Amazon is going downhill quickly. I target shoot with a compound bow as a hobby, and as a result I usually buy a set of arrows a year. In 2015 when I would search for "target arrows" on Amazon the first page results would be for legit American companies who make exceptional arrows for about $30 per set of 6. Now, and for the last 2 years if I search for "target arrows" I get pages and pages of Chinese crap arrows (I purchased several sets and returned them). The crappy ones are also selling for $30 per set but they are made out of weak aluminum and come bent up. To get the nice American made ones I have to got 10-20 pages deep or search by brand name and even than the real ones are usually on page 2 with page one featuring the same crap from China. Now, don't get me wrong, I am sure they can make quality arrows in China, but what makes it to the top of Amazon is utter crap.
I noticed this with many other products as well, but the arrows is a particularly noticeable example because it's something I regularly replace as they get beat up and destroyed (I shoot a lot).
It's really baffling to me how despite being one of the largest companies in the world and being centered around e-commerce Amazon doesn't do anything about these issues weakening their core product. I say "do nothing" not "fail to stop" because I haven't seen any evidence that Amazon does anything at all to prevent or discourage these behaviors.
I wonder if it's because they push the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mantra too far. After all, their current approach is successful so why risk changing anything? That would also explain why the website overall looks so dated in many areas.
I was recently researching car dashcams. On Amazon the top brand has thousands of reviews but the most critical one accuses the seller of offering free mounts in exchange for 5* reviews. The second most prominent one is featured heavily in a deal aggregator website which I knew about from before.
I decided to do my research outside of Amazon. The most reliable brand which I chose based on independent review sites and user forums does not actually appear on first 10 pages of Amazon search results. I bought it anyways, and it is so good value for money that I have ordered another one. Safe to say I don't trust Amazon recommendations at all.
I agree with this, but would like to say, if you open your orders history, you can order the same arrows again assuming the business is still selling them on Amazon.
In an effort to get completely off of Google, I moved my music library off of Google Music and was going to just use an MP3 player. I had some suggestions from friends (Sony, Phillips, Onkyo, Pioneer) and decided to search Amazon to see what I could find.
When I did a search on Amazon, it was page after page after page of Chinese MP3 players, all under $50. Most of the Hi-Fi players my friends recommended were in the $4-$500 range and up. Even after searching for the specific models they recommended, I still couldn't find them. The search results would return the same sub $50 players.
After a few minutes I gave up and went directly to the manufacturers site. Even more discouraging, when I was googling "Pioneer MP3 player" the Pioneer website was completely buried in the search results, but the first two pages of SERP's had a myriad of Amazon results.
There was a time when you just expected a company to be on page 1 if you searched directly by the company name and product. And these were not fly-by-night companies nobody has heard of. These were major electronic and audio companies I was searching for. Depressing to say the least
Why not order online from a sporting goods store, or, if possible, direct from the manufacturer?
"Get everything in one place" was more valuable when we had to travel from place to place and it took 30 minutes, but traveling from one website to another takes no time, so the proposition isn't as strong.
Return policies, security, etc, are concerns still, but those cons come along with the pros of no commingling, probably a lower price if ordering direct, and supporting the economic diversity of having more than one store.
There has been a huge increase in the number of dodgy sellers and obviously fake reviews, and Amazon does not seem to care.
I reported a few dishonest listings and absolutely nothing happened despite a number of reviews corroborating it.
Prime deliveries have also started to slip (here in the UK), with 'guaranteed next day deliveries' suddenly being delayed with no update or anything.
Amazon got so successful because they earned a pretty much blind trust from customers, but trust is lost quicker than it is earned.
I suggest Amazon solves this by requiring ALL purchasers to leave reviews of ALL products they buy. Or by adding a $10 fee to every purchase that can only be refunded by leaving a review.
Isn't the solution to that problem branding and not nationalist policing by the retailer? I mean, reading your post I don't see what Amazon can do to make you happy except ban "chinese" manufacturers.
If you're seriously a regular buyer of these products, surely you have a few manufacturers that you know and trust, just like serious hobbyists in other activities have preferred brands of balls or shoes or guitar strings or whatever. Can't you just search for those?
I check Fakespot, and click on some reviewer profiles. The idiots doing full-time positive product reviewing are so easy to spot by their hilarious review history that you start to assume that Amazon doesn’t do anything against them on purpose. They also mainly flock on the crap within a single month or so (but this is one of many Fakespot metrics).
I tried buying a new bicycle light last week and literally every product was crap with fake reviewing. After wasting an hour on this I ended up not buying from Amazon. Rolling out the red carpet for the Chinese crap and counterfeit industry on their platform is likely to become Amazon’s death if they don’t admit their mistake and turn the wheel now.
While this could be seen as off topic, I don’t think it is: I strongly recommend purchasing that bike light from your local bike shop. If you have a local bike shop, it is likely struggling. But it is also likely that the lights they have on offer there are specifically selected for their utility, particularly their utility in your locale. Perhaps it will be a few dollars more than Amazon, but you will reap the benefit.
I just looked for a headphone splitter for an iPhone. Every result on the page had pretty high reviews, but when you click on the results and look at the reviews you see weird five star reviews like "great planner with a great cover" and "this was the perfect organizer for my daughter's drawers" at the top of the reviews for a highly rated headphone splitter. I don't know what's going on with Amazon, but I ended up going to best buy to look for peripherals.
Shit like this is what made me lose confidence in Amazon and I stopped my prime subscription.
My wife bought me “luxury” branded jackets and clothing for fall. Half of them were counterfeit. I called Amazon and they said I can return them and they’ll send me new ones. Ok. How will I know those won’t be counterfeit? Worse, I found a jacket was counterfeit after the return period when it literally started to fall apart at the seams. Welp, Amazon said they can’t refund me.
Multiple times my packages are either not delivered on time or aren’t delivered at all. 2 times they were half way across the state. When I called them to ask, they wanted me to confirm my address since they magically and suddenly couldn’t find my address anymore. Well guys you’ve delivered 10k+ worth of goods to me at this address this year alone. WTF?!
My customer service experience also degraded every other instance. When they missed my last delivery date I called them and threatened to cancel and the rep said “Sure, Sir, let me do that after I reorder this item”. He figured it was quicker or reorder an item than wait for it to get back from across the state.
Wow. The Facebook groups mentioned in the article have 87,000 members, who are offered full reimbursement of product costs in exchange for writing five-star reviews on Amazon. The only way to describe this is as a large-scale effort to deceive and defraud mass consumers. Ugly, ugly, ugly.
*-star reviews on all of the major review sites are 2-dimensional. They should be 3 dimensional (0-x stars) + time. This way if clusters of 5-star reviews show up in an extremely short period of time it's a red flag. Instead of seeing a static "this product/service got x stars", we should be able to see "this product/service, within the last 1 month, received on average x stars". And then you can extrapolate, oh they received on average 2 stars before they upgraded their product, and now the product is getting 4 stars. Or something like: "this restaurant was getting on average 1.5 stars last year, but recently they're getting glowing reviews. Maybe they fired the manager?".
Also this very interesting Planet Money episode #838 about people all over the world receiving weird packages full of random Chinese items that they never ordered.
Turns out they are phantom packages from vendors on Ali Baba and TaoBao gaming the review system. This is called "brushing".
They managed to interview a "brusher". So the brushers have to make themselves look completely real during the buying process, hesitating, clicking links from different vendors and only after a while select the actual item they target. To get the "verified purchase" tag something has to be mailed somewhere. But instead of the actual item the vendor sends a package with random stuff and sometimes they send these to addresses of previous unknowing international customers to make it look more real.
I feel unaffected by such fake reviews as the only ones I ascribe much value to are the negative ones. Also, I've extremely curtailed any purchasing on Amazon as I've come to perceive the majority of their marketplace to be a degenerative crap house.
Let's not forget that these fake reviews are being paid for. That's clearly better than non-paid-for fake reviews. That is, there's some friction for the malicious actors.
Imagine how much less spam we would have if it cost 1 cent to send an email. Friction can do a lot of good.
This is all to say that it looks like Amazon and others (e.g., Steam) are doing the right thing in requiring a verified purchase in order to leave a review.
But it does seem like there's an easy improvement that Amazon could make: offer amnesty to people who report (after the fact) that they left a fake review. The review would be marked internally as fake (and this would impact rankings, etc.) but the vendor would be none the wiser.
> That is, there's some friction for the malicious actors.
Fake reviews are just another form of marketing, like traditional junk mail. Making mail spammers pay postage doesn't seem to have changed the fact that most of the snail mail I get is junk, even in the digital age. Charge reviewers a quarter or a dollar to leave a review. If I was passionate enough -- one way or the other -- to leave a review, I'd pay it! I'll bet it would squelch the fake reviews overnight. Just tune the charge to find an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio.
> Imagine how much less spam we would have if it cost 1 cent to send an email. Friction can do a lot of good.
Except the spam email problem was solved without opening the door to another place where uninformed consumers could get nickle-and-dimed? Aren't we all glad the pay-for-email push failed?
I read somewhere that fake reviews are technically illegal in the USA. Reviewers who received a steep discount or for free are supposed to disclose based on some law supposedly- because it may be promotional. Like YouTubers, Twitch streamers, or influencers.
I don't know what law this is but I'm sure if someone ever got angry enough at Amazon and hit them with a massive lawsuit to enforce the fake review problem, Amazon would probably fix it within a few months. Amazon's pretty proactive and they tend to respond best to lawsuits. I follow lawyers for Amazon sellers who sue or threaten to sue Amazon and/or Amazon sellers in the US.
If you were a purveyor of fake reviews, you would want to track the reviews you peddled. It's knowable if reviews disappear over time.
What would be the incentive to come clean to Amazon about your own fake reviews? I don't think the people who sell fake reviews are likely to grow a conscience spontaneously.
A bit off topic, but companies/organizations that use punctuation in their name make sentences look screwy. The organization in this article is “Which?” which the Guardian faithfully reproduces (without the quote I used). As a result, every time the name of the organization comes at the end of a sentence, the Guardian doesn’t end it with a period, they end it with a question mark. This made me go back and reread at least one sentence because I thought I misread it. I read the sentence as a statement, not a question (and it was a statement.)
I was looking in Amazon for a protective case for the iPhone XR that my SO has preordered.
Apparently there are many cases and even more reviews of very happy customers (verified purchasers as per Amazon) who were making very positive comments on the perfect fit of the case (on a phone that is not yet on sale).
I don't live in the US/UK/Europe so Amazon deliveries are things I pay a lot for and take a while to get to me. So when I buy something, I have to be damn sure I'm going to like it. That's lead to the following strategy: filter reviews to only look at 1-star and 2-star reviews and make sure you can live with it if all the things people say there end up being true. It's served me well so far and no amount of 5* reviews will change my decision to buy or not. Also, I look for things elsewhere, and only go to Amazon for buying, I don't use their search. That helps a lot as well
A colleague recently pointed me to fakespot.com, where you paste the URL of a product (like an Amazon product) and (it seems) it does an ML type analysis to score the likelihood of fakeness in the aggregate of reviews with a score and then highlights the likely fake ones and why it thinks what it thinks.
There's surely a market for verification for customers as much as there's one for the criminally-minded sellers.
Which begs the question of why Amazon isn't offering this themselves, or doing it in the background in a way that prevents this from being the problem it is.
I have to wonder at some level if in the short term this boosts their sales figures, but long term erodes trust in buying from them and diminishes their stranglehold.
I used to trust Amazon reviews to the point I'd often not read a ton or research reviews else where before purchasing.
These days I often opt to just buy from a retailer from a name brand. With Amazon increasing prices it often isn't much difference in price and there's better quality control.
It has officially become a chore to buy something on Amazon if you care about doing any due diligence.
This sort of thing seems pervasive these days. I see it on Yelp, Google Reviews and Amazon. (hell, the NYT has had pieces on people buying their competitors products en-masse just to give them 1-star reviews and move the relative needle in terms of Amazon reviews).
It will have to be fixed though, it seems that buying things sight unseen only really works when you have a lot of evidence (reviews) that the product is good.
Seems like a good way for an upstart to differentiate themselves.
There's no great reason to believe that fakespot is actually good at telling you when reviews are fake. Compare the absolute maximum that fakespot can ever do against the description given in the article, and you'll see that fakespot is no panacea. Fakespot can only ever catch a certain kind of low-effort fake review that is becoming less relevant as markets find new ways to cheat people.
Amazon should come up with a proprietary and secret algorithm (the way Google search is) to do the same thing. They are in the best position to do this, since they have all the info. They could leverage purchase history, payment methods, addresses, account age, etc...; they even have the resources to use slightly more invasive information such as credit score. It's knowable what products are having fake reviews bought for them, they could secretly flag accounts suspected of this and lower their weight. Fakespot can't get half of the information Amazon already has. Amazon needs to fix this for themselves.
One way to solve this problem would be to create a curated directory of reputable sellers on amazon and just link to their products. Sprinkle some Algolia magic dust for search and voilà. Easier said than done but it’s a start.
Actually it seems one site/app is doing that [0] haven’t tried it personally but they seem to have the right idea IMHO.
Edit: I should have linked directly to their about page [1]
[+] [-] x0054|7 years ago|reply
I noticed this with many other products as well, but the arrows is a particularly noticeable example because it's something I regularly replace as they get beat up and destroyed (I shoot a lot).
[+] [-] simias|7 years ago|reply
I wonder if it's because they push the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mantra too far. After all, their current approach is successful so why risk changing anything? That would also explain why the website overall looks so dated in many areas.
[+] [-] esalman|7 years ago|reply
I decided to do my research outside of Amazon. The most reliable brand which I chose based on independent review sites and user forums does not actually appear on first 10 pages of Amazon search results. I bought it anyways, and it is so good value for money that I have ordered another one. Safe to say I don't trust Amazon recommendations at all.
[+] [-] djsumdog|7 years ago|reply
I don't want retail to go away. Fuck Amazon.
[+] [-] hbbio|7 years ago|reply
Not necessarily à la Yahoo! but a modern collaborative system, with help from some ML would do. My friends at Slant would agree :)
[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] at-fates-hands|7 years ago|reply
In an effort to get completely off of Google, I moved my music library off of Google Music and was going to just use an MP3 player. I had some suggestions from friends (Sony, Phillips, Onkyo, Pioneer) and decided to search Amazon to see what I could find.
When I did a search on Amazon, it was page after page after page of Chinese MP3 players, all under $50. Most of the Hi-Fi players my friends recommended were in the $4-$500 range and up. Even after searching for the specific models they recommended, I still couldn't find them. The search results would return the same sub $50 players.
After a few minutes I gave up and went directly to the manufacturers site. Even more discouraging, when I was googling "Pioneer MP3 player" the Pioneer website was completely buried in the search results, but the first two pages of SERP's had a myriad of Amazon results.
There was a time when you just expected a company to be on page 1 if you searched directly by the company name and product. And these were not fly-by-night companies nobody has heard of. These were major electronic and audio companies I was searching for. Depressing to say the least
[+] [-] PostOnce|7 years ago|reply
"Get everything in one place" was more valuable when we had to travel from place to place and it took 30 minutes, but traveling from one website to another takes no time, so the proposition isn't as strong.
Return policies, security, etc, are concerns still, but those cons come along with the pros of no commingling, probably a lower price if ordering direct, and supporting the economic diversity of having more than one store.
[+] [-] chrisper|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intended|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ElBarto|7 years ago|reply
Unfortunately I have to agree.
There has been a huge increase in the number of dodgy sellers and obviously fake reviews, and Amazon does not seem to care. I reported a few dishonest listings and absolutely nothing happened despite a number of reviews corroborating it.
Prime deliveries have also started to slip (here in the UK), with 'guaranteed next day deliveries' suddenly being delayed with no update or anything.
Amazon got so successful because they earned a pretty much blind trust from customers, but trust is lost quicker than it is earned.
[+] [-] zxcvvcxz|7 years ago|reply
Here's my anecdote: I can't stand Amazon Canada. It's complete and utter crap.
Actually everything in this country is a crappy watered-down version of the US: Amazon, Netflix, you name it.
[+] [-] la6470|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] la6470|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bootlooped|7 years ago|reply
Edit: ignore the above, I failed to read the part where they said the price was the same.
[+] [-] joelx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajross|7 years ago|reply
If you're seriously a regular buyer of these products, surely you have a few manufacturers that you know and trust, just like serious hobbyists in other activities have preferred brands of balls or shoes or guitar strings or whatever. Can't you just search for those?
[+] [-] DanielleMolloy|7 years ago|reply
I tried buying a new bicycle light last week and literally every product was crap with fake reviewing. After wasting an hour on this I ended up not buying from Amazon. Rolling out the red carpet for the Chinese crap and counterfeit industry on their platform is likely to become Amazon’s death if they don’t admit their mistake and turn the wheel now.
[+] [-] tammer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] faizshah|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bingbingo|7 years ago|reply
My wife bought me “luxury” branded jackets and clothing for fall. Half of them were counterfeit. I called Amazon and they said I can return them and they’ll send me new ones. Ok. How will I know those won’t be counterfeit? Worse, I found a jacket was counterfeit after the return period when it literally started to fall apart at the seams. Welp, Amazon said they can’t refund me.
Multiple times my packages are either not delivered on time or aren’t delivered at all. 2 times they were half way across the state. When I called them to ask, they wanted me to confirm my address since they magically and suddenly couldn’t find my address anymore. Well guys you’ve delivered 10k+ worth of goods to me at this address this year alone. WTF?!
My customer service experience also degraded every other instance. When they missed my last delivery date I called them and threatened to cancel and the rep said “Sure, Sir, let me do that after I reorder this item”. He figured it was quicker or reorder an item than wait for it to get back from across the state.
[+] [-] cs702|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perpetualcrayon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jobigoud|7 years ago|reply
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/04/27/606528176/epis...
Turns out they are phantom packages from vendors on Ali Baba and TaoBao gaming the review system. This is called "brushing".
They managed to interview a "brusher". So the brushers have to make themselves look completely real during the buying process, hesitating, clicking links from different vendors and only after a while select the actual item they target. To get the "verified purchase" tag something has to be mailed somewhere. But instead of the actual item the vendor sends a package with random stuff and sometimes they send these to addresses of previous unknowing international customers to make it look more real.
[+] [-] plink|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaffee|7 years ago|reply
Imagine how much less spam we would have if it cost 1 cent to send an email. Friction can do a lot of good.
This is all to say that it looks like Amazon and others (e.g., Steam) are doing the right thing in requiring a verified purchase in order to leave a review.
But it does seem like there's an easy improvement that Amazon could make: offer amnesty to people who report (after the fact) that they left a fake review. The review would be marked internally as fake (and this would impact rankings, etc.) but the vendor would be none the wiser.
[+] [-] TheRealDunkirk|7 years ago|reply
Fake reviews are just another form of marketing, like traditional junk mail. Making mail spammers pay postage doesn't seem to have changed the fact that most of the snail mail I get is junk, even in the digital age. Charge reviewers a quarter or a dollar to leave a review. If I was passionate enough -- one way or the other -- to leave a review, I'd pay it! I'll bet it would squelch the fake reviews overnight. Just tune the charge to find an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio.
[+] [-] antidesitter|7 years ago|reply
Incidentally, this was the motivation behind a PoW system called Hashcash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash.
[+] [-] jessriedel|7 years ago|reply
Except the spam email problem was solved without opening the door to another place where uninformed consumers could get nickle-and-dimed? Aren't we all glad the pay-for-email push failed?
[+] [-] Regardsyjc|7 years ago|reply
I don't know what law this is but I'm sure if someone ever got angry enough at Amazon and hit them with a massive lawsuit to enforce the fake review problem, Amazon would probably fix it within a few months. Amazon's pretty proactive and they tend to respond best to lawsuits. I follow lawyers for Amazon sellers who sue or threaten to sue Amazon and/or Amazon sellers in the US.
[+] [-] bootlooped|7 years ago|reply
What would be the incentive to come clean to Amazon about your own fake reviews? I don't think the people who sell fake reviews are likely to grow a conscience spontaneously.
[+] [-] abruzzi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] howenterprisey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markdown|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acjohnson55|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maximp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatever1|7 years ago|reply
Apparently there are many cases and even more reviews of very happy customers (verified purchasers as per Amazon) who were making very positive comments on the perfect fit of the case (on a phone that is not yet on sale).
[+] [-] entropy_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pergadad|7 years ago|reply
If they did want to fight fake reviews they would make reporting easy.
They'd also not allow completely different products to be listed on the same page.
...
[+] [-] mancerayder|7 years ago|reply
There's surely a market for verification for customers as much as there's one for the criminally-minded sellers.
[+] [-] shostack|7 years ago|reply
I have to wonder at some level if in the short term this boosts their sales figures, but long term erodes trust in buying from them and diminishes their stranglehold.
I used to trust Amazon reviews to the point I'd often not read a ton or research reviews else where before purchasing.
These days I often opt to just buy from a retailer from a name brand. With Amazon increasing prices it often isn't much difference in price and there's better quality control.
It has officially become a chore to buy something on Amazon if you care about doing any due diligence.
[+] [-] qwerty2020|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
[2] https://reviewmeta.com/
[+] [-] a-dub|7 years ago|reply
It will have to be fixed though, it seems that buying things sight unseen only really works when you have a lot of evidence (reviews) that the product is good.
Seems like a good way for an upstart to differentiate themselves.
[+] [-] denzil_correa|7 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law
[+] [-] Gerardd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huy-nguyen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BugsJustFindMe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bootlooped|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wilsonfiifi|7 years ago|reply
Actually it seems one site/app is doing that [0] haven’t tried it personally but they seem to have the right idea IMHO.
Edit: I should have linked directly to their about page [1]