazon, it's not because I want Amazon to recommend their pick. I want to compare alternatives and make my own choice. That's getting harder and harder, because there's a gazillion identical results with spammy, polluted product names, sold by a bajillion different-yet-indistinguishable sellers. And each one of those results has a nice, fancy-looking template, but when you start reading, it's full of spelling and grammar errors.
It's as frustrating as trying to have a "conversation" with a chat bot.
What's the solution? Beats me. A naive part of my brain is suggesting some kind of vetting process for sellers, or maybe a trust rating, but I'm sure there are tons of horrible problems with those ideas.
I recently bought a dog collar on Amazon. A week or so later, I got a large envelope in the mail, with "Amazon Early Reviewer Program, 2646 Rainer Ave S St 1020, Seattle, WA 98144" as the return address.
Inside was a piece of paper with a code to "activate my $20 gift card" by leaving a 5-star review of the dog collar, photographing the review, and emailing it to a very non-Amazon email. It also instructed me that "for security reasons", I should not include or attach this letter to my review, nor leave a negative review without emailing them first. All this still purports to be from Amazon proper with the Amazon logo on the paper as well.
This is clearly a scam from the seller to buy 5-star reviews, and their product has plenty of what look to be paid reviews to me as a result. I tried very hard to find any place to report this scheme, which goes past review buying to include impersonating Amazon itself, and mail fraud. I emailed several Amazon contacts, used contact forms on their site, and contact forms I could find on the seller side as well. I attached photos of the letter.
The only response I got was a form letter telling me that if I saw a fake review, I should click the report button under that review.
This is just one example. Almost every product I've bought in the past year that came from an individual seller included some kind of bribe for 5-star reviews, from gift cards to whole "free products every month" programs.
I reported this to Microsoft as it was an outlook.com source address. Microsoft did nothing. My junk mail folder was starting to fill.
After about two months of this i got passive aggressive and set up a script to email them a 20 meg gif with “fuck you” tiled on it hourly to their mailbox. After about a day they got the point and I stopped receiving emails.
I think amazon have stopped sellers getting hold of buyers emails directly now though.
I agree. I don't get why there hasn't been more progress on this. The ratings are almost meaningless now on almost the majority of products on Amazon.
Amazon themselves seem to be directly making the problem worse with "early access reviews" or whatever they're called.
For me, a good start would be:
- Only allow people to rate things that they bought with their own money, as evidenced by a credit card or bank account linked with their name on it.
- Only allow people to rate things after they have purchased multiple products, or after you've spent above a certain threshold (e.g. $100).
AFAICT, those are not currently requirements on Amazon and would go a long way (in my layman's imagination) towards fixing the problem.
Your first suggestion doesn't address paid reviews. Usually the scheme is "buy it, and we will reimburse you with a little extra on top after you leave a review."
Your second suggestion would probably bias towards fake reviewers. It's pretty rare for someone to get paid just for one review.
One of the hard things to realize is that paid reviews are written by real people. Most of them probably know they are doing something shady, but not all - some think this is a legitimate marketing interaction. Many of them also leave real reviews for stuff - including negative reviews. It's generally not actually bots writing reviews.
Amazon probably doesn’t consider this much of a priority to deal with as it doesn’t hurt them just their customers.
If Amazon also required actual purchase of that item, now there's the extra cost of actually buying that item. Even more so when you're talking about things that are expensive. This would drastically lower the amount of spam that could be generated unless the company wants to throw some huge money at it.
Returned items would still potentially be an issue, but I'm guessing Amazon already has things in place to kick off users that return too many items.
Amazon has the brain power and resources to mitigate this problem...
Item 2) Professional reviewers have purchased multiple products above certain threshold.
Easier way to stop this is to prevent reviews from people who used a coupon to buy something and the price is above some threshold (i.e. seller doesn't knock to $5 between 10PM and midnight for their reviewers to buy it).
If I can think of this solution - why can't Amazon? Simple answer is they know of this behavior and encourage it.
I have shifted my purchasing behavior to buy from Walmart, Target, Ebay when at all possible. I know Walmart isn't exactly an angel - but I'd rather have 2 devils in the marketplace than 1. I even try to buy books from Barnes And Noble...but unfortunately the fulfillment time + price is hard to beat w/ Amazon. I rarely have books above the B&N threshold for free shipping.
- they killed their subscription service (last year?) - laundry detergent may or may not be taped (they at least bag it), leading to spillage - they use the same flimsy tape for all of their packages - they stopped using any sort of package space filler (I really liked when they were using long sheets of paper - makes me less worried about plastic waste, and we could give them to our son so he could color on them) - you need to use their app for curbside pickup (Home Depot does this right with the ability to do it with or without their app) - inconsistent availability of items for shipping
It's easy to meet their free shipping limit, and it's nice to have the option to pickup from a local location, but unlike some retailers, I feel Target would rather you either shop in their physical stores, or go somewhere else.
I reported it fi eBay as method of payment looked dodgy as well.
Was instructed that everything was fine and to ship it. I didn’t.
Now a week later I got another email say that it might be a scam. So they canceled it.
Unfortunately, I still put up with Amazon for probably 40% of my purchases. It's fast and generally cheap. (Even though even Amazon Prime has gotten ridiculous)
Honestly it's really hard to believe you. That may have been what you were told but there's hundreds of well documented cases of sellers manipulating reviews where Amazon does not penalize the seller.
The logical explanation is Amazon has decided not to punish sellers who manipulate reviews if Amazon thinks it's a net gain for Amazon.
Yeah, I get it. For what it's worth - I didn't just get told they care, I saw some of the systems that were built to work on detection.
Amazon is not a very short-term oriented company. They're usually pretty good at caring about long-term dominance to get dollars in ten years rather than pennies today. It's clear as day to anyone that fake reviews are hurting their image to customers, eroding trust. That's leading people to buy stuff elsewhere.
At the same time, Amazon Marketplace is one of the underappreciated masterstrokes from Amazon over the last 15 years and has driven a huge increase in their retail revenue, which you can see in annual reports. So, certainly they're unwilling to take really dramatic action like dropping 3rd-party sellers entirely. But I still think they realize fixing this is pretty crucial for the long-term health of the retail business.
It's hard for me to explain the cases where people find obvious fraud and the seller doesn't get penalized. These would get flagged internally in mailing lists too, and most of the time it was a process error somewhere - a ticket that got dropped when shuffled between the zillion different departments; Amazon's internal bureaucracy is truly insane and huge. I think it's usually incompetence rather than devious cleverness, honestly.
There are probably some other cases that are more complicated (sellers reopening new accounts, and then doing social engineering on unwitting poorly-paid support people to regain listings). I think those are kind of rare.
---
Anyway, all this to say: I get it, it's hard to believe because it's easy to think of Amazon as all-powerful. But... they're really not. It's a huge, slow, bureaucratic, sludgy company. They have some money (okay, a lot of money) and technical talent but it isn't super clear how you'd apply those to this problem. It's hard.
This has nothing to do with thinking Amazon is all-powerful, and everything to do with thinking they don't care because it makes them money. Amazon's revenue is clearly skyrocketing and they make a ton of money because of the marketplace. It seems obvious to me they made the decision to put revenue/profits over long-term customer support.
You believe that Amazon wants to solve the problem. I believe Amazon doesn't want to solve the problem, because they make more money not solving it now. And talking about the long-term vision of a company whose founding CEO just stepped down is pretty meaningless.
I'll be more blunt. Amazon saying they care about fake reviews is like Facebook saying they care about privacy. They make money by lying about it, not fixing it. Facebook clearly hasn't suffered the long term damage of years of horrible PR using their stock price as a metric (you know, the only metric that really matters), and Amazon likely won't either (in fact they've had just as much bad PR and look at them now).
I am glad you seem to enjoy working at Amazon, or at least have a respect for the culture. I've never been there so I can't comment on it, but I've heard lots of horrible things about the culture there. And lately the complaints have been shifting towards Amazon thinking more and more about short-term profits instead of the big picture.
All I can say is not everybody agrees with you.
FWIW, single data point, YMMV, etc., but where I work (under AWS) I have never seen behavior that is exploitive of the customer like you're talking about to be encouraged or allowed.
Yes, AWS may be different from how things are done in retail, and we're huge so I'm sure it does happen here and there -- but from my admittedly limited vantage point, Bezos' heavy emphases on long-term thinking and earning the customer's trust have taken deep root everywhere I've been able to see.
Doesn't mean peeps always get it right, some choices are difficult, compromises have to be made, there are outliers, etc., but still, it's there. I've just never seen cheap thinking around customers, so to speak, and I really like that aspect of working where I do.
If that ever changes in a broad way, that'll be the beginning of the end of Amazon's dominance.
And I'm saying I think this is already happening, and the most talented senior employees are already starting to leave. This is going to take years, maybe decades to unravel. But I've already shifted away from buying things on Amazon because the experience has become significantly worse for me and I'm better off buying elsewhere.
You're welcome to disagree, but I think Amazon is no longer about value creation but value extraction. And quite frankly it doesn't matter if you feel differently as an employee, because that's how I feel as a customer.
You believe Amazon is so bad at removing fraud because they are greedy and evil and are happy to have it. I believe Amazon is so bad at removing fraud because it's beyond their capabilities, and that nobody knows how to ensure trustworthy information on the internet.
But we arrive at the same spot: I don't really buy from Amazon anymore either for anything where the quality matters, because I can't trust anything on there. I use Chewy for pet stuff, Newegg or Monoprice for electronic stuff, Lee Valley for gardening stuff - etc.
In a way, I'm more pessimistic than you: I think good intentions wouldn't even help.
This isn't hard. Seriously, you have lost all goodwill from me - anyone that isn't a fucking idiot could immediately solve this problem. But Amazon doesn't want to lose money, is what you really mean.
Fuck Amazon and fuck you. I have more respect for Facebook at this point.
Bull shit.
There will be Amazon rockets and maybe one day a Mars landing but stopping mass fraud is too big a problem?
Reasons:
- Receiving broken, clearly used/returned, or counterfeit items.
- Product reviews obviously gamed and useless.
- Sticking their nose into political issues. Just run your services please and don't try to tell me what to read or think.
A lot of people love Amazon now but this kind of shit screws customers and that’s unacceptable.
Sure you get short term results because colleagues are competing against one another to not get into the PIP meat grinder, but inevitably it leads to burnout and people leaving.
Not to mention Amazon’s reputation in tech is pretty low b/c everyone knows about this management by PIP culture
Would that go away once the shitty reviews go away? I'm not convinced it would. The economic impact would be on shitty sellers as they would lose revenue, but I suspect a lot of that revenue would just go to good products.
That is basically the same thing as all powerful in this context. It is the same pattern of sinisterization in the whole "Big Tech Bad" propaganda push.
This is a long winded way of saying "Yeah it sucks, but we're not losing as much money as we are making because of this, so we're not as invested in fixing this problem."
I'm not doubting whether they want it fixed. I'm doubting the priority they put on it.
If fake reviews simply penalize the seller, you've opened up an attack channel where anyone can submit fake reviews and eliminate competitors from the marketplace. It's complicated.
Random internet individuals: "But they could just..."
Like so many things/problems - they all seem easy/obvious until you actually TRY TO DO IT, at which point you realize why all of the other very smart people haven't solved it yet.
I put it in the same bucket as fake accounts on Twitter. My guess is that Twitter can correlate many accounts that do nothing but troll and shill for particular factions, and probably has a registry of these accounts, but they also lose MAUs when they nuke accounts. They have an incentive to wait until user growth comes in stronger than expected before they ban lots of active users.
For me personally, the biggest weakness of Amazon is commingling of inventory. I never buy things like lubricants and bearings from Amazon, even if the seller is an authorized distributor, because there's no guarantee I will avoid knockoffs from a different seller. I'd rather buy from Walmart or pay more for a specialty retailer to ship me the product, because Amazon inventory is often mixed with cheap knockoff garbage.
The problem was created by amazon and can be fixed by Amazon.
Close the backdoor entrance for chinese sellers, and problem solved.
Amazon made it easy for random chinese companies to onboard as amazon sellers because it lowered every single barrier from an import/ banking/permit perspective
Amazon can close that door anytime it wants.
Amazon business model was being a parasite, benefiting from the system of high quality products and trust built into the system. Without having to pay distributors, buyers, and store rents. And lest we forget sales tax.
But that old system is now dead and gone. So there are no trustworthy good faith reviewers.
Let's not forget that it is Amazon that is providing this huge monetary incentive.
As a customer, I really wouldn't care if Amazon dropped all 3rd party sellers. Most users won't. Amazon, of course, will.
Uhm, how about not commingling inventory and not letting people swap out entire products underneath the same ratings/reviews?
Let's say the seller is selling widgets. They get their phantom accounts to buy the widgets and thus run up the lifetime spend counter. Then they give the "purchased" widgets to themselves and just keep on selling them.
All they have to pay per iteration is the overhead (Amazon's take), assuming they'll manage to clear their stock later.
E.g. say a widget costs $110, of which Amazon's take is $10. The seller uses their fake account to buy 10 widgets at a total cost of $1100. The seller both receive the widgets (shipped to the fake account's address) and the $1000 from the "sale". The total cost is thus $100 for making the fake account look like it has spent $1000.
You can roll this out with two 5-star rating systems and replace the old one once the new one has enough ratings.
I used to work at Amazon, and can say that this came up on internal mailing lists all. the. time. It really bothers people, particularly engineers who see that it is eroding customers' trust in Amazon. It's really bad, and people know it. There were significant teams trying to work on it when I left.
I think it really is that it's a very difficult problem of cat-and-mouse, without any clear path to victory for Amazon, and the sellers have a huge monetary incentive to evade detection. It's very adversarial, and Amazon has the tough position of _also_ not wanting to discourage legitimate reviews and sellers. And there are so many sellers that solutions need to scale well.
So: I think they're trying, but it's a bona fide hard problem.