My issue with Amazon reviews is the ease that sellers are able to change the product and keep the reviews. I recently tried to buy a decent pair of USB C headphones. The top two recommended products both had 5 starts with hundreds of verified reviews... for a dvd copy of a classic movie. I've decided I just can't trust Amazon reviews anymore.
My last employer sent out a company-wide email asking every employee (and their friends and family) to order their flagship product (IoT device) on Amazon, write a 5-star review and e-mail the marketing department for reimbursement and product return. The returned products would then be re-shipped to Amazon.
Needless to say, it was the shortest time I've ever spent at a job.
Or the one product that has like ten different "variations" which are actually totally different products, yet share reviews. A review on one of them means nothing for the other nine.
This always happens with various editions of books too especially for classic books. For example: I want to buy Meditations by Marcus Aurelius but there are so many editions of that book with different authors who translated these books but you'd see the same exact reviews on all of these editions. It is very hard for me in that case to choose the right book.
I really think Amazon needs to fix this. I'm about two shitty products away from cancelling Prime. Their business model is "good enough products shipped really quickly without needing to think about it much". Recently, things I order aren't good enough. I find myself thinking about whether I should just drive to Target so that I can see the thing before I buy it. This seems like a problem for Amazon.
While Amazon Germany (afaik) does not yet have many of the problems of Amazon US (I often hear on HN about fake products and the fake reviews of TFA), what really annoys me is the completely different products as one. I was looking at a drill, it's variants included a jigsaw. The reviews were almost all for the jigsaw and at some point, Amazon even removed the notice which variant was reviewed. Utterly useless.
In an unregulated market, brand identity and reputation becomes a very strong differentiating factor. The strongest brand on Amazon is Amazon, so by allowing the generic market to rot they are allowing their own-brand basics products to establish themselves because consumers can assume that Amazon products won't have this fake review problem.
It does also work for other brands too of course. I was in the market for some Lightning cables recently and almost every single cheap cable was a switch-out with review for different products. The only brands I recognised were Amazon and Anker and both their stuff was legit (I bought from both).
This is yet again another, surely well-known 'leak' in how products are presented and displayed, since it can still happen, Amazon is tacitly complicit with the fraud.
Most of these issues could be mostly cleared up with some basic operational policies: purchase only reviews (or sideline the others), no 'changing the product', some degree of manufacturer verification etc..
I also agree that it should be very easy for Amazon to pick up on. I can't believe it's happening. We call this "Review Hijacking" and have a warning that appears at the top of our report if we detect it: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/amazon-review-hijacking/
A couple months ago, I googled 'whiteboard amazon', clicked the first result, and was taken to a well structured amazon page for a whiteboard that had 5 stars. Looking at it a little closer, I noticed that of the 143 reviews, 143 were 5 star reviews. On top of it, every review followed a similar structure, was made by an account that had thousands of 5 star reviews, and was so beyond the pale obvious fraudulent that I felt the need to email jeff@amazon.
Today I was looking at some vitamins, and I checked every single result for a certain supplement that was 4 or 5 stars and every single one of them ranked D or worse on FakeSpot.
How the fuck does Amazon not know how to deal with this? 100% of reviews coming in for a product on the same day? MAYBE THAT'S A SIGN, AMAZON.
It gets even worse that true 5 stars and low ratings can get flagged for false review by Amazon's algo.
Last year there was a posting on hackernews how this person lost his Amazon account as it got flagged on its first review with a long history of purchases.
I think that food supplements/vitamins are the worst. My one and only email to [email protected] was on that. It probably didn't do any good, but I felt better.
Luckily, they don't appear to be of any value anyway.
It's not just the fake reviews that bug me. I can use fakespot to weed through a few of those. The thing that has really made Amazon less usable for me in the last year or so is seeing the exact same product twenty times under different nonsense-word brands. Recalling a recent example, in about a minute I can find the exact same pair of water shoes sold as: gracosy, MAYZERO, LINGTOM, Wonesion, JointlyCreating, Centipede Demon, hiitave, and more. Another one is Belilent, Alibress, SUOKENI, Zhuanglin, Dreamcity, and so on. Same pictures, almost same descriptive text, with only minor cosmetic differences.
Are these different companies that happen to use the same supplier? It's possible, but it could also be one company creating multiple pseudo-brands to game the system. I could probably even find out, but I don't care. The same physical thing shipped for the same price from the same Chinese factory shouldn't show up twenty times. As long as search results are filled with crap, they're useless. It's the combination of fake reviews and this kind of flooding that makes me want to leave and never come back.
The store is an absolute mess, even with major brands. The exact same pair of Nikes could be listed in a half dozen separate categories sold by two dozen different sellers at shipping speeds ranging from two hours to two months and prices ranging from $0.06 - $649.58.
You end up having to spend 10x the amount of time down the rabbit hole of different categories, vaguely different product titles, different sizes ("size 10", "size TEN" "10(m)", etc.), and different names for the same color shoe, all to desperately find that low price/size/color combination that drew you in from the search results in the first place.
The store desperately needs moderation to tidy it up. I'm sure the devs are patting themselves on the back for all the extra engagement they are milking out of me, but frankly I'm using the site less and less to the point where I've cancelled my prime membership. The only thing keeping me is milking their free shipping and 3% back card, and only if local alternatives fail me.
What you're experiencing is called dropshipping, and it's becoming popular because amateurs are seeing it as a "get rich quick scheme." There's a product called Oberlo (https://www.oberlo.com/) where you can easily browse Chinese items for sale and add them to your own Shopify store. Then you can use a free plugin to integrate Shopify with Amazon. That's why you're seeing a million of the same item, because it's tons of people browsing the same products with this same setup.
This is one of the most problematic. I think 3 out of 5 products I usually search for turns up massive levels of white-label crap. I suspect these are Alibaba based sellers who rebrand their white label fake products in Amazon literally 20 to 50 times under different cool sounding brand names. They have different costs and slightly different descriptions but otherwise no real way to differentiate them. These listings completely takes over search results and pushes out any genuine brands not savvy with SEO way out on 3rd or 4th page creating denial attack on customers. Now I have made habit of not falling for these white label crap and explicitly look out for "made in XYZ" in description. I think lot of US based genuine brands have gone bankrupt because of these.
Amazon needs complete reboot of their search given this level of white label spam and their inability to effectively de-dup results.
> Are these different companies that happen to use the same supplier?
You can often find the exact product, same pictures and all, on Alibaba. Only difference is the branding, so it's obvious where sellers are sourcing their products.
It's one of the reasons I use AliExpress: it cuts out the middlemen and their markup.
I actually love it when I see this on Amazon, as it tells me that I can just go on Alibaba/Aliexpress and order the same thing from there for a fraction of the price.
yeah fake reviews are an industry thing and it's basically not much different than advertisement and once you treat them like that they aren't such a grating issue... what is a huge problem to me instead is that their search is completely useless because everyone is writing everything on their pages, even if you look for a specific brand of items, even if you further filter by brand, nothing seem to work and a lot of junk fills up the result page.
that and commingled inventory.
currently I trust more aliexpress to deliver the product as pictured than amazon.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, but at some point in the last year or so I completely lost trust in purchasing goods on Amazon.
I’ve been a Prime customer since Prime launched. I loved it for a decade. It used to be an automatic reflex for me: need something? Type it in Amazon and click buy.
But now I don’t trust Amazon search results at all, and when I do purchase I only do it via direct product links from other sites I trust (like Wirecutter or the manufacturer’s site). Increasingly I buy direct from the brands websites.
I wanted to drop Prime this year. My wife argued we should keep it because the kids watch a lot of Prime Video. But we’ve already got Netflix, and with Disney launching their thing I think I’d rather buy that than stick with Prime any longer.
Not sure where Amazon is headed, and I wish the fate of AWS and Whole Foods weren’t at least somewhat tied up in the fate of Amazon’s retail operation.
Find Lock Picking Lawyer on YouTube and his reviews of the locks Amazon recommend. See him open them in seconds. Share videos with wife. She will be with you on cutting the umbilical cord to Amazon after that.
The locks they recommend in 'Amazon Choice' have known vulnerabilities that design solutions were found for many decades ago so the products are essentially naive. If Amazon deliberately set out to hype the most useless locks so you would have your stuff stolen (and have to buy more from Amazon) then they would struggle to do a better job.
Of course the locks come with hundreds of five star reviews even though they can be opened in seconds with low skill attacks.
I received an email at least once a month, to an address I used exclusively for Amazon purchases, inviting me to join a website that will reimburse me via PayPal if I purchase products and review them.
I have forwarded the emails to Amazon a couple times explaining that my email address is used exclusively for them making it easier to narrow down who might be sending these emails. They always respond with a warning that my account might be suspended if I partake in such sites.
Blog it with any specific info you want to protect redacted. Give newspapers and equity analysts a chance to find what you are saying backed by evidence. This is the only way $BIGCO will ever care. Do you care enough to do it. I probably wouldn't.
Same here. Cryptic alias on my own domain that I never use for anything else. It's rare though, I get one spam email to that address once every few months now, and it's always shopping/review-related. I've contacted Amazon to ask how, when and with whom they shared my email address and their response was basically "we don't ever, but here's a month of free prime for your trouble".
I wish I kept a link, but there was looking to buy a book on music theory or something similar. One of the books had 13 or so reviews, all glowing. Many were of the form "Exactly what I was looking for!" or "Just perfect!" with nothing more.
Two of them had the same surprising word that made no sense in the context of the sentence: both reviews used the word "goal." Then it hit me: either the directions telling them what to review or in their own attempt to translate to English, the auto-translation picked the wrong synonym, choosing "goal" instead of "score."
I never thought it would get that way but I feel more comfortable now buying from ebay from a seller with good feedback. Amazon is such a cesspool of weird sellers. For example I looked for flashes of Godox brand. Listings had "Godox" in the title but when I looked at the listings they were all from different sellers and not from Godox. I think is intentionally misleading by Amazon. As a tech person I sort of understand what's going on but a lot of people trust Amazon and don't understand that Amazon isn't really the seller and does nothing against sleazy listings.
One product (power bricks for MacBooks) had over 1000 5 stars, then the 1 star reviews came in where people actually had their power adapters catch on fire. Amazon, or maybe the seller, shut the review/product down. Now, it's back:
Lots of verified purchases. All the reviews are within the same date range. It doesn't take machine learning or advanced AI to catch this; a simple SQL statement should be enough to flag these. But still, they persist.
If you are buying electronics, buy it from Best Buy, Costco, Target, Walmart or another retailer with a physical store. Best Buy matches Amazon's prices and their merchandise is not fake.
I recently ordered a small device from Amazon, it was poor, so I gave it a 1 star rating with a short, negative review.
About a week later, I received an e-mail from the seller (via Amazon's payments communication system) asking for me to delete my review in return for being refunded the total amount, and stating that I could keep the device.
Whilst I didn't take up their offer, I assume many others did which shows how Amazon is 'not flooded with one-star reviews'.
I reported 4 fake reviews to Amazon on a product I purchased before.
The product page had changed from the old one I originally purchased on to a new one with 4 obviously fake 5-star reviews. I found this when I went to re-purchase the product after it (an eBike) was stolen. The page is here (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07K2VLSX5/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_He...)
There is a review from me, calling out the fakes and providing detail, and the other 4 that are clear-as-day fakes. The previous product page, which I referenced in my report to Amazon, had numerous high quality, legit reviews averaging around 3 stars with tons of detail.
I use Amazon a lot but I won't buy expensive brand-name stuff there anymore. Case in point: I am going to buy a Starrett combination square and Amazon has a nice price with free shipping, but I'd bet there is a 50/50 chance I get a counterfeit.
I'd also put your chances of getting a fake $9 Casio watch on Amazon at 50/50.
As a software engineer I kinda sympathize with Amazon -- no matter what system you come up with, people are going to game it. It's a very complex moving target and you will never be able to eradicate all of the scammers. At the same time, I think they could do a lot better than they do today, and I wonder if they actually try.
When buying on Amazon, I'm mostly interested in the 2-4 range reviews; I find this is where people discuss the pros/cons instead of just the pros (5 - best product ever!1!) and just the worst (1 - it had a defect because I threw it in the pool even though it said don't throw it in the pool and the company doesn't want to reimburse me, never buying from it again yadayada - kind of reviews).
"Online retail giant Amazon's website is flooded with fake five-star reviews for products from brands it has never heard of, consumer group Which? has claimed."
Took me about 5 times reading that to realize "it" referred to "consumer group Which?"
I think the question mark in the name helped throw me off...
My theory is that amazon’s new business model is increasingly going to be based on advertising.
Reliable reviews are incompatible with advertising revenue (why else would you have to advertise heavily if your products are really the best).
The same observation may explain the doscountinuation of Amazon Button. Button would reorder the same product/brand over and over again - not compatible with advertising by competitors.
[+] [-] matthewfcarlson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rlander|7 years ago|reply
Needless to say, it was the shortest time I've ever spent at a job.
[+] [-] cortesoft|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gordon_freeman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanderjd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Semaphor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonh|7 years ago|reply
It does also work for other brands too of course. I was in the market for some Lightning cables recently and almost every single cheap cable was a switch-out with review for different products. The only brands I recognised were Amazon and Anker and both their stuff was legit (I bought from both).
[+] [-] sonnyblarney|7 years ago|reply
Most of these issues could be mostly cleared up with some basic operational policies: purchase only reviews (or sideline the others), no 'changing the product', some degree of manufacturer verification etc..
But they chose not to do it.
[+] [-] nathancahill|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ReviewMeta|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] modzu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OrgNet|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmanfrin|7 years ago|reply
Today I was looking at some vitamins, and I checked every single result for a certain supplement that was 4 or 5 stars and every single one of them ranked D or worse on FakeSpot.
How the fuck does Amazon not know how to deal with this? 100% of reviews coming in for a product on the same day? MAYBE THAT'S A SIGN, AMAZON.
Amazon reviews are worse than garbage now.
[+] [-] _jal|7 years ago|reply
How do you know they don't, and have via whatever mechanism decided that they make more money if they choose not to?
[+] [-] madsprite|7 years ago|reply
Last year there was a posting on hackernews how this person lost his Amazon account as it got flagged on its first review with a long history of purchases.
[+] [-] chrischen|7 years ago|reply
Maybe that's bad for business if they did. People see a < 5 star review and may not purchase it, even if it is a lie.
[+] [-] PorterDuff|7 years ago|reply
Luckily, they don't appear to be of any value anyway.
[+] [-] m3nu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkrisc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notacoward|7 years ago|reply
Are these different companies that happen to use the same supplier? It's possible, but it could also be one company creating multiple pseudo-brands to game the system. I could probably even find out, but I don't care. The same physical thing shipped for the same price from the same Chinese factory shouldn't show up twenty times. As long as search results are filled with crap, they're useless. It's the combination of fake reviews and this kind of flooding that makes me want to leave and never come back.
[+] [-] asdff|7 years ago|reply
You end up having to spend 10x the amount of time down the rabbit hole of different categories, vaguely different product titles, different sizes ("size 10", "size TEN" "10(m)", etc.), and different names for the same color shoe, all to desperately find that low price/size/color combination that drew you in from the search results in the first place.
The store desperately needs moderation to tidy it up. I'm sure the devs are patting themselves on the back for all the extra engagement they are milking out of me, but frankly I'm using the site less and less to the point where I've cancelled my prime membership. The only thing keeping me is milking their free shipping and 3% back card, and only if local alternatives fail me.
[+] [-] warent|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytelus|7 years ago|reply
Amazon needs complete reboot of their search given this level of white label spam and their inability to effectively de-dup results.
[+] [-] panic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fucking_tragedy|7 years ago|reply
You can often find the exact product, same pictures and all, on Alibaba. Only difference is the branding, so it's obvious where sellers are sourcing their products.
It's one of the reasons I use AliExpress: it cuts out the middlemen and their markup.
[+] [-] fastball|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LoSboccacc|7 years ago|reply
that and commingled inventory.
currently I trust more aliexpress to deliver the product as pictured than amazon.
[+] [-] burlesona|7 years ago|reply
I’ve been a Prime customer since Prime launched. I loved it for a decade. It used to be an automatic reflex for me: need something? Type it in Amazon and click buy.
But now I don’t trust Amazon search results at all, and when I do purchase I only do it via direct product links from other sites I trust (like Wirecutter or the manufacturer’s site). Increasingly I buy direct from the brands websites.
I wanted to drop Prime this year. My wife argued we should keep it because the kids watch a lot of Prime Video. But we’ve already got Netflix, and with Disney launching their thing I think I’d rather buy that than stick with Prime any longer.
Not sure where Amazon is headed, and I wish the fate of AWS and Whole Foods weren’t at least somewhat tied up in the fate of Amazon’s retail operation.
[+] [-] Theodores|7 years ago|reply
The locks they recommend in 'Amazon Choice' have known vulnerabilities that design solutions were found for many decades ago so the products are essentially naive. If Amazon deliberately set out to hype the most useless locks so you would have your stuff stolen (and have to buy more from Amazon) then they would struggle to do a better job.
Of course the locks come with hundreds of five star reviews even though they can be opened in seconds with low skill attacks.
[+] [-] istjohn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cptskippy|7 years ago|reply
I have forwarded the emails to Amazon a couple times explaining that my email address is used exclusively for them making it easier to narrow down who might be sending these emails. They always respond with a warning that my account might be suspended if I partake in such sites.
[+] [-] harry8|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luckylion|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] urda|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helloindia|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tasty_freeze|7 years ago|reply
Two of them had the same surprising word that made no sense in the context of the sentence: both reviews used the word "goal." Then it hit me: either the directions telling them what to review or in their own attempt to translate to English, the auto-translation picked the wrong synonym, choosing "goal" instead of "score."
[+] [-] maxxxxx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sundayedition|7 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/KUPPET-MacBook-17inch-Compatible-MacB...
Lots of verified purchases. All the reviews are within the same date range. It doesn't take machine learning or advanced AI to catch this; a simple SQL statement should be enough to flag these. But still, they persist.
[+] [-] l8nite|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ginger123|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gringoDan|7 years ago|reply
Highly recommend.
[+] [-] adrian_mrd|7 years ago|reply
About a week later, I received an e-mail from the seller (via Amazon's payments communication system) asking for me to delete my review in return for being refunded the total amount, and stating that I could keep the device.
Whilst I didn't take up their offer, I assume many others did which shows how Amazon is 'not flooded with one-star reviews'.
[+] [-] blibble|7 years ago|reply
essentially only stuff that's completely obvious if it's fake, or if it's too expensive/niche to bother counterfeiting
[+] [-] 52-6F-62|7 years ago|reply
Maybe it's just in what I shop for but I haven't received a single counterfeit item, or come across fraudulent listings.
I've seen my fair share of imitation (and probably trademark-infringing) products and cheap crap, but I try and avoid that stuff.
So my experience has largely been positive—but there's no shortage of horror stories. That seems the norm around this board.
So I wonder is it just worse on the American side? (for reasons of volume or targeted marketing or whatever)
[+] [-] davidparks21|7 years ago|reply
The product page had changed from the old one I originally purchased on to a new one with 4 obviously fake 5-star reviews. I found this when I went to re-purchase the product after it (an eBike) was stolen. The page is here (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07K2VLSX5/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_He...)
There is a review from me, calling out the fakes and providing detail, and the other 4 that are clear-as-day fakes. The previous product page, which I referenced in my report to Amazon, had numerous high quality, legit reviews averaging around 3 stars with tons of detail.
Amazon has made no changes after my report.
[+] [-] twblalock|7 years ago|reply
I'd also put your chances of getting a fake $9 Casio watch on Amazon at 50/50.
As a software engineer I kinda sympathize with Amazon -- no matter what system you come up with, people are going to game it. It's a very complex moving target and you will never be able to eradicate all of the scammers. At the same time, I think they could do a lot better than they do today, and I wonder if they actually try.
[+] [-] d0m|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwighttk|7 years ago|reply
Took me about 5 times reading that to realize "it" referred to "consumer group Which?"
I think the question mark in the name helped throw me off...
[+] [-] juskrey|7 years ago|reply
E.g. if the book author is "arrogant", or most product problems are coming from hysterical idiots with none of them due to the manufacturer.
[+] [-] psadri|7 years ago|reply
Reliable reviews are incompatible with advertising revenue (why else would you have to advertise heavily if your products are really the best).
The same observation may explain the doscountinuation of Amazon Button. Button would reorder the same product/brand over and over again - not compatible with advertising by competitors.