The rule is that it has to keep the item barcode (SKU). SKU recycling is common practice even among ‘legitimate’ sellers - agree that it’s completely ridiculous though.

Amazon are aware it’s happening but ignoring it because it’s good for business. If they really cared about it they would do more than ban 600 sellers - given an afternoon I could put a big list of fraudulent products together because they are so easy to find, so it wouldn’t be difficult for Amazon to do the exact same.

Based on the experience below, that doesn't seem to be the case. Reviews for Klein bottles were hijacked and moved to apply to black-head remover.

https://www.kleinbottle.com/Amazon_Brand_Hijacking.html

I believe this has been done by setting up a SKU-Variant. The same-SKU technique is definitely correct - I was contracted to work on an inventory management system about 2 years ago and there were some requirements about how there might be different products with the same SKU barcode for this (unless it has changed since then).

I'm not saying it's the right thing to do - but it's also just how being a large Amazon seller works. If you sell LiPo batteries on Amazon and have worked for 5 years to get lots of reviews and the top spot on the listings, and then your supplier discontinues your best-selling range, starting again with fresh listings can completely destroy your business. So you change suppliers and keep the same SKU and change the description. I'm not saying it's 'right', but unfortunately if you want to be an Amazon seller it's just what you have to do.

There might be different techniques to do the same thing too though.

Interesting. So from Amazon's perspective, it is perfectly fine for a SKU to refer to two products from entirely different industries? I'll admit that I'm not an expert here, but to my mind, a SKU should be akin to a GUID.

For the case you are listing, I would absolutely say that there should be a new SKU, because it is a new product whose quality assurance is entirely disconnected with the original product. If it is only a component rather than the entire product that has changed, I could see there being variations listed with different sub-values, but any review should then be listed with the exact ID that was being reviewed.

I'm of the opinion that any change to the product must be clearly communicated, even if it doesn't change the listed features, because there is an implicit statement that two identically described products are identical. I ran into this a few years ago, after passing down an old desktop to a family member. They needed wifi access on it, and I recommended a USB dongle that I had previously used with that computer. However, the newly-purchased dongle didn't work, because the manufacturer had switched to a new chipset without changing the listing, and that new chipset wasn't supported by the OS version I had installed.

I know that "compatibility with Linux kernel x.y.z" wasn't an explicitly listed feature, and therefore it didn't fall under the strict interpretation of false advertising, but I still consider it to be fraudulent. It was marketed as being the same as a previous model, but didn't have the same functionality as a previous model.

A SKU barcode is unique and is issued by a central authority (gs1) but you can always decide to change the title, pictures and even product category, and you can even have multiple suppliers for a single SKU.

You are right that there should be a new SKU, the issue is just that it’s not in the sellers interest as they will lose all their history and reviews which effectively means that if you have a top selling product you have to start again from scratch (which if you are an established top seller in reality means you just lose all your sales and go to the bottom of the listings).

You should really have a correction in the title, because the problem is coming from american wholesale accounts that purchase things around 100mqo from ali warehouses, it's not chinese people talking in english and scamming english speaking consumers into buying cheap plastic bought for 2$ a piece sold for 20$ on amazon, that's purely american greed.

The title is correct - 600 Chinese brands were banned, and the reason for the ban was that the manufacturers were including incentives for leaving positive reviews within the product packaging.

The issue isn't product quality in this particular instance, or buying something for $2 and selling it for $20, it's that these brands were including incentives to write fake Amazon reviews inside the packaging of the goods they manufacture.

This used to be the space that paper magazines handled, and to a limited extent orgs like Consumer Reports still do.

"User" reviews are bullshit, and far too easy to game. And Amazon's system bodges together distinct products, so you can't even tell if you're reading a relevant review of the thing you want to buy or a different model/size/anything.

I sometimes wonder if an independent review site would be a business idea. Crap merchants would avoid it anyway, but anyone with a solid product would get a tear down, lab report, subjective review, and objective performance details, with a couple of follow-up purchases just to check the product hadn't been substituted.

Result would be high-value products standing out from the noise, with some objective reassurance for customers - which is the opposite of the Amazon model.