If your friends want to sell anything online my advice is to be a company that sells products online that just happens to also use Amazon. Don't be an Amazon seller exclusively or you might live to regret it. They can shutdown your account for almost no reason or any reason at all with absolutely no recourse whatsoever. They can suspend any of your listings and give zero reasons. They will hold on to your money and keep it hostage.

All I have to do as a competitor to royally fuck you up is have a few people buy your product/s and then contact Amazon to complain that they are counterfeit or somehow not as represented by the listing. Boom! Listing shutdown, account suspended or both. If you call Seller Support for help the story you are likely to get is the the "Seller Performance team does not share the reasons for which they take certain measures". Boom! Again. You just got shafted, have no clue why and have no recourse. All you can do is wait and see what the internal Amazon process might decide.

I have a friend who was in a similar predicament. He was forced to have all of his inventory destroyed because it would have cost so much in shipping to recover it from Amazon warehouses that telling Amazon to destroy it was a better option.

Yeah, when a product has a lot of polar (5 and/or 1 star reviews) I often spend a few minutes looking into those people's other reviews, to see how they are. When there's almost no description and all 5 or 1 star, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that they are probably paid reviews.

It's a shame that Amazon can't just implement a weighting system with values based on how much a customer has purchased, how long they've had their account and the number and range of stars in reviews they've given. That would be a lot of map/reduce jobs over a lot of people, and reviews... but weighting the "overall" rating better would go a long way towards improving things for everyone.

> But as you said, there are plenty of people who give 1-stars for almost no reason.

I've seen studies that seen that (honest) ratings in number/star systems are strongly culturally correlated, and that American culture strongly favors giving the highest rating unless there are out-of-ordinary reasons to go negative, while some Asian cultures strongly favor giving middle to low ratings unless there is out-of-ordinary reasons to go positive.

So simple cultural correlations in awareness of and use of a particular brand of a product could result in very different review results with exactly the same customer satisfaction profile.

To be frank, this is something I hadnt really considered. But it does make sense. I would be interesting seeing more about the subjectivity of reviews based on cultures.

You really can't trust reviews at all. The best advice I can offer is to mentally average scores across two or three pages and use that to decide whether scores are being gamed or not. No product will produce 100% satisfaction. If you see something with 100% 5-star reviews it is almost certain it is being gamed in one way or another. 1-star reviews can be hard to evaluate. I know one seller who had a massive 1-star review attack launched against them. Their revenue went from tens of thousands of dollars per month to nearly nothing within 30 days. Horrible.