It's nice to see hard evidence of this, but anecdotal evidence is plain to see on Amazon.com reviews. For example, a product gets a lot of 5 star reviews stating that the buyer bought it for their child/relative/friend and they are just sure that they will love it... 5 stars! Or "I just got this delivered yesterday and I haven't used it yet but it looks really great!"... 5 stars.
These are then immediately followed by a 1 star review along the lines of "This is the biggest piece of junk I've ever bought online. Will be returning to Amazon. DO NOT BUY!"
These aren't to be confused with the indiscriminate idiots who can't be bothered to use their brains, who leave mindless reviews such as "This is junk but it was cheap and kinda works... 5 stars!" Right.
Most times this trend of 5's followed by 1's is seen even in the first page of reviews. It's a serious problem with the platform. I usually search for reviews written by people who have had the product for a week or two and give the pros/cons along with a less than 5 star rating. That helps me avoid the fakes and the idiots.
This makes me wonder why Amazon, in all their analytical genius, isn't cracking down on this when it's so blatantly obvious.
> This makes me wonder why Amazon, in all their analytical genius, isn't cracking down on this when it's so blatantly obvious.
I used to work at Amazon, and can say that this came up on internal mailing lists all.the.time. It really bothers people, particularly engineers who see that it is eroding customers' trust in Amazon. It's really bad, and people know it. There were significant teams trying to work on it when I left.
I think it really is that it's a very difficult problem of cat-and-mouse, without any clear path to victory for Amazon, and the sellers have a huge monetary incentive to evade detection. It's very adversarial, and Amazon has the tough position of _also_ not wanting to discourage legitimate reviews and sellers. And there are so many sellers that solutions need to scale well.
So: I think they're trying, but it's a bona fide hard problem.
> And there are so many sellers that solutions need to scale well.
This actually raises a core part of the problem: why does Amazon need literally dozens of sellers for every piece of junk on the site? For any sort of commodity on the site, there can be thousands of results. All the same. All within a few percent of the same price. All completely indistinguishable through any mechanism in the search facility. There have been so many times that I've been looking for something with a specific feature, and it's just page after page after page of stuff I don't want, that I finally give up and just buy the crap they're shoving at me. That brutally-carnal competition for every nickel and dime is a big part of the motivation to flood the platform with fake reviews.
What made Amazon great at the start was the fact that they DID NOT carry every conceivable item under the sun, from every single person who wants to spin up a mercantile account and give it a whirl. I've gone back to buying most things from brick-and-mortar stores because THEY are still doing the curation. They're not going to carry 17,000 different USB cables, and the ones they do are going to be high-enough quality that they don't have a high rate of return. I wish Amazon all the worst. To paraphrase Yogi Berra: No one shops at Amazon any more; it's too crowded.
I think this actually works in Amazon's favour. It's a completely intractable problem to find the best widget from 17 pages of almost identical widgets with completely unstructured data to sift through. So what do customers do? They buy the Amazon recommended choice. It serves two purposes, it crowds out any competitive market place whilst capturing practically all of the value by determining what gets put in front of the customer first.
I'm not sure it really works in Amazons favor. Sure, some customers might be more inclined to buy the Amazon recommended choice. But I wonder how many are frustrated like me.
When I buy stuff on Amazon, it's not because I want Amazon to recommend their pick. I want to compare alternatives and make my own choice. That's getting harder and harder, because there's a gazillion identical results with spammy, polluted product names, sold by a bajillion different-yet-indistinguishable sellers. And each one of those results has a nice, fancy-looking template, but when you start reading, it's full of spelling and grammar errors.
It's as frustrating as trying to have a "conversation" with a chat bot.
What's the solution? Beats me. A naive part of my brain is suggesting some kind of vetting process for sellers, or maybe a trust rating, but I'm sure there are tons of horrible problems with those ideas.
I keep getting ads on Youtube from some Malaysian guys telling me how they bought cheap Chinese stuff on Alibaba and sold it for like 10x the price on Amazon and how I can really easily get $200,000 USD per month if I follow their 'easy' course. I really wish all these dropshipping "entrepreneurs" would run each other into the ground.
I recently bought a dog collar on Amazon. A week or so later, I got a large envelope in the mail, with "Amazon Early Reviewer Program, 2646 Rainer Ave S St 1020, Seattle, WA 98144" as the return address.
Inside was a piece of paper with a code to "activate my $20 gift card" by leaving a 5-star review of the dog collar, photographing the review, and emailing it to a very non-Amazon email. It also instructed me that "for security reasons", I should not include or attach this letter to my review, nor leave a negative review without emailing them first. All this still purports to be from Amazon proper with the Amazon logo on the paper as well.
This is clearly a scam from the seller to buy 5-star reviews, and their product has plenty of what look to be paid reviews to me as a result. I tried very hard to find any place to report this scheme, which goes past review buying to include impersonating Amazon itself, and mail fraud. I emailed several Amazon contacts, used contact forms on their site, and contact forms I could find on the seller side as well. I attached photos of the letter.
The only response I got was a form letter telling me that if I saw a fake review, I should click the report button under that review.
This is just one example. Almost every product I've bought in the past year that came from an individual seller included some kind of bribe for 5-star reviews, from gift cards to whole "free products every month" programs.
The other way round is the time I left a negative review for a phone case. I was emailed every day automatically by the seller directly to my email from theirs to retract my negative review. I asked them to stop. They didn’t.
I reported this to Microsoft as it was an outlook.com source address. Microsoft did nothing. My junk mail folder was starting to fill.
After about two months of this i got passive aggressive and set up a script to email them a 20 meg gif with “fuck you” tiled on it hourly to their mailbox. After about a day they got the point and I stopped receiving emails.
I think amazon have stopped sellers getting hold of buyers emails directly now though.
Those gift cards are often hilariously bad, like the one I recently received for a USB cable.
Very official Amazon-looking at first glance, until you realize that it almost looks like cut out by hand. And when I was promised "10 US€ for a 5-star reviews" on the back, I couldn't help but read it in Borat's voice. :)
Unfortunately, I don't think those would help, and they might hurt.
Your first suggestion doesn't address paid reviews. Usually the scheme is "buy it, and we will reimburse you with a little extra on top after you leave a review."
Your second suggestion would probably bias towards fake reviewers. It's pretty rare for someone to get paid just for one review.
One of the hard things to realize is that paid reviews are written by real people. Most of them probably know they are doing something shady, but not all - some think this is a legitimate marketing interaction. Many of them also leave real reviews for stuff - including negative reviews. It's generally not actually bots writing reviews.
Sure, but it would surely reduce the scale of these fake reviews. Right now, companies can buy reviews in batches of thousands; the only actual cost is in somebody/something creating that review and some overhead.
If Amazon also required actual purchase of that item, now there's the extra cost of actually buying that item. Even more so when you're talking about things that are expensive. This would drastically lower the amount of spam that could be generated unless the company wants to throw some huge money at it.
Returned items would still potentially be an issue, but I'm guessing Amazon already has things in place to kick off users that return too many items.
Item 1) Currently, sellers give out coupons codes that make a $50 item into a $5 item. People buy in reviews group buy it...it counts as a purchase and Amazon marks their review as "Verified Purchase".
Item 2) Professional reviewers have purchased multiple products above certain threshold.
Easier way to stop this is to prevent reviews from people who used a coupon to buy something and the price is above some threshold (i.e. seller doesn't knock to $5 between 10PM and midnight for their reviewers to buy it).
If I can think of this solution - why can't Amazon? Simple answer is they know of this behavior and encourage it.
I have shifted my purchasing behavior to buy from Walmart, Target, Ebay when at all possible. I know Walmart isn't exactly an angel - but I'd rather have 2 devils in the marketplace than 1. I even try to buy books from Barnes And Noble...but unfortunately the fulfillment time + price is hard to beat w/ Amazon. I rarely have books above the B&N threshold for free shipping.
I tried to switch to Target, especially for standard household supplies, but they seem to be actively pushing people away.
- they killed their subscription service (last year?)
- laundry detergent may or may not be taped (they at least bag it), leading to spillage
- they use the same flimsy tape for all of their packages
- they stopped using any sort of package space filler (I really liked when they were using long sheets of paper - makes me less worried about plastic waste, and we could give them to our son so he could color on them)
- you need to use their app for curbside pickup (Home Depot does this right with the ability to do it with or without their app)
- inconsistent availability of items for shipping
It's easy to meet their free shipping limit, and it's nice to have the option to pickup from a local location, but unlike some retailers, I feel Target would rather you either shop in their physical stores, or go somewhere else.
Ebay helped facilitate a fraud against me and are still on my black list. The whole process was horrible and costly. Up until it happened i used them regularly to buy and sell. I know its tangential but my thoughts are based on your white list. Essentially eBay and to a degree Amazon are perpetrating fraud indirectly on a massive scale.
Sam's, Costco, and Walmart.com, as well as grocery.walmart.com ... Walmart is definitely firing on all cylinders these days. (Costco has literally the worst website, and they rarely have great deals on it like in the club, so... thinking about letting that one go.) For cheap Chinese stuff, going to Ebay. Also going to Ebay for things like used laptop chargers, since I figure the odds are higher that with new ones, they might be counterfeit.
Unfortunately, I still put up with Amazon for probably 40% of my purchases. It's fast and generally cheap. (Even though even Amazon Prime has gotten ridiculous)
> I think it really is that it's a very difficult problem of cat-and-mouse, without any clear path to victory for Amazon, and the sellers have a huge monetary incentive to evade detection.
Honestly it's really hard to believe you. That may have been what you were told but there's hundreds of well documented cases of sellers manipulating reviews where Amazon does not penalize the seller.
The logical explanation is Amazon has decided not to punish sellers who manipulate reviews if Amazon thinks it's a net gain for Amazon.
Yeah, I get it. For what it's worth - I didn't just get told they care, I saw some of the systems that were built to work on detection.
Amazon is not a very short-term oriented company. They're usually pretty good at caring about long-term dominance to get dollars in ten years rather than pennies today. It's clear as day to anyone that fake reviews are hurting their image to customers, eroding trust. That's leading people to buy stuff elsewhere.
At the same time, Amazon Marketplace is one of the underappreciated masterstrokes from Amazon over the last 15 years and has driven a huge increase in their retail revenue, which you can see in annual reports. So, certainly they're unwilling to take really dramatic action like dropping 3rd-party sellers entirely. But I still think they realize fixing this is pretty crucial for the long-term health of the retail business.
It's hard for me to explain the cases where people find obvious fraud and the seller doesn't get penalized. These would get flagged internally in mailing lists too, and most of the time it was a process error somewhere - a ticket that got dropped when shuffled between the zillion different departments; Amazon's internal bureaucracy is truly insane and huge. I think it's usually incompetence rather than devious cleverness, honestly.
There are probably some other cases that are more complicated (sellers reopening new accounts, and then doing social engineering on unwitting poorly-paid support people to regain listings). I think those are kind of rare.
---
Anyway, all this to say: I get it, it's hard to believe because it's easy to think of Amazon as all-powerful. But... they're really not. It's a huge, slow, bureaucratic, sludgy company. They have some money (okay, a lot of money) and technical talent but it isn't super clear how you'd apply those to this problem. It's hard.
> I get it, it's hard to believe because it's easy to think of Amazon as all-powerful.
This has nothing to do with thinking Amazon is all-powerful, and everything to do with thinking they don't care because it makes them money. Amazon's revenue is clearly skyrocketing and they make a ton of money because of the marketplace. It seems obvious to me they made the decision to put revenue/profits over long-term customer support.
You believe that Amazon wants to solve the problem. I believe Amazon doesn't want to solve the problem, because they make more money not solving it now. And talking about the long-term vision of a company whose founding CEO just stepped down is pretty meaningless.
I'll be more blunt. Amazon saying they care about fake reviews is like Facebook saying they care about privacy. They make money by lying about it, not fixing it. Facebook clearly hasn't suffered the long term damage of years of horrible PR using their stock price as a metric (you know, the only metric that really matters), and Amazon likely won't either (in fact they've had just as much bad PR and look at them now).
If you had ever worked at Amazon you would find it very difficult to believe what you do. Short term solutions aren’t part of the companies culture. Andy Jassy has been around since the beginning and has the same core values as Jeff. Not to mention your argument could equally be made with Jeff as the CEO. It just isn’t how the company works.
I have never worked at Amazon, but I have heard enough horrible things from people that used to work there that make me believe not everybody shares your opinion. In fact, those other people went out of their way to convince me not to take a job there.
I am glad you seem to enjoy working at Amazon, or at least have a respect for the culture. I've never been there so I can't comment on it, but I've heard lots of horrible things about the culture there. And lately the complaints have been shifting towards Amazon thinking more and more about short-term profits instead of the big picture.
FWIW, single data point, YMMV, etc., but where I work (under AWS) I have never seen behavior that is exploitive of the customer like you're talking about to be encouraged or allowed.
Yes, AWS may be different from how things are done in retail, and we're huge so I'm sure it does happen here and there -- but from my admittedly limited vantage point, Bezos' heavy emphases on long-term thinking and earning the customer's trust have taken deep root everywhere I've been able to see.
Doesn't mean peeps always get it right, some choices are difficult, compromises have to be made, there are outliers, etc., but still, it's there. I've just never seen cheap thinking around customers, so to speak, and I really like that aspect of working where I do.
If that ever changes in a broad way, that'll be the beginning of the end of Amazon's dominance.
> If that ever changes in a broad way, that'll be the beginning of the end of Amazon's dominance.
And I'm saying I think this is already happening, and the most talented senior employees are already starting to leave. This is going to take years, maybe decades to unravel. But I've already shifted away from buying things on Amazon because the experience has become significantly worse for me and I'm better off buying elsewhere.
You're welcome to disagree, but I think Amazon is no longer about value creation but value extraction. And quite frankly it doesn't matter if you feel differently as an employee, because that's how I feel as a customer.
It's funny, you and I arrive at the same conclusion from different paths.
You believe Amazon is so bad at removing fraud because they are greedy and evil and are happy to have it. I believe Amazon is so bad at removing fraud because it's beyond their capabilities, and that nobody knows how to ensure trustworthy information on the internet.
But we arrive at the same spot: I don't really buy from Amazon anymore either for anything where the quality matters, because I can't trust anything on there. I use Chewy for pet stuff, Newegg or Monoprice for electronic stuff, Lee Valley for gardening stuff - etc.
In a way, I'm more pessimistic than you: I think good intentions wouldn't even help.
If Amazon wanted to solve this problem, they'd get rid of comingling and allow customer to flag bad returns as "fraudulent products." It would be trivial to train an ML model to catch fraud this way, all you have to do is allow it to have meaningful inputs. Of course once you get rid of comingling you don't even need to bother with that, as you've solved the problem the same way the rest of the industry has already solved it.
This isn't hard. Seriously, you have lost all goodwill from me - anyone that isn't a fucking idiot could immediately solve this problem. But Amazon doesn't want to lose money, is what you really mean.
Fuck Amazon and fuck you. I have more respect for Facebook at this point.
You’re saying the company that’s revolutionized the supply chain and brought us AWS can’t mitigate at least mass, organized fraud if it was a priority?!
Bull shit.
There will be Amazon rockets and maybe one day a Mars landing but stopping mass fraud is too big a problem?
I always wonder how much you can truly unlink from Amazon for retail purchases. Even where a store runs on Shopify there is a good chance they are using FBA for fulfilment
What about the short term solution of PIP culture?
Sure you get short term results because colleagues are competing against one another to not get into the PIP meat grinder, but inevitably it leads to burnout and people leaving.
Not to mention Amazon’s reputation in tech is pretty low b/c everyone knows about this management by PIP culture
> they make a ton of money because of the marketplace
Would that go away once the shitty reviews go away? I'm not convinced it would. The economic impact would be on shitty sellers as they would lose revenue, but I suspect a lot of that revenue would just go to good products.
Think about that initial paragraph for a moment. You assume it is because it makes them money but you also assume it is a choice on their part - that they could do something about it that works.
That is basically the same thing as all powerful in this context. It is the same pattern of sinisterization in the whole "Big Tech Bad" propaganda push.
> At the same time, Amazon Marketplace is one of the underappreciated masterstrokes from Amazon over the last 15 years and has driven a huge increase in their retail revenue, which you can see in annual reports. So, certainly they're unwilling to take really dramatic action like dropping 3rd-party sellers entirely. But I still think they realize fixing this is pretty crucial for the long-term health of the retail business.
This is a long winded way of saying "Yeah it sucks, but we're not losing as much money as we are making because of this, so we're not as invested in fixing this problem."
I'm not doubting whether they want it fixed. I'm doubting the priority they put on it.
They’re been able to create a service or two for AWS so they clearly have the horsepower to resolve this unacceptable problem that’s eroding their credibility. They have a lot of cred now which I assume they don’t want sliding down a slippery slope.
If fake reviews simply penalize the seller, you've opened up an attack channel where anyone can submit fake reviews and eliminate competitors from the marketplace. It's complicated.
"...Amazon...significant teams trying to work on it...but it's a bona fide hard problem."
Random internet individuals: "But they could just..."
Like so many things/problems - they all seem easy/obvious until you actually TRY TO DO IT, at which point you realize why all of the other very smart people haven't solved it yet.
This is an oversimplification. Amazon also profits from fake reviews because they encourage consumer confidence, and most of the solutions that "random internet individuals" propose would result in some lost revenue for Amazon. The tricky part is Amazon's counter-aligned business incentive.
I put it in the same bucket as fake accounts on Twitter. My guess is that Twitter can correlate many accounts that do nothing but troll and shill for particular factions, and probably has a registry of these accounts, but they also lose MAUs when they nuke accounts. They have an incentive to wait until user growth comes in stronger than expected before they ban lots of active users.
For me personally, the biggest weakness of Amazon is commingling of inventory. I never buy things like lubricants and bearings from Amazon, even if the seller is an authorized distributor, because there's no guarantee I will avoid knockoffs from a different seller. I'd rather buy from Walmart or pay more for a specialty retailer to ship me the product, because Amazon inventory is often mixed with cheap knockoff garbage.
FakeSpot and ReviewMeta are up on different tabs every time I buy something new on Amazon, and they do a pretty good job of alerting you to scammy reviews without any internal Amazon info. I can’t imagine it’s not something an internal team could make a serious dent in.
The problem was created by amazon and can be fixed by Amazon.
Close the backdoor entrance for chinese sellers, and problem solved.
Amazon made it easy for random chinese companies to onboard as amazon sellers because it lowered every single barrier from an import/ banking/permit perspective
The problem is 20 years ago the people who were reviewing products were the buyers for distributors selling to brick and mortar stores.
Amazon business model was being a parasite, benefiting from the system of high quality products and trust built into the system. Without having to pay distributors, buyers, and store rents. And lest we forget sales tax.
But that old system is now dead and gone. So there are no trustworthy good faith reviewers.
Can't you just only allow reviews for purchasers with X amount minimum lifetime amazon spend? Just make the cost benefit not worth it to do 500 scam reviews. They already have verified purchase.
That seems vulnerable to a version of the Scientology bestseller exploit.
Let's say the seller is selling widgets. They get their phantom accounts to buy the widgets and thus run up the lifetime spend counter. Then they give the "purchased" widgets to themselves and just keep on selling them.
All they have to pay per iteration is the overhead (Amazon's take), assuming they'll manage to clear their stock later.
E.g. say a widget costs $110, of which Amazon's take is $10.
The seller uses their fake account to buy 10 widgets at a total cost of $1100. The seller both receive the widgets (shipped to the fake account's address) and the $1000 from the "sale". The total cost is thus $100 for making the fake account look like it has spent $1000.
Why not have certified users who have a clear history of buying things on the platform that can provide "trusted" reviews? Certainly there might still be a problem with sellers spamming people to ask for reviews in money but I think it would up the bar substantially. You can then improve this by only allowing reviews from people with known purchases.
You can roll this out with two 5-star rating systems and replace the old one once the new one has enough ratings.
> This makes me wonder why Amazon, in all their analytical genius, isn't cracking down on this when it's so blatantly obvious.
Because there are absolutely no consequences, and general boosterism increases sales. If you go to site X and there are a mix of good and bad reviews for a product, but then go to Amazon and see all good reviews a similar product, you buy at Amazon. Especially if you have Prime, which you might just have because you like a tv show.
If a systematic fraud is exposed, accounts are banned, Amazon press-releases a "crackdown", new accounts are quietly created by new business entities owned by the same people, process continues. What's the cost?
I have to agree with this sentiment. In general, I look for long term use reviews, any sign that a product will fail both beyond the return period and warranty period.
If my trust in long term reviews erode, I'm inclined to buy less.
Word of mount is a powerful tool that amazon has harnessed with reviews, and has seemingly replaced the need to see a product in person before a purchase.
I keep thinking I need to subscribe to consumer reports. They seem to be the only reviewers these days that I can be sure are not bought. They might or might not know what they are talking about, but at least they are not bought.
I spent years worrying about misleading descriptions and fake reviews. I then bought a subscription to which.co.uk and have been a happy customer since. They review a wide variety of products and they are a non-profit registered as a charity in the UK. They are mainly funded by consumer subscriptions so conflicts of interest are avoided.
CR are not as unbiased as they claim to be. They love Honda cars for example, and my experience with Hondas has been uniformly disastrous. Or may I just got two lemons.
single reviews are fine for product features but not really about all the ways a product can fail. This becomes statistical in nature and a single reviewer wont necessarily find those issues.
I find amazon reviews are still fine. Read the worst reviews read 3* reviews to find all the worst things. Use 5* reviews to get an idea.
They do have some basic algorithm that weighs each review/reviewer. The average shown isn't a raw one. Some reviews count more than others. Then add in fakespot.com..
Yup, easy returns are a big benefit, and keep me from completely abandoning Amazon, for now.
However, for some categories, such as batteries or electronics, even after examining all the negative reviews and rates, I've found it impossible to get non-counterfeit products. I'm happy to go to a regional specialist in such items or even to a big-box store just to get greater confidence in a genuine item.
(&yes, don't even think about getting 18650s on Amazon. I saw someone selling boxes with a Tesla logo & brand - obvious BS. I reported it and at least did see them disappear in a week, but another popped up.)
I have regularly purchased multiple items on Amazon with the intent of sending back my least preferred option for about 3 years now. I had the occasional return before that as well.
I worked in a big box retailer a couple decades ago. They had metrics that showed them every time a customer entered the store it was worth $50. This created a huge incentive to handle returns, since just being in the store “made them money” even if they walked out of the store without buying anything.
I don’t know how well this translates to best buy, since they probably don’t have the same really large purchases skewing the average up, but I’m positive returns are a net positive for them using similar metrics.
I paid for college working at a big box store 20 hours a week in the 90s, about 50% of commissions were trolling the return line and selling to those folks.
For Amazon, I don’t think it’s that way… you mail them a return and they don’t cross-sell, many times they scrap and sell by the pound.
A product that has lots of reviews shows customer engagement and Amazon knows this. I'm certain those products get tons more sales because people naturally gravitate to what's popular. I just bought a small storage cabinet that had no reviews and no customer data on it. I hate to say it, but I'd probably be a bit more comfortable if there were tons of fake reviews as illogical as that sounds, but this particular one was the exact size I needed.
I'm also the kind of person that goes straight to the 2-3 star reviews. I want to know the issues and determine if it's just sour grapes (damaged on delivery) or something I should be concerned about. When I was browsing step up converters, I found some amazing reviews at the 2* levels... like engineers that picked the product apart and determined they were wired wrong and might be a fire hazard. Sadly these types of reviews get buried and often ignored by the worthless deluge of 5* reviews.
Yes this. Even worse I've noticed these new business entities are getting even better at pretending to be real businesses with websites, contact forms, pictures of buildings, and "about us" pages written in pretty poor english. I just searched for hose the other day and the first few pages of brands were: amayrose, JOOIKOS, Zalotte, Amazon Basics, Hooshing, FOXEASE, HAUEA, Knoikos, TUNHUI, POYINRO, HIYUTOY.
The second one gets caught for fake reviews, just put the name through another random generator and back up.
Trust is eroding, but every time we try and use an Amazon competitor we come crawling back. When do viable alternatives emerge?
Amazon has billions of dollars in profits. That they don't spend a small portion of this on curating their seller base tells me they see the fraud as something that helps them.
Or that Amazon can't move beyond their startup mentality of growth uber alles. Perhaps the best move at this point is not to continue their existing approach, and redefine their storefront to something other than a nicer Aliexpress.
'This makes me wonder why Amazon, in all their analytical genius, isn't cracking down on this when it's so blatantly obvious.'
Cynically, turn a blind-eye to misdemeanours of third-party sellers so long as there is data to be mined. Gradually replicate best-selling merchandise through your own-brand labels and then slowly dispose of the third-party sellers whilst retaining evidence of how they were systematically breaching the program terms in order to mitigate any chance of a class-action law suit.
I also think there’s an element of balancing investments and returns. If Amazon is missing out (or “losing”) $50 million per year from eroded trust, then they should invest $49.9 million in fighting the fraud regaining that trust. But they need not invest more.
> These aren't to be confused with the indiscriminate idiots who can't be bothered to use their brains, who leave mindless reviews such as "This is junk but it was cheap and kinda works... 5 stars!" Right.
I wouldn't say that they were indiscriminate nor not bothered to use their brains. One of the all too often seen things is a card for "leave a 5 star review and get a $10 amazon gift card" in the package.
Yes, its part of an effort to get 5 star reviews since the sorting of the product on amazon is more important than the text in the reviews below the fold. Yes, that's unscrupulous on both the buyer's and the seller's part.
But it is not indiscriminate or brainless on the part of the reviewer. It's selfish.
And yet! And yet, like Google, Amazon now prefixes my search results with "Amazon's Choice" or some other marketing crap.
Man, I remember when you could trust reviews, search for an item, filter anything below 4 stars and get a decent, reliable list of products to choose from. You felt like you had some of the best damn kitchen knives your budget could afford.
> These are then immediately followed by a 1 star review along the lines of "This is the biggest piece of junk I've ever bought online. Will be returning to Amazon. DO NOT BUY!"
Sometimes I wonder about even these ones though - they could have been written by those with a competing product being sold on Amazon.
Companies are amoral, they will usually only do something if there is profit. Amazon has no reason to crack down on fake reviews because they don't effect their bottom line either way. They want people to buy stuff using their site, they don't really care what it is they buy as long as they keep buying. There isn't a viable alternative so competition isn't the issue. So they can get away with a lot before people choose to leave.
> Amazon has no reason to crack down on fake reviews because they don't effect their bottom line either way.
For various things (certain electronics/peripherals, certain tools) I deliberately avoid Amazon because I want something I can trust and don't have energy to decide which of the fifteen similar-looking things on Amazon is well-made and which is a fake or just crap.
I don't buy very much on Amazon anymore. Mostly name brand stuff that isn't often counterfeited. Guitar strings, books, moisturizer and such. It is still very good for grabbing random widgets (I just bought a knob puller for my guitars). Other than that I mostly order from places that I know stock quality product. Sur La Table for cooking stuff comes to mind.
The problem comes when you don't know. I needed a new battery for my Dyson vacuum - out of stock at Dyson, but online has a lot of third parties for half the price (and often more capacity) - but what do I trust as real? I ended up at Amazon because they will probably ship me something and if it doesn't work I have a chance to return it. I was tempted to try that Vietnamese company directly, but how do I know?
Trust is how you know. I trust Target, Best Buy, whomever, to sell me an actual Dyson battery. I’ve never had any problems with any company not taking an online return (except once with Amazon charging me for a replacement for a ~$10 item they said was delivered but wasn’t). Amazon doesn’t really stand out in that regard these days.
That Vietnamese company with the 3x capacity:price ratio is probably selling junk. There are just so many more junk sellers (at least by name—maybe a handful operating all those names). So it boils down to taking a gamble when the odds are against you, getting lucky, and building a relationship or going to a retailer you trust already.
Those I trust that would sell me the battery I need are buying from Dyson and so out of stock. They also charge 2x for a smaller battery. I'm left with janky brands: either from amazon or from janky companies.
I've had great luck in these situations buying from a small company that filtered out which cheap brands were good products. However I already have some other reason to trust those small companies.
I've mostly switched back from shopping online to shopping in local retail. If you're actually stocking shelves, instead of just running a digital flea market, you have to be choosy about what you stock. There's a ton of value in having someone filter out the trash and buy from reliable sources. I'm happy to pay more for that service, and usually I can get the item same-day since I'm already there in the store. For example you may have a local vacuum/appliance shop who has a direct relationship with Dyson and so can buy genuine parts on your behalf, or even have them in stock wholesale.
There is a lot of truth to that, but it only applies where a local retailer stocks what you are interested in. There are a lot of parts that can't be got locally. There are a lot of hobbies that can't support a local store.
I've long since stopped buying anything from Amazon except the occasional book. You can't trust reviews, but you also can't trust that the product you think you're buying is what it says it is. It doesn't really bother me that I "can't" buy from Amazon, there are lots of alternatives these days. There are even more local options than before.
Often I will use amazon for research/discovery and might actually buy direct from another site which has a better price - gear for music in the UK for example.
You also can tell low quality products for the poor English/Grammar and knockoff similar brand names.
Amazons search really sucks quiet often a long tail search term will return product that in no way matches searcher intent.
I always found it interesting how bad pricing is on Amazon for music gear. I assume they know that musicians will go to established shops (shout out to Sweetwater) and that people just getting into it won't know any better.
I agree with your overall point, but I wanted to comment on this:
> Companies are amoral
This is presented as a truism, but it is not true. Companies can be as moral as they wish to be. One of the reasons we have found ourselves auctioning off the arms and legs of American industry to China is this race-to-the-bottom mentality of "it's just business" that prioritizes short term profit over the long term viability of a company. Yet those companies have lobbyists, marketers, and advertisers, which they use to fight expensive battles in the marketplace and regulatory forum. Some companies even have the benefit of being under the same ownership umbrella as a venerated newspaper or popular cable news network.
Morality doesn't dissipate into thin air just because a few people throw their lot in together and try to make money. Apart from having financial incentives to do no harm to their customers or areas of service, companies have the capacity to make decisions based on reasoning about what is right and what is wrong. There is no fiduciary duty to do harm for the sake of profit.
> These are then immediately followed by a 1 star review along the lines of "This is the biggest piece of junk I've ever bought online. Will be returning to Amazon. DO NOT BUY!"
I really wish Amazon expose return rate for each product. That would be better indication of customer satisfaction.
Also I wish there was not such a stigma against returning products. That would be a good way to drive bad players out of business. A few times when I returned something I apologized too much but store employees said that I am doing them a favor by returning it because this is how they determine what to stop selling in their store and prevent shier people from buying junk products.
I've spoken to Amazon sellers. They are forced to accept even the most ridiculous refund claims, because at the slightest smell of trouble, Amazon will ban their accounts. It's scary how their algorithms can literally ruin a persons livelihood.
I don't see why sellers should be worse off then buyers on Amazon, seeing as they're both customers.
There always will be certain percentage of people who will take advantage of return policies. I am sure at Amazon's scale, they can detect abusers easily. Most people hate to return stuff, and I think retailers take advantage of that, in general. That's why you see obvious lies in advertisements. Tesla's Autopilot mode? If society accepted returning defective or subpar products, then I doubt retailers will over-promise or sell subpar products.
Another option might be no returns at all. This way buyers will need to do their due diligence before buying and less likely to impulse purchase crap. Probably better for the society as a whole. Also things will be cheaper as retailers will not need to account for any returns.
Maybe the reason they aren’t cracking down on it is exactly because of their analytical genius?
I’m not sure how Amazon operates in the US, but in Northern Europe it’s main target very clearly isn’t the informed customer, but the people who’s next step is going on one or the Chinese sites like wish. Maybe having a lot of fake reviews is simply better than having few reviews for their target audience? Hell, half the stuff on Amazon.de is resales of things that are clearly imported from China, so maybe Amazon’s role is simply to broker these wares in a manner that’s not as prone to getting the buyer scammed? Or maybe shit reviews is just better for sales than no reviews?
What's the problem with the Chinese sites? Whole large businesses are based on simply buying on them and reselling offline... Yes they sell crap, but these days, everyone sells crap. It's just a difference between poorly advertised cheap crap and well-advertised expensive crap.
I think that's exactly their point: Amazon uses fake reviews to make the poorly advertised cheap crap look like well advertised expensive crap. Therefore, you're more likely to trust Amazon instead of buying the exact same product from Aliexpress.
> I usually search for reviews written by people who have had the product for a week or two and give the pros/cons along with a less than 5 star rating. That helps me avoid the fakes and the idiots.
Might only help somewhat with the fake reviews. From the "Avoiding Detection" section:
"Fraudulent businesses give reviewers specific criteria to follow to avoid detection on Amazon. These criteria are designed to present the reviews as legitimate. In this ElasticSearch server, vendors asked reviewers to wait a few days before publishing a review. They also request substantial reviews that are longer than just a few words, and may even outline certain details that should be included in the review."
I've also seen cases where items have been poorly reviewed but only because according to reviews section the people who bought the item were all incapable of using it correctly.
I saw an amazon review of someone complaining that a drill bit they bought got bent drilling through a brick. The picture they provided showed quite clearly that they had severely damaged and bent a brad-point drill bit (which is meant to be used for wood). The bending can also be explained by the fact that these drill bits are usually nowhere near as hard or brittle, presumably because if you ever try to use a drill bit intended for drilling through metal to drill wood you will quickly find how easy it is to snap it when it's in a thick bit of wood, and people don't usually drill deep holes in metal without a drill press to keep the drill going straight.
Oh, and the worst part of the amazon experience has to be the number of "Answers" to "Questions" where the answer is just: "Sorry, I don't know the answer."
They just straight up PayPal you money to change your negative review. Trick is once they pay change your review back and say they paid you but Amazon will likely remove the review at that point.
One way to fix is to only allow verified purchases.
Amazon also needs to remove the ability for sellers to request reviews be removed.
Amazon also needs to be less strict on negative reviews. Right now it doesn’t seem there’s any moderation on five star but if you put 1 star they really don’t approve them much. Most of mine have been declined.
They need to stop sellers from taking over older product pages or switching what product a page is sold on. There’s this common scam where they will sell a legit gizmo and get high reviews them swap it for the junk scam item. No idea why they let this happen as it seems so obvious but who knows.
Also need to really ramp up moderation of third party sellers. Start being picky about what they allow to be sold. Anything sold in the sad card category needs to be manually verified.
I always like seeing the most recent reviews since it can sometimes show that people have started receiving knockoffs or that there's been a rapid change in quality of a product. The most helpful review is like months to a year old so it sometimes doesn't accurately reflect the product anymore. Some people really are just idiots and either purchased something very cheap expecting high quality or they give high ratings for a product when they outline serious flaws in the review.
I usually don't buy random junk off of amazon all the time like some do so when I make a purchase, I already know exactly what I want and it's something totally necessary.
> For example, a product gets a lot of 5 star reviews stating that the buyer bought it for their child/relative/friend and they are just sure that they will love it... 5 stars! Or "I just got this delivered yesterday and I haven't used it yet but it looks really great!"... 5 stars.
Exclamation points are the giveaway in most fake reviews.
The same goes for Glassdoor. The more exclamation points in a 5-star review of a company, the more likely it was written by an HR person or the CEO.
Another suspicious element is the extremes of 1 and 5. At best its a 'you either love it or hate it', at the very least it is controversial. Amazon could flag it as such.
Don’t forget the one-star reviews for shipping problems. “Arrived broken because the box was smashed in half” is still marginally more useful than “arrived three days late”. They’re both irreverent when comparing the products themselves.
For that matter, buying USB charging hubs is a nightmare. The reviews are identical on every single one: there’s always at least one who overloaded theirs and complained that their house burnt down.
I’m not sure any of this is obvious.
I have observed my relatives leave reviews just like the one you described as fraudulent. They are older folks who don’t get what the point of reviews is. Sometimes they will leave reviews like: „cheap and arrived in 1 day” which completely misses the point of what product reviews should be.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t be so sure that „this is complete junk” review is genuine or perhaps comes from the competitor who wants to hurt the rating of the product.
Just like sarcasm is really hard to detect in an online forum, even with human intelligence, and having some conversational context, I think determining reviewers true intent is really really hard.
> This makes me wonder why Amazon, in all their analytical genius, isn't cracking down on this when it's so blatantly obvious.
It's probably one of those situations where it's obvious, but not provably so.
It's like when you pass a huge pile of random bike parts in a pile next to a homeless encampment: it's 100% a bike chop shop, duh, anyone can see that...but you can't prove that it's a chop shop just based off of what you saw, so police can't take action without substantial further investigation.
It's easy enough for us as to consumers to spot fake reviews, but can you prove that they're fake just because they're repetitive or awkwardly written or whatnot?
I brought a product from Amazon and returned it since it’s defective. Posted a 3 star review, which I thought it’s fair.
For the next two months someone from the seller company constantly sent me emails offering a $30 gift card to me to change the rating to a 5 star. So those “it’s trash...5 star” are probably people being paid to change their initial review.
I’ve thought about taking their money but added in a statement in the review that the 5 star was a paid request from the seller, just to screw their practice a bit. But stopped fearing that Amazon might ban my account.
> For example, a product gets a lot of 5 star reviews stating that the buyer bought it for their child/relative/friend and they are just sure that they will love it... 5 stars! Or "I just got this delivered yesterday and I haven't used it yet but it looks really great!"... 5 stars.
That doesn’t sound necessarily fake, that just sounds like humans being humans. You see this in many reviews on other sites, as well.
Not saying they’re not fake, but my understanding was that the fake reviews usually go through a little more effort than that.
> These aren't to be confused with the indiscriminate idiots who can't be bothered to use their brains, who leave mindless reviews such as "This is junk but it was cheap and kinda works... 5 stars!" Right.
What's wrong with that? If you buy a pair of headphones for 2$, you simply can not expect good sound. But if it works well enough to hear what you need to hear, this sounds pretty fair.
I got $15 bluetooth headphones from a r/buildapcsales post, everyone in the comments said it would sound like shit, but I've been using them for over a year and I couldn't be happier. it's got noise cancellation, battery lasts for close to a week with my heavy usage, and it's got really good quality. Maybe just to me, but I'm young, so my ears shouldn't be that degraded yet. But I have gotten pairs for my friends and family and they are all happy. Sure, they aren't XM4's, but they are literally $15, and I have gotten way more than that in value.
Objectively, I’m sure they aren’t great quality. You just don’t seem to care, which is great for you, but also doesn’t make your advice givers wrong. Have you ever tried $200 headphones to compare? Also you go back and forth on they are quality and they are only 15 dollars so what should I expect.
I didn't expect much but they sound great to me. I have tried XM4's and other higher end headphones but not for a long period of time (just a few hours). But I know I'm not that bad at determining quality so they are at least pretty decent.A
The PayPal reimbursement thing has been going on since Amazon changed their review rules a couple of years ago.
If you ask me, the new Verified Purchase shill reviews since the rules changes are worse for shoppers than the shill reviews with disclaimers (which were always easy to spot and ignore).
It's a good example of "be careful what you wish for".
Looking at 1* or 2* reviews often says much more than total * count. But of course, sorting is often possible by total * only. Maybe sorting items by least amount of 1* and 2* would help.
If you were going to write a fake review wouldn’t you praise the item instead of just writing one that makes you sound like an idiot who doesn’t get the purpose of a review?
Perhaps but if you’re paying you probably want it to be credible (the article describes vendors coaching people on what kind of reviews to write). I find it pretty plausible that people writing “bought it as a gift, haven’t gotten it yet!” kind of reviews are probably genuine.
In the pre-Internet world there would be someone at the store who would a) do a checkout of the product prior to listing and b) evaluate customer returns and act upon them, in order to protect the integrity of the store. Delivering crap would lead to consequences (in the worst case de-listing) for the vendor.
Amazon doesn't do either - sellers are allowed to put up basically everything that's legal to sell somewhere on the world (including propaganda materials for all kinds of questionable groups including right-wing terrorism), and they don't care at all about complaints from customers about fake products or shoddy quality.
They only seem to care when big media representatives short-circuit the system and raise a stink at the PR team.
It's gotten to the point where a product with thousands of reviews and an average 4.5 - 5 star rating immediately raises a red flag with me.
And Amazon appears unmotivated to do anything about it. As a personal example, I had purchased a mouth guard that had over six thousand 5-star reviews. It was listed as high quality, FDA approved, etc. When I received it, it was a piece of plastic junk with inkjet quality instructions in English and Chinese. Along with it came a note promising a $10 Amazon gift card if I left a 5 star review and emailed them proof of it.
I took a photo of the note and forwarded it to Amazon expecting some action - instead I received a canned response about "we take these issues seriously". A year later, that seller is still there with dozens of products, all with thousands of 5-star reviews.
For what it’s worth, and a little off topic, I would never ever purchase a product that went in or closely on my body from Amazon. Jacket? Maybe. Food? Not likely. Mouth guard that sits in my mouth for hours every night? Absolutely not, no, ever.
Too many fake products that look like they’re the real things, and if they’re fake who knows where they come from or what they’re made of.
yeah, it's fucked up that it's come to this but I'm the same way. I don't even really care about reviews anymore on amazon. I just don't believe the star rating.
Reviews with pictures seem better, or like reddit reviews if it's a brand name.
I've started putting these pictures in a review and then give an honest review. This will allow people to decide what to think of all the reviews, including mine, and whether or not they're willing to accept the risk.
I canceled my prime subscription right after receiving something similar
It's just not worth it anymore to buy something on Amazon only to receive a counterfeit and then have to order the same thing directly from the manufacturer anyway; something something poor man pays twice
Aw, man. Here I am working my ass off for The Man when such an easy, obvious, and apparently unchallenged grift is just right there in front of my face:
1. Find some cheap-ass white-label product and order a crap-ton of it.
There is a whole industry around this...and I'd say you (and I) were many years too late. Once you find a good product others will come for it. If I find something "cool" on Amazon I check Aliexpress. If it's a significant savings I'd just buy it from there.
I don't think most of products they sell are actually legal to be sold. If you had these products in your mom and pops shop, the trading standards or whatever agency would shut down your store, but somehow Amazon is allowed to sell all this dangerous junk without consequences and they are even allowed to avoid paying tax. Something isn't right.
I've had a follow up for more information about a specific incident, but I haven't been contacted with concrete results of my reports.
I figure, if anything, my reports might influence investigations or prosecutions later down the line, along with evidence and reports gathered by others. I don't really expect anyone to reach out to me unless they want my testimony, and at that point, I'm sure there are better people they could drag into hearings or court.
Last year, I posted a negative review of an inexpensive (~$10) electronic device on Amazon. A few weeks later, the seller contacted me with an offer of a $20 Amazon gift certificate to take it down. I didn't respond. A few days later, they offered $30, then $40, then $50.
I've also received around ~10 of these same emails offering increasing prices to remove my review.
Maybe this is a good investment opportunity? I'm joking, but they did offer me almost twice the price of the product itself, which is interesting.
Something also curious is that the seller initially sent emails starting with with "Hi, [my sister's name]". Her name was not associated with my amazon account at all, and definitely not the name shown on the amazon review. I wonder where they are retrieving the names from for this.
I was offered a 50% refund for a terrible action camera. I took it (I'd relegated the camera to monitoring my greenhouse, so it was worth keeping at 50% off for that purpose), and they began reminding me to correct my bad review every few days. It started out with typical broken English telling me they were grateful for the opportunity to serve me and resolve my bad review, please go set the review to 5 stars.
Now I get messages asking me to please fix the review because they will get in trouble for refunding me and not getting a 5 star review, and they thought we had a deal. Sort of coercive, urgent language.
Those get taken down, with the motivation that they’re reviewing the seller, not the product, and should be on the seller’s page instead (where no one reads them).
As someone that helps clients with their Amazon stores, this is not a surprise, what is the surprise is that so few people know about. Review scamming has been an issue on Amazon for a very long time and each time that Amazon rolls out a new method of combating it the review sellers simply pivot and keep right on rolling.
The hardest part for a lot of smaller sellers is that with enough negative reviews you can have your account locked or even cancelled and there is nothing (not much) you can do about it, just like dealing with a Google or Facebook lockout. There is no recourse for most people.
The same review scam issues exist anywhere where reviews are a thing. imdb, yelp, google...
Anecdote: just before the pandemic me and my SO searched for a Sushi place one day. Found one on Google, 4.7 star average on 500ish reviews. Should be good, right?
Nope. It was literally the worst restaurant experience of my life. Nobody was inside. Weird location. The menu screamed "run by cheap assholes trying to scam you". It's always a huge red flag when well over 100 menu items exist and all are from different Asian cuisines (BUT authentic Chinese restaurants will still be amazing despite 700+ items).
Hungry, we still sat down and ate and dear god was it bad. I will spare you details. Some weird Indian dude pretended to service us, food was worse than gas station sushi.
So what happened? We made the mistake to just look at the summed score and not the reviews. It were obvious paid Indian reviews and bots. So obvious that I was angry at myself for the stupidity not to check more closely and angry at Google to allow such bullshit on their platform.
> My guess would be part of his negative experience was on him being a negative person.
Maybe you should stop accusing random people on the Internet of pretty grave character issues when all that is stated are factual circumstances which I won't apologize for. I can also just randomly assume that you are some white knight seeking validation by defending ephemeral descriptions of people you have never met.
It just happened to be Indians in this case and idk under which rock you live, but shitty restaurants trying to ride the hype wave of certain cuisines isn't a new thing. Getting served sushi by an Indian by itself doesn't mean shit but in combination with all other factors it matters.
It must be tiring to jump at shadows of racism all the time. He mentioned it because that's what he was. You can't get any more generic of a description then someone's gender and race.
It's usually not necessary to mention someone's race. Nothing objective is added here because we know the server is Indian. The author is expecting the information to carry specific negative connotations with the reader, and just to make sure he adds that the server was "weird".
He doubles down on making sure you understand that Indian = dishonest by mentioning fake reviews, that were surely created by Indians. Maybe they were, but that is not materially important to the situation. Fake reviews can just as easily be created by Americans, or Japanese, or literally anyone on Earth.
I understand that people like you tire of hearing your thoughts and ideas challenged. It's part of the reason the world is becoming more polarized. People would rather stick their fingers in their ears and say everything is okay, rather than face the problems that exist in society. I hope you remove the fingers some day.
How exactly is mentioning that someone is Indian the same as disparaging Indian people and equating them to 'bad'. Why exactly does it matter if it matters if he's Indian. Why is race suddenly not okay as a descriptor in any scenario. Or would it have been totally fine if it had been an amazing experience and a "nice Indian man". Would that be equating Indian = good and thus also disingenuous and harmful because bad people exist?
If he was directly insinuating that Indians are bad then I'd agree with you. Being Indian is simply a supplementary detail to the story. It didn't have to be Indian, didn't have to be a sushi restaurant, didn't have to be Google for reviews. Does mentioning a sushi restaurant make it insinuating that sushi restaurant = bad and thus not okay. What details are okay and what are not. If it's just the race then what makes his race in a totally different category to all other descriptors used in the description. Please be specific
I've always wondered why Amazon didn't take a "collaborative filtering" approach to reviews -- basically take your ratings and then give you recommendations based on others who tend to give similar ratings. It seems like this would mean that the scammers would mostly just give their nonsense reviews to other scammers.
"Was this review helpful to you?" Maybe there should be a concerted effort of "people" to start clicking "No" to that question on obvious fake reviews. There's already sites tracking bad reviews, so "borrow" their list, create some bots, and start negating fake reviews. ??
This is one thing that I think YouTube gets right. Once a video has been posted and comments have been posted, liked, etc, you cannot change that video in any form. This is on the premise of avoid bait-n-switch to put of a video to garner the positive response and then swapping it out with a different video. Amazon should do something similar.
I don't thunk that would work with physical objects very well. Especially when recalls are done via serial number. Apparent identical physical objects are always fundamentally different from each other unlike data.
I reviewed books regularly on Amazon years ago and made it into their top 10,000 reviewers list. Ever since then, I regularly get emails from Amazon sellers asking me to review their products. Before Amazon introduced the "verified purchase" system, they would offer to send me the product, now they ask me to buy their product and they'll refund me on PayPal.
I still get a few emails every week, even though it's been years since I reviewed anything and I'm now reviewer #1,263,485.
Edited to add: I think it takes into account how many people vote your reviews as helpful. I got a lot of helpful votes because I received books weeks or months before they were released (I had a book review blog) and would post reviews on the release date so they would be one of the first reviews up.
Skimming a hundred or so reviews from first few of the 10,000, every review is five stars, posted at rates of ten or more per week.
So to the fakery professionals, it’s an industry leaderboard.
To you and me, who have need to spot fake reviews, it’s a singularly valuable sample of what to be on guard against. So thanks, Amazon, for clueing us in to just how rotten your system really is!
If Amazon cared, it'd be trivial I think to make a bunch of honeypots which would get such emails and penalize the sellers that do stuff like that. But that's a big "if".
I've used ReviewMeta as well, however I find the issue is that almost every product has suspicious reviews. If the average rating was 4.8 on Amazon, RM might lower it to 4.3 but they would also do the same for competing products.
I guess maybe I'm lucky in that I've never considered a product with blatantly fake reviews, however I also recognize that in order to compete even legitimate companies need to "play the game".
Yes. A great many product categories are so filled with scammers that if you reject the ones with bad scores on Fakespot or ReviewMeta you'll end up with nothing. Which could be an argument for shopping somewhere other than Amazon, except that you might only find one or two stores that have The Thing and then you'll have no information on how good it really is. It might even be the very same thing you looked at on Amazon, or you might fail to find it elsewhere at all. I've ended up buying some real clunkers IRL too, and found some unexpectedly good stuff on Amazon.
"Caveat emptor" was a saying long before the internet, after all. No matter where you buy, you're taking a bit of a risk and should try to manage it however you can. I still use ReviewMeta, and often follow where it leads if there's a distinction, but I also think we have a lot of work to do applying what we already know about gaming-resistant filtering in domains like this.
Honestly, the reviews are a big reason why I use Amazon. Even if I know most of them (or all of them) are fake, I feel safer buying from Amazon when a product has hundreds of reviews, compared to an online store like Walmart which may have zero reviews for the same product. It's stupid, but there's a part of my brain that likes seeing those numbers I guess.
I wonder if there are any middle man review services out there that can offer product reviews to online stores, along with proper moderation.
If I see a product on Walmart.com I want to buy, but there are no reviews, I'll usually search for it on Amazon just to see reviews. But once I'm on Amazon, they usually have the better price and free 2-day shipping with Prime.
One test is to search for something that's obviously a scam: '2TB flash drive'
You know these are scams because SSD chips with a high enough density to get 2TB in a keychain form factor are going to be cost thousands. When they're advertising $40 or $50, it's likely a 64GB drive with a controller that fakes the available storage.
Run some of those listings through FakeSpot and ReviewMeta to see how they do at identifying scams.
These days I DDG/google the product name I'm interested in and look for no-name forums on page 2/3 where people post at least a picture or two and an honest review.
I'm 50/50 on affiliate links, but tend to trust them more if it links directly to the manufacturer's webstore.
And you support the extortion of sellers who are suffering quite a bit. If everyone would use Amazon, the world soon would be enslaved by one single retailer offering the lowest wages on planet earth with zero to no respect for human rights.
I use 5* ratings to get an idea of which products to look at, but I mainly look at 1-3* reviews to see if I want to buy it.
I personally had a ton of amazon basics batteries leak in the packaging after 2 years of storage. I posted that review and amazon rejected it saying it didnt meet their community guidelines.
That made me distrust the review process and now I generally wont buy amazon branded products. However if there are bad reviews that tell the same consistent story and that go into enough detail, then they are likely not competitor plants.
> I use 5* ratings to get an idea of which products to look at, but I mainly look at 1-3* reviews to see if I want to buy it.
Yep, exactly this.
Who cares what people that were happy with it think, generally. Hearing a few use cases is helpful to decide if it's fit for what you're trying to do, but it's generally very useful information. If I buy this I don't care all the ways it will make trees greener and shiny things shinier, I want to know if I give them $100 what is the _worst_ experience I will get.
Look at the negative reviews and see what kinds of issues people were having. Usually after skimming 5 or 10 you can get a pretty good feel for what kind of experience you are going to have.
> "These headphones that say 'for iPhone' and clearly show a lightning connector don't work with my Android! They should really say they don't work with Android! Garbage!"
> "I tried to use this blender to start my own 'will it blend' YouTube channel and when I put rocks in the blade got all chewed up and the company won't replace it! COMPANY DOESN'T STAND BEHIND THEIR PRODUCTS! AVOID!"
> "These $0.50 pens aren't half as good as my co-worker's $80 pen. Why bother."
> "Said it would get here Friday but it got here Monday, and UPS threw it over my fence and broke it!"
> "Ordered this desk chair and parts were missing!"
When the negative reviews are largely stuff like that (bought wrong thing, misuse of product, not understanding that cheap things are cheap for a reason, carrier issues), you know you can basically ignore them. The last one (product issues) kinda depends on whether there's a million of these, but generally if it's one or two and they don't say that they've tried to contact the company to resolve it I'm not too bothered.
When you start seeing reviews that explain (1) an actual issue with the product; (2) attempts to contact the company and/or get a refund; and (3) a poor response from the company... that's when I get worried. A few like:
> "Product arrived, of the ten included, only 4 worked. I contacted the seller and two weeks later they still haven't responded."
> "Product is very cheaply made. The first one worked for a week then the foo broke. The seller sent me a replacement, but then that one broke 2 days later."
None of this is surprising. I’m very sad to say this, but the internet of today, for all of its sophistication, sucks compared to what it was, and all the promise that it held, 20 years ago.
I wholeheartedly agree. If you want to depress yourself further, think about how much potential for good we squander on the web in terms of medical information.
If we had designed the internet differently (eg: with considerations for privacy, authenticity, verifiability) we could pool resources and have millions of people report on medications, treatments, nutrition, etc.
If a regular person uses the web we actually have today to do their own health research, they're playing dice with their life.
I recently got spam that said that if I purchase a product for 1/2 the price (reduced via a link in the email), AND then I put a review of the product, they will give me a refund for the 1/2 price I paid. I reported this to Amazon, and Amazon replied that the email was not doing anything wrong. I didn't do this, since the commitment to pay back the 1/2 I paid was not guaranteed.
This is good to see hard evidence of a scam that has for many years been obvious to anyone who bothered to look -- Amazon reviews in any non-obscure category have been fake for years, and there are multiple startups/services working to mitigate it, e.g., Fakespot [1], which are definitely helpful.
Now we get to see if Amazon is actually just really bad at filtering a bad problem, or really just DGAF as long as the fraud drives sales and commissions.
What we should see is wholesale delisting, banning, and prosecution of vendors, and banning and selected prosecution of fakers. What will we actually see?
I'd think Amazon would care when people abandon them because it is just too hard to find anything real, but the level of fraud on there indicates that Amazon prioritizes other metrics. When a few figure it out, it doesn't hit the traffic & sales numbers much. When many figure it out, it is likely too late. Did Bezos exit while the exiting was still good?
Wow, the scale of this surprised me. Made me wonder, do these services offer both positive and negative reviews? That is, if I want, can I get 5 stars on my stuff, and then also pay for 1 star on my competition?
"In total, 13,124,962 of these records (or 7 GB of data) have been exposed in the breach, potentially implicating more than 200,000 people in unethical activities."
I don't find the fake reviews that important when I make a purchase. I know they are there. I know 95% of my Amazon search results are absolute trash. You get what you pay for. If you don't do your research, and think a $50 speaker from HWAROMA is going to be as good as a $250 Celestion because of reviews, that's kinda on you. Believe it or not, some people will want that deal because that $50 speaker might get them through a show in hard times.
You do have to do research on everything you buy. User reviews are still a part of that research, just not nearly as much.
If you google info on what you want, you KNOW at least the top 25 results are all paid for in one way or another, probably more than that now.
Don't expect a corporation to watch your back. Amazon has made clear they give NO F's about the average human using their services, as long as they keep using it.
It's common to receive a counterfeit brand-name product from Amazon, because anyone can fulfill a product by sending it to an Amazon warehouse. Lot's of counterfeits make it in. Netflix even has a docuseries about it[1]. Research doesn't help there, since you're getting a counterfeit instead of the quality product you researched. Yelp is even worse than Amazon, with reviews tied into their business model[2].
Am I the only one not particularly bothered by fake reviews?
Because there's a button for "Helpful" on each review, and the most helpful reviews more or less generally get voted to the top -- and there are almost always some really long, in-depth ones.
I don't even pay attention to star ratings anymore. I just read the top 10 reviews and get a pretty good sense of what specifically is good and bad about the product.
Even without fake reviews, star proportions were never that useful in the first place because they're not a random sampling of users, and people are way more likely to leave a review to complain than to praise, so it's biased no matter what.
I'm sure it could be in theory but it doesn't seem to be in practice.
I think the logistics would just be harder -- it's relatively simply to put a leaflet in the product advertising "leave a 5-star review, then e-mail us and get this bonus product/warranty/whatever."
Whereas to locate a specific review to mark "Helpful" would need to be via e-mail with a link to a specific review in question, coordinated across several of them, with so much volume that it outweighs the naturally "helpful" ones. I don't know, but I've never seen it happen.
If I were an unscrupulous seller, I'd write a nice review myself, pay a stooge to post it, then pay a bunch of other stooges to mark it helpful repeatedly for the next six months from different IP addresses. I don't think it'd be all that hard but then again I've never tried it.
I'm with you here. I tend to read a few reviews to determine if I should give a new product a shot. If somebody takes the time to write a 250 word review that has some pros and cons and include some photos, I'm going to trust that review. Many products you can find a handful of reviews like this which is all I need to make a decision. If I'm caught between two products, I'll order both and return the one I don't like (make sure they have free returns). Works pretty well for me.
Same thing with counterfeits which people claim are rampant on Amazon. Either I manage to avoid them or they're very good counterfeits, in which case I wouldn't care.
I think the problem here is that the products that aren't cheating on their reviews will get ranked lower. So although they're perfectly fine products, if they drop to the second page of search results you might never actually open them up to read their real human reviews.
You can still read the real detailed reviews on the products you do look at, so you'll avoid buying a lemon, but you will be preferentially buying from review cheaters.
The problem is much deeper than that for sellers. Enough negative reviews can end your ability to sell on Amazon. Add to that, reviews are part of the ranking algorithm, positive reviews will play a role in where you place in a product search.
> The server contained a treasure trove of direct messages between Amazon vendors and customers willing to provide fake reviews in exchange for free products. In total, 13,124,962 of these records (or 7 GB of data) have been exposed in the breach, potentially implicating more than 200,000 people in unethical activities.
This information should be made public.
I'd love a browser plug-in which displays a warning when viewing a product from a vendor in this database, that the vendor has been known to pay for reviews, and likewise if viewing a review by someone in this database, a warning that the reviewer is a shill.
And 2 weeks later, the guy will resell stuff from another account from different paid reviews. Which are also always evolving to capture consumer trust. Works especially well for products in usd 1k range.
I have always wondered why "verified purchase" is a thing. That should be the default and only way to review. May be when they were little it was needed, but now they already know who is adding the review, they can easily check if the user bought that item in the last X months and only allow in that case. The rest of them can't add reviews, simple.
Often it's quite easy to spot these fake reviews. I mean a 10 $ USB-C cable with more Amazon reviews than e.g. the PS5? Sure. The popular "name brands" must really like this as these scammers ruin the collaborative review system for everyone, so people will put more trust in brand names again.
Another funny thing are all the new brands that pop up on Amazon (at least in Germany). They're often picked to sound vaguely familiar (e.g. Orfeld) and trust-inspiring, and their product pages portrait them as century-old companies. Often the products they sell are sourced from whitelabel manufacturers, so you have 20-40 brands offering the same product (for wildly different prices), maybe with some small variation in packaging and color.
Interestingly, some new companies like Anker have managed to build up a good "brand reputation" in 5-10 years, probably also due to the fact that they're no longer at the bottom of the trust chain.
The funny thing to me, if you think about it, is that nothing really changed, it's just become more transparent.
It's for decades, if not arguably always been a bunch of bullshit marketing for meaningless labels slapped on imported knock offs of questionable quality that you just hope they sample enough of for QA to keep the factory from slipping turds and razor blades into some of the boxes.
> I mean a 10 $ USB-C cable with more Amazon reviews than e.g. the PS5?
That seems like a bad example. People are having a really hard time getting PS5s, and probably 50%+ are scalpers that don’t care about writing reviews. And cables are produced and bought at a much higher rate than video game consoles, anyway.
Cables are an interesting example because they are so inexpensive and easy to produce, I can't imagine any one being much better than the others. Especially when they're all within 10-20% in price.
I used to agonize over finding "the best" but then I started to realize how much time I was wasting. Just find the cheapest option with the length you want and call it a day. Same goes for most things on Amazon.
A few years ago, I closed my Amazon account partly because I felt like the company was a net negative for society. And I haven't missed it, even in the past year. I guess it's kind of similar to social media in that respect, you feel less like a clicking/buying machine and it's pretty nice.
I once bought a product from Amazon India, the manufacturer had literally printed on the product, that if I give a 5 star review and send a screenshot on Whatsapp they'd give me X cashback. I outed them on amazon reviews, and amazon decided to not publish my review.
I love Amazon as much as the next guy but I do think they are doing something....just the other day I got one of those "free 5G" phones from T-Mobile and thought about getting a case for it...well I got a $5 case on Amazon and when the item arrived it had the nice little card about "leave a 5 star review; we mail you a $5 Amazon Gift Card"...well cheap ass me tried to provide my review (I had already installed the case) but the site did not allow me to submit a review for the first 2 days after I received it...so I guess this is some sort of deterrent right? It did the trick for me, I'm happy with the case but I haven't bothered to try to submit a review again
This has become a serious problem on IMDB as well. It's common, almost the norm for small releases, to have a flurry of reviews right at release giving ratings of 8 or 10 out of 10. They'll have glowing comments about how the director made such effective use of a shoestring budget, and so on. And then a little later this gets followed by a string of 1- or 2- out of 10 reviews, saying it's one of the worst movies ever and the high reviews are obviously shills.
For larger movies, or over a large enough timespan, the noise eventually gets drowned. But it's made IMDB reviews useless for deciding whether to watch new movies.
Reminds me of the nightmare that descended on Steam when they opened up Greenlight to nearly everyone. Great in theory, but in short order the service was drowning in low effort garbage, asset flips and downright scams. Eventually they had to up the barrier of entry a little again just to get some sanity back. Or just look at the wasteland that is the Play Store on Android. Any marketplace that's globally accessible needs to have curation and a high barrier of entry, or it will be spammed to death by these people. Of course, Amazon has no motivation to fix this, being a monopoly. They get paid either way.
Not sure if this helps much, but I try to avoid buying from marketplace sellers. This is partly to avoid my personal data being shared with yet another company (it's been misused by marketplace sellers in the past) but also in the theory (hope!) that Amazon themselves will on average buy better products. After all, they have their reputation to maintain and have to deal with all the refunds if they sell shoddy goods.
Increasingly though, I'd rather just shop from a retailer that specialises in a particular type of product and has invested in their reputation.
I'm with you here. I only buy from Amazon itself, or, if looking for a specific item (eg. a known brand, or a product with 'offical' reviews found elsewhere), the manufacturer's. It probably reduces the risk of fake/knockoff/garbage products. I also feel (not sure about that, though) that the customer support would be better should there be any issue with the delivery or the product.
The main issue is that all ratings systems are essentially mathematical garbage, with voting incentives heavily skewed by actors who want to sell or disparage a competitor. The masses are the collateral damage. But even in an honest "fair" voting schema how does my neighbor harbor the same sort of values and beliefs in a product as I do. Just like opinions, ratings are inherently subjective and relative to one's own value systems.
Some prefer cheap, quick and dirty solutions whilst others prefer durable and long-term solutions.
It's not an Amazon-only issue. Many services, even Google playstore, is replete with this kind of _infestation_. There are many perspectives here.
(1) One can hope to combat this with technology and processes. But the number of people consuming the service versus the actual number of people and systems employed to safe guard customer trust is quite high.
(2) Understand the kingdom of humanity. There are always good/bad actors. The line that divides good/bad is also quite fickle. But we need more "good". We need to discuss this more.
I think it is easy to be cynical and easier still to say, "Just fix it, nerd," but trying to detect collusion between two parties when you do not control their communications is quite difficult, especially when their associations will be only fleeting.
For example, you could disallow changes in star ratings, but that would also prevent people from rating something only to change their minds when it broke three months later and you've lost useful information that way.
You could make sure all communication goes through Amazon, but that only counts for email. The seller has your physical address and therefore can offer you gift cards to change your mind, via a postal offer.
You could hide the names of reviewers, but then you risk losing the trust metagame where there are reviewers people trust.
You could allow only the verified purchaser of a product to comment, and only once, and that makes "review bombing" of competitors expensive but not impossible.
I imagine you would need a good outline of all types of different "fakes" (I am sure multiple sorts exist) and scams, then find the nastiest game theorists available and discuss what could and could not be done. The more I think about this, the more Amazon Marketplace morphs into Amazon Escrow.
How do (relatively) smaller marketplaces avoid these problems? ex: steam allows reviews from people who got the product for free, and all the reviews tend to be far more trustworthy IMO, both in detail and aggregate. Is this because the economics of the market's products is different (plus easy to refund)?
At least for me the best part of Steam reviews is that I can easily check reviews done by my friends / online gamer groups. By restricting the web of trust so a smaller batch of entities, I know I am avoiding most of the fraudsters.
Dumb question: if you un-tethered reviews to user profiles (or removed user profiles all together), wouldn't this problem go away, or fall drastically?
If amazon could give me the scores from verified-purchasers, show me anonymized comments from verified-purchasers; I think I'd be ok.
> These Amazon vendors send to reviewers a list of items/products for which they would like a 5-star review. The people providing the ‘fake reviews’ will then buy the products, leaving a 5-star review on Amazon a few days after receiving their merchandise.
> Once the Amazon vendor confirms all reviews have been completed, the reviewer will receive a refund through PayPal, keeping the items they bought for free as a form of payment.
I'm surprised the article does not mention tax evasion and money laundering. Those are surely bigger hammers than whatever would come from the FTC or GDPR.
I don't understand why folks (here) are so up in arms about this? It's well known.
It's pretty easy to spot fake amazon reviews with very little effort, and buy accordingly. Also, no matter how tempted I only buy directly from amazon and never from their 3rd party sellers; just for easy returns. So on the off chance I get burned, the product goes right back. It's not that big a deal. It's not like I was going to independently find the best product on my own, without the help of amazon, without some trial and error.
Maybe I'm too much of a sociopath. Allowing fake reviews is great. It vastly increases amazon's footprint, making sure that the things I buy are and remain easily returnable. Scammers gonna scam. Let them.
It's also easy to spot incompetent users that leave 1 star reviews due to their misunderstanding of the product. Or 5 star reviews of blu ray before it's even released. That kind of thing. You know, you have to actually read the reviews ok? It's not too much to ask, honestly.
You cannot police this kind of thing to any reasonable degree and maintain cost/performance ratio where it "needs" to be. Maybe it's a little too loose now, but any improvement is going to be modest plus it will breed better scammers.
I really rue the death of flash. It was sooo easy to filter flash and ignore the drek. Now where are we? I don't consider these fake reviews to be a problem; indeed they are a benefit. Keep them easy to spot, please.
I have to say that in retrospect, it seems fairly pathetic that back in 94-95 we (Jeff, Shel and myself) did not even think about how the review system would eventually get gamed with this level of "sophistication".
I think if you had told us then that this sort of thing would eventually happen, we would not have believed you. This goes to show, perhaps, that imagining the significance of something when you're first building it is almost impossible. The notion that worldwide manufacturers and distributors would consider it so important to have "strong" amazon reviews that they would engage in this kind of behavior just would not have crossed our minds back when amazon itself had no significance.
So if you're building something right now, maybe stop and ask yourself "ok, so how does this all look if we end up taking over the world 25 years from now, and this thing is a gatekeeper between a lot of people and a lot of revenue?"
>So if you're building something right now, maybe stop and ask yourself "ok, so how does this all look if we end up taking over the world 25 years from now, and this thing is a gatekeeper between a lot of people and a lot of revenue?"
This is a fair concern, but I'd say that if you're building something right now, I think is better to worry more about getting your startup in a position to take over the world first and then deal with those concerns. Worrying about these big problems when you're small I would say is a bit of premature optimization.
If we had known in 94 that customer reviews would eventually get gamed in this way, should we ever have added the feature? Was 15 or 20 (?) years of a "working" review system enough to make it worthwhile, and now it needs revisiting, or should we just have said "no" right at the start?
No review system would be even worse as you cannot even tell if people are getting crap. There is already ceasesless whining about false positives being an abuse of power and in the same breath complaining about not doing enough.
The "do nothing ever without the foresight of a precog or else you are EVIL!" school of ethics never made any sense. It is just an excuse to be outraged and pin all of the world's problems on the tall poppy.
I wish by law Amazon (and other stores) were forced to show country of origin of the products.
Last week I needed to buy a new kettle and this was a nightmare to find a product that is not made in China (for ethical reasons). It should be as easy as selecting a country you want a product from - instead you have to go through each individual listing, look through photos or answers. Sometimes it is easy to find where product is made by just looking at description (e.g. broken English), but some sellers go out of their way to mask where things are made. As a consumer I should be able to filter products I don't want more easily.
Then when you order a product you get these cards that say if you leave a positive review, you'll get a discount or free product.
If you leave a negative review, you can brace yourself for being bombarded by Chinese companies threatening you in various ways to delete the review.
Amazon needs to sort this out and if they cannot do it, regulator should step in.
edit: here we go again, something negative about China and commment is being downvoted. Can Hacker News do something about Chinese bots?
You broke the site guidelines badly with that bit at the end. Please review them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Note the one asking you not to go on about downvotes, and the other (much more important) one asking you not to make up stories about astroturfing, brigading, etc.
There's zero evidence that you were downvoted by "bots", and that sort of fantasy swipe is off topic here for very good reason.
There seem to be laws around having to put the "made in ..." on the product itself, it shouldn't be hard to put that on the online product description as well. I'd be for that. It's not an anti-[any country] thing, I'd just prefer things that are made close to where I am.
Made in x is a fundamentally misleading metric with anything of complex supply chains and international trades. Thanks to old pissing matches there is tarrif induced inefficient stupidity of "almost finished goods" which are shipped and then "manufactured" by doing token last steps domestically just for tarrif avoidance.
Transparency is a kind of regulation though. One that I think we sorely need. Along side anti-basic anti-trust and some small protective tariffs for countries that don't have good labor standards.
Much of the cost of stuff made in the first world is the cost of having a first world regulatory framework and workplace protections.
Sure, and the anti-regulation or anti-tax guys still demand that police protect their money and goods - so I can't understand when the anti-regulation fanatic is saying that free market will eventually solve this , transparency is too much of a burden or danger.
These are then immediately followed by a 1 star review along the lines of "This is the biggest piece of junk I've ever bought online. Will be returning to Amazon. DO NOT BUY!"
These aren't to be confused with the indiscriminate idiots who can't be bothered to use their brains, who leave mindless reviews such as "This is junk but it was cheap and kinda works... 5 stars!" Right.
Most times this trend of 5's followed by 1's is seen even in the first page of reviews. It's a serious problem with the platform. I usually search for reviews written by people who have had the product for a week or two and give the pros/cons along with a less than 5 star rating. That helps me avoid the fakes and the idiots.
This makes me wonder why Amazon, in all their analytical genius, isn't cracking down on this when it's so blatantly obvious.