Are Amazon Seller Ratings Trustworthy? | Hacker News Reader

Are Amazon Seller Ratings Trustworthy?

makingstrange.net

49 pointsspxdcz16 comments

I don't know if this person's complaints about the way Amazon treated his negative seller review are representative. If true, it's very shortsighted because it will hurt Amazon if their customers find that highly rated sellers consistently give them bad service.

However, he should also ask for a refund directly from Amazon (under their A-to-z Guarantee). Amazon is very good about giving refunds, even from third party sellers, and doing so would probably put more pressure on the seller as well. The guarantee specifically says:

"If a seller has clearly misrepresented the condition or details of an item in a way that affects its value or utility, it is "materially different." In such cases, that seller should be willing to offer a refund or exchange when contacted within 14 days of receiving the item."

I think that this is probably a fluke. Amazon is not in the habit of sacrificing long-term values such as their reputation for a short-sighted gain.

Jeff Bezos has explicitly claimed this in similar situations in the past:

"Indeed, some of the most important things Amazon has done have seemed like tactical losers to established companies who were looking at the short term. But Amazon has always been fixated on improving the consumer experience regardless of conventional wisdom, according to Bezos’s comments in HBR: 'In the very earliest days (I’m taking you back to 1995), when we started posting customer reviews, a customer might trash a book and the publisher wouldn’t like it. I would get letters from publishers saying, ‘Why do you allow negative reviews on your website? Why don’t you just show the positive reviews?’ One letter in particular said, ‘Maybe you don’t understand your business. You make money when you sell things.’ But I thought to myself, We don’t make money when we sell things; we make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.'"

http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/02/25/how-amazon-innovat...

Let's hope they stay "not evil".

I do hate that Amazon seems to remove negative reviews so easily (I think the same goes for book reviews as well) but I also wish that people would only leave a negative review after they unsuccesfully tried everything with the seller. It seems like this person order the wrong product (though the description was accurate, so this was not the seller's fault), waited a few weeks for a refund, but never communicated the not-arrival of the refund and his frustrations with the seller.

The seller sounds really unprofessional, but many of us here have businesses that sometimes screw things up and I am glad when people let me know when I do, instead of shouting on the internet that I suck.

> [...] but I also wish that people would only leave a negative review after they unsuccesfully tried everything with the seller.

As a consumer I don't want to try everything with a seller. So even less warrants a negative review. (Though some good-faith effort is OK.)

You are right, that was put too strongly. "Make some effort to allow the seller to make it right" is what I should have said.

That pretty much means that most Amazon ratings are bullshit.

It means that all Amazon ratings are potentially bullshit.

There's no way to generalize from one user/seller experience to all of them, but the fact that we don't really have evidence to the contrary definitely does sour the whole experience.

I generally avoid the third party sellers just because I like to use super-saver shipping to save money, but I'll go for the third party if the item is hard to find or the deal is amazing.

Precisely.

I'm sure this isn't wide-spread, but it still very strange behaviour from such an established company. They take down the negative reviews at the drop of a hat, but it takes a mountain of effort to get them re-instated (in fact, they haven't even been yet).

And the worrying bit seems to be that they don't even know their own published policies on the matter: if you don't follow/know your own policies, what's the point in having them? Is it all hot air?

It's also a bit of a worry from the sellers perspective that they can't afford to get even one bad review. I guess this has come about because all the sellers are trying to hard to prevent negative reviews that even one puts you back compared to others.

It's important to point out that this is reviews of the seller, not the product.

E.g. if you buy an item from a 3rd party seller on Amazon you can leave a product and a seller review.

If you only buy from Amazon on Amazon then this issue shouldn't affect you (although others might).

Er, I was pretty clearly talking about buying from third party sellers, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

"That pretty much means that most Amazon ratings are bullshit."

That is an insane overreaction. Amazon has a long-standing reputation of excellent customer service over millions of transactions. A singular error on their part should be examined in that context. You'll find that their response invalidates your claim: http://www.makingstrange.net/2010/03/update-are-amazon-selle...

There's now a followup blog post at http://www.makingstrange.net/2010/03/update-are-amazon-selle.... Amazon contacted her and offered the usual story (it was an inexperienced employee, various people screwed up, the issues involved have been escalated), and she's giving them the benefit of the doubt.

I'd just like to point out that this:

>they are far more concerned with keeping their (sic) Sellers happy (sic) then their customers.

is based on a mistaken premise. The customers of Amazon are the sellers. It's the buyers who the author wants to claim are being screwed by Amazon. Sellers are where Amazon makes its money (unless you happen to buy directly from Amazon).

I'd like to see more than one data point before coming to any conclusions.

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