For instance Aukey has been caught by Amazon, but in my experience their products were pretty good, and they probably played the fake review game mainly due to everyone else playing it, and it became an arms race.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...

(since the competitors are sort of forced to use fake reviews)

- they can really fix it (e.g. by kicking every fake review mandator) and drown competiting products far below in the search results, leaving "Amazon's choice" ones at the top.

With way fewer reviews it will be harder to argue the ranking results legitimacy.

- they don't fix it, and as you say, get an excuse to kick any random brand trying to stay afloat on their platform.

Either way Amazon wins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement

It is a conspiracy theory. Some of them are just true.

And the first, promoted, comment/ratings is from a guy who received the product for free in exchange for a review.

https://www.amazon.fr/AmazonBasics-One-Port-Charger-Tablets-...

Unless your product is so revolutionary or cheap you're gonna need marketing.

And i think you are talking about the times before NewEgg had 3rd party sellers.

Totally agree. Right now there's a spread from anyone can review anything (yelp, Google reviews) to purchase required to review. What if only 1 out of 20 purchases, selected randomly, were allowed to place a review?

Single person review shops become easier to spot - they are suddenly ordering way more than typical. Returns might skyrocket, which is expensive for everyone involved, however there's now another signal available to spot odd patterns of behavior.

Inclusion of a restocking fee, which is obviously not popular with consumers, is another option which would help make it more expensive to fake reviews.