It’s not even for remotely equivalent products: my subscribe and save for cat litter was replaced with a birth control test under the same ASIN, after being unavailable for a few months!
i bought a wifi card on amazon and it came with a note mentioning a $20 amazon gift card if left them a good review. i reported it to amazon and nothing happened - i dont think they even responded.
i go elsewhere for reviews because amazons are so gamed and untrustworthy.
But yes, you're right. The short and sweet of it is that it's just a gamble getting anything you can't physically validate or verify upon receipt off of Amazon.
My main problem is that there are no alternatives to buying ebooks. In terms of how easy it's to buy and transfer to the device.
It isn't always the same "they", in fact I'd guess it isn't more often than not.
Sometimes a seller is shutting shop, and to make that last few pennies one of the assets they pass on is the account with products with good reviews. Another route to the same effect is apparently inactive accounts getting hacked. Maybe even active accounts, with the sterling reputation Amazon has for support it might be more hassle than it is worth for the hacked seller to do anything about it.
> It's ridiculous that Amazon doesn't catch this.
This comes under “sterling reputation Amazon has for support” when it comes to it being reported. And they have little incentive to deal with it if it isn't reported until there is a competitor that does it better and takes enough business for them to care – the inflated reviews improve sales of which they get a cut.
For books and many other things you have to simply ignore five-star reviews because the few that aren't fake are kind of clueless ("product arrived quickly"). Often you need to ignore one-star reviews as well because they're packed by competitors and people who couldn't read the directions. There's far more actual information to be found in the middle/mixed ratings.
It's called unfluence to connotate the inversion of influence from social media ad networks, to individuals.
This was the case for the front page results for S22 screen protectors when I was looking a few weeks ago. It's ridiculous that Amazon doesn't catch this.