Amazon bans incentivized reviews tied to free or discounted products | Hacker News Reader

Amazon bans incentivized reviews tied to free or discounted products

techcrunch.com

452 pointskjhughes244 comments

FINALLY!!! You can't buy a single tech accessory on Amazon without these fake reviews.

Next they need to get rid of grouping reviews for different product versions.

They also need to ban merchants from hounding me to review their products. One of them even called me on my phone. I don't know how they got my number.

Some shipping carriers require a phone number, so I believe that Amazon transmits your ship-to phone number with the explicit requirement to use it only for logistics purposes. I'd complain to Amazon for a seller who used the number for any other purpose and certainly for one who called me for a review.

I'm in England.

I'd be calling the Information Commissioner as well.

Amazon provides the phone number for all orders. It's whatever phone number you have listed on your account, or saved on one of your delivery addresses.

Sellers are supposed to use them to fix order-related problems, and can be helpful for the case when a customer does not respond to emails (such as when you've provided an invalid delivery address).

Your phone number is on Amazon shipping label too

> Your phone number is on Amazon shipping label too

Probably for shipments shipped from an Amazon warehouse (sold by Amazon, or Fulfilled-by-Amazon/FBA).

For our own labels, we print our company phone number, and that's fairly common for many ecommerce companies (although certainly not all).

It protects the customer's privacy, and in the event there's an issue with delivery, it's best the carrier contact the shipper (us) anyway.

Whether your phone number appears on the shipping label is variable. Based on the 5 fulfilled-by-Amazon (sometimes sold-by-Amazon) packages in my hand, it appears on all the Amazon-as-trucker packages and neither of the USPS packages. I suspect the rules are even more complex than simply "what carrier", but it clearly varies.

Look again closely at your Usps labels. May seem like random numbers but it's there

If it's not on the label, it's in the system.

Some folks generate their own custom labels, and may omit things like that. The data is still sent to the carrier during the "End of Day" task (or equivalent) in whatever shipping software the shipper uses.

Alright. I can only speak from what I see. Thanks.

It's really not there. (My phone number is in the 617 area code.)

http://static-s3.sokoloff.com/random/amazon/IMG_1880.jpg

On other labels it's after the "DF3..." ID.

That's a custom label (ie. not stock from USPS), and is likely generated by the shipper's shipping software.

Apparently they chose to leave that field off the label, but it's still sent to USPS by the software.

The seller on that particular order was Amazon.com LLC; the box was an Amazon box, closed with Amazon branded tape and mailed USPS.

I have one simple rule: unless we've seen each other naked, or you've paid me money, the only phone number you get when you ask me for my phone number is the number of a pay phone at a gas station in Forks, Washington that was torn down a few years ago to make room for a new highway.

If you give your cell phone number out to random companies on the Internet, then yes, you can expect to get spammed. What in the world makes that seem like a good idea to so many people?

So you give fake phone numbers to your friends?

He's actually a nudist and so are all of his friends.

Obviously some judicious exceptions are made on occasion, but never without thinking through the consequences.

And yet you'll give them your address so they can send you a package hopefully containing something you want.

Spam my mailbox all you want. That costs you time and money, not me.

We all like to joke about mailbox spam, but it's certainly a serious issue - and the worst part is there's little to zero incentive for USPS to stop stuffing our mailboxes full of garbage.

As long as the junk mailer companies pay their postage, USPS is more than happy to deliver the junk to you.

I don't have any data, but I'd wager junk mailers are a sizable portion of annual USPS revenue...

I don't think this is right... I've been selling on Amazon for years and have never seen buyer phone numbers. I just logged in, and it doesn't show it when viewing an order on the site, nor does it come through in the order management software I use. (In case it matter, I'm talking about Amazon.com not one of the non-US ones, and I have a Professional seller account.)

Edit to add: If there really is a way to get the buyer's phone number, I'd love to know. Some shipping methods need a phone number, and thus far I've always just put my own in when this happens since I didn't have the buyer's one, and hoped it didn't matter.

It previously came through the MWS order API. My custom order management software would pick it up. So you could only get it if you have a professional account.

However, I believe that amazon has discontinued the practice of giving out phone numbers as of early 2014 to sellers due to some idiot sellers harassing their customers.

But if you have someone's name and address, there is a decent change you can find it by googling their name. Especially if they have a land line.

edit: Yes, I also logged in just now and it does in fact show phone numbers. Not sure why I stopped picking them up through the api. They may have changed the field name. Also, it is strange that there are multiple complaints about not being able to see buyer phone numbers any longer in the seller forums. I think maybe they went away for a time and are back.

I just logged in, we can still see customer's phone numbers. Maybe it's because we have an olderish account? We're on V2 of the Order Manager pages in Seller Central...

Edit:

> Also, it is strange that there are multiple complaints about not being able to see buyer phone numbers any longer in the seller forums. I think maybe they went away for a time and are back

Amazon experiments with Seller Central a lot - it's possible some people were getting phone numbers and some weren't for a long while. We also signup for many of their "beta" programs, so perhaps that makes a difference...?

Weird. I definitely haven't seen phone numbers in our Pro account in 5+ years. I'll have to see if I can pull it from the API, but there's definitely no where on the site that shows me phone numbers.

I'm unsure why you don't see them. For us, it's on most order pages right below the customer's address. I've just always assumed when it's not there, the customer didn't provide one. Most seem to have a phone number, however.

We have a Pro account as well, and we see the phone number both in Seller Central as well as over the API (we currently are using a MWS API version from 2011, if that makes any difference).

Regarding putting your own number on the package - that is what we do with 100% of our shipments from our warehouse, and we've done it that way for more than a decade without issue.

The phone numbers are supposed to be mainly used for when there's an issue with delivery, but in our experience the carrier never calls (although it would be nice if they did sometimes... but I digress). We even put our phone number on international shipments (where I'd expect the most hassle due to customs), and never had an issue.

Of course, YMMV...

Can't talk about the US, but my local carrier sometimes calls when he doesn't find the right door.

> They also need to ban merchants from hounding me to review their products. One of them even called me on my phone. I don't know how they got my number.

I would consider phone calls out of bounds. Did you complain to Amazon customer service about this?

No. I didn't know it was a violation. I did sternly tell them not to call me again, and wrote a negative review.

Even if its not a violation of a TOS I suspect complaining to Amazon will help address this issue. Remember Amazon's core value is customer obsession so they strive to make you happy. Don't hesitate to let them know when you are unhappy. :)

Huh, I can't say I've ever even seen one. Perhaps I don't dig deeply enough into reviews, but I'd think these reviews would bubble up to the top.

I've been getting that, too. I understand why they do it, but some vendors are definitely more aggressive than others.

Anecdote: I purchased a dog hammock/cover for the backseat of my car last year and the straps melted over the course of the summer. The company replaced it for free, then emailed me every other day about updating my review... definitely before it'd gone through another summer, but even before I'd actually set it up in my car. I don't feel that a merchant holding up their end of their "lifetime guarantee" obligates me to update my review of their product (though I intend to once I'm satisfied that I've actually used it enough to warrant an update).

Anecdote. I bought a dinosaur costume for my toddler son for Halloween, they sent me the wrong size but I didn't notice until Halloween, it sort of worked anyway. Later they hounded me for a review. After five or so requests, I replied saying I wasn't going to leave a positive review because they sent the wrong size. That was all, I didn't ask for anything or leave a negative review.

They sent me huge rant about how I couldn't have a refund and what their return policy was.

Retailers are shady despite people most of the time.

Retailers are shady... but so are the customers too.

Source: my SO worked on phone support in her last two jobs, one was selling old books on-line, the other selling various appliances. Man, you wouldn't believe the horror stories I heard from her every other day. Having a phone number seems to somehow attract the worst subgroups of humans to it.

hope the dinosaur costume was awesome, though

> Next they need to get rid of grouping reviews for different product versions.

This is huge. It seems to be a common tactic for companies to get a product's rating up to 4.5 stars, then replace it with a lower quality version. I notice only when I filter for the most recent reviews.

There been many occasions where I didnt buy something because of this very reason.

> It seems to be a common tactic for companies to get a product's rating up to 4.5 stars, then replace it with a lower quality version

What you are likely seeing is not a seller "pump-n-dump" scheme.

Rather, it's more likely another seller came along and "attached" to the good listing - except they are selling a knock-off product of worse quality. Often these sellers are from overseas, but not always.

Amazon rotates the "Buy Box" (the "Add to Cart" button) winner on a "percentage-share" basis - meaning if there are 5 sellers attached to a listing, and all stats on the seller accounts are equal (volume sold, number of positive feedbacks, account history, etc...), then each seller will get 1/5th of the buy box time. When certain sellers are "stronger" than others (meaning their stats), they get a larger percentage of the buy box time. You can see this sometimes if you refresh the page several times while on a product page. The "Sold by xxxxx" may change.

So, it's likely some cheap knock-off seller has attached to a "hot" product listing, and simply based on Amazon's Buy Box system, they will get a certain percentage of sales. Unfortunately, this can ruin a perfectly good listing for the other sellers who sell the legitimate product, and is difficult to combat.

It pays to pay attention to a seller's own feedback rating. Not just how many stars on average, but more importantly the recent 30 day trend for their feedback ratings, as well as the number of total feedbacks, since it will give an idea of seller volume (most sellers average about <10% of orders leaving order feedback, and usually <1% leaving product feedback - my company has sold on Amazon for the past 7 years, and we seem to stay right in line with what other sellers expect as well).

Exactly. I tend to filter by critical reviews (with the default sort of recent) and that often gets the noise down to a manageable level.

I think this is a slightly different issue, which first entered widespread public discussion in the SSD market.

Basically Kingston (I think?) and a few others released a new SSD and used very high quality components in them, so that they exceeded advertised specification. After the early-adopter reviews came in with the benchmarks and whatnot, they altered the build to use lower quality / cheaper components. When discovered and confronted, their argument was that the lower quality builds still met spec, so it was appropriate to sell it under the old model number and listings, but the upshot was that they got to produce low quality products while benefiting from reviews and benchmarks that were run against a higher quality product.

I don't think there's much Amazon can do about this particular issue... although yes it would be a great help if you didn't see reviews for the 900x version of something while looking at the 1x version page.

Steam handles that problem by showing two scores for the item (games in their case): the total score, and the "past 30days" score. This way you can see if something is going wrong recently.

I love that mechanic. I think it's a lot more in the forefront with things like software that gets auto-updated, where the publisher pushes an unfortunate patch, or fails to follow through on a promise which was previously given the benefit of the doubt. I don't think physical products have yet caught up to the idea that this notion is relevant to them as well.

The especially difficult part when it comes to reviews for physical products in that it just isn't sexy to benchmark an old piece of hardware. What makes the situation even worse is that most reviews aren't centralized (that is, you google "productname reviews") and so to a large extent the visibility goes to whoever publishes first. Your brand new benchmark announcement gets clobbered by the pagerank of the reviews that happened right when everyone was interested in the product.

I had long assumed that Valve added the "past 30 days" aggregate to show when games had improved rather than gotten worse. (i.e. early access games) Kind of interesting that it helps clarify changes in both ways, and implies very different incentives for the game publishers/sellers.

It's a poor argument and they are misleading their customers. You don't buy on the specification you buy on the reputation. If $creditable_reviewer says it's one of the best drives they've ever used, you are going to go for it.

When you buy the exact same product and end up with something that has substantially lower quality parts than what the reviewer had, you've been defrauded.

Edit: it hurts the reviewer too, as I now have reasonable evidence that $review_body is unreliable. If the fraud never comes to light, I may stop using they publisher's reviews.

Poor in what sense?

People were certainly mad about it, but the companies didn't have to face a lawsuit, so as far as they were concerned it seems like it was a great argument :-\

> When you buy the exact same product and end up with something that has substantially lower quality parts than what the reviewer had, you've been defrauded.

How exactly do you define "substantially"? No matter where you draw the line, you'll get people who will toe it and that will be legal. And in any case it's very hard to argue fraud when the company itself didn't tell you that the device was that good. You'd just get companies (rightly) saying that they aren't responsible for purchasing decisions you made based on things that third parties have said.

From someone like Amazon's perspective, it's also not reasonable to declare that absolutely no changes can be made to a product to keep it under the same listing, which is really the only way you can make this a black-and-white issue. It would also be doing consumers a disservice if every time a trivial thing changed (e.g. logo placement on the box, or the manufacturer adds an extra screw to make the body stronger, or whatever) the entire history of reviews and ratings got reset. So the best solution we have right now is to say "look man, don't be an ass"... and unsurprisingly, people who want to be an ass are more than happy to disregard this in order to make an undeserved buck.

There's another solution, which is that reviewers who find that their good review is being used to flog a substantially worse product (and in this case, the reviewer themselves gets to determine what is substantial) disown/update that review and/or refuse to review that manufacturer's products in the future.

that would require a lot of thought and tracking on reviewers part that I'm not sure most reviewers would care to do. Esp since it's for the benefit of others (amazon/manuf) and not themselves. If you pay them then you throw off the balance.

Also, it would be too late!

From a few things I've read, I don't think this is specific to Kingston. It's apparently pretty common for offshore factories to optimize for cost while keeping the product apparently the same.

There is a principal-agent problem. The company whose brand is on the line needs to be diligent about catching it in QA.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that Walmart will ask the manufacturer to build a special lower-quality version of the same item to keep costs down. So a direct price comparison can be misleading.

Yeah, I wonder if it's always the fault of the brand, actually.

I remember that during the FTDI fiascos[0] one of the often-raised complaint is that many vendors don't even know they're using fake FTDI chips, because it's the factory that decides to replace the genuine chip with a counterfeit to cut down on costs.

Then again, a cynic in me sees this as a plausible deniability scenario - the brand can always say that they didn't know about the component switchup, "it's that Chinese factory that did it, and we're investigating!".

[0] - FTDI supplies the most popular USB-to-serial chips, which are present in pretty much any USB-connected device you have; on two instances they released driver updates that detected and bricked devices with counterfeit USB-to-serial chips.

There's a fine line here between "counterfeit" and "clone". It's only a counterfeit if it's sold as a genuine FTDI part.

Gomorrah ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/0312427794/ ) has an interesting discussion of the workings of the fashion industry in Italy. It goes like so:

1. A fashion label invites a bunch of clothing manufacturers to a pricing auction. They all meet somewhere.

2. The representative of the label describes the clothing they want. The manufacturers bid for the contract, with bids taking the form "X many items within Y period of time at Z cost". For example, 800 items / 20 euros per item / 1 month.

3. Eventually, the brand will accept a bid. At that point, every manufacturer may commit to fulfilling it. Any manufacturer accepting the winning bid is given the material for free.

4. Whoever delivers first gets paid. Everyone else is left with a partially-complete order that they can no longer sell to the brand that commissioned it.

(4a. Manufacturers who show a history of accepting bids for the free fabric and then failing to deliver get blacklisted.)

5a. The brand sews its label onto the clothes it bought and sells them at "high" prices.

5b. The slower manufacturers may sell their too-slow clothes to the mafia, which sews a counterfeit label onto them and sells them at "low" prices.

So now we have the mafia selling "counterfeit" clothing that would have been "real", if only it had taken a little less time to create. The fabric and cut are to brand specifications because the clothes were made at the brand's direction to bear their fancy label. Would you call those clothes counterfeit?

Bose totally did this with their MIE line of headphones. I bought a pair right when they were introduced. They seemed very well made and I loved them. Sadly, that pair got stolen. The next pair was the same but... different. Several pieces just seemed flimsier, cheaper. The cord was a bit thinner, the plastic remote was creaky, earbuds felt were less substantial, etc. Melted that pair on a radiator, unfortunately. On to pair #3. Everything feels cheap, which is annoying when you spend $120 on a pair of earbuds. Cord leading from the remote to the earpiece is approximately the thickness of dental floss and breaks inside of 6 months. No more Bose for me.

This gets at an important point in the Lean Manufacturing philosophy. The typical business chases profits and works to reduce costs. But Lean businesses focus on delivering value while reducing waste. For your headphones, somebody was cutting costs without regard to value vs waste.

I think one of the reasons this is so common that anybody can cut costs. ("Your budget next year is 10% lower. Make it work!") But it takes thoughtful experts to discover and eliminate waste.

> It's apparently pretty common for offshore factories to optimize for cost while keeping the product apparently the same.

It's called "value engineering" and is commonplace in every business. It's like taking working code, and then optimizing it over time. Finding ways to cut costs goes on all the time, and it does not necessarily imply cutting quality.

If they are caught they could:

* Drop the product from the store completely.

* Put a Warning Misleading Listing stamp on the listing.

* Penalize the seller in the results.

Add a negative "age" score that slowly increases over time, like how reddit articles are ranked. This will bias the average ratings towards newer reviews. This can also be done in the algorithm that decides which reviews to showcase.

This may also be a third party seller selling fakes.

There are also Amazon listings where they have completely different products sharing the same page, using the UI that is normally intended for color/size/quantity selection. The reviews get mixed together and it can be difficult to tell which review is intended for which product. It would help if Amazon added fields to the review to indicate which variant the review was written for. Filtering would be even better.

Or just boot terrible sellers off the Amazon store and stop being AliExpress.

The problem is, the "terrible" sellers are back on Amazon the next day under a different name/brand.

So spin off a secondary site for the bazaar and protect the Amazon brand for selling quality stuff and only include the top-quality sellers on the main Amazon brand.

This is unfair to AliExpress. Unlike Amazon, they know better than to mix reviews for products from completely different sellers.

> They also need to ban merchants from hounding me to review their products. One of them even called me on my phone. I don't know how they got my number.

If you go into the "Address Book" in your account settings, you'll see a phone number listed with each of your addresses. I'm assuming that gets passed along to merchants with your order details.

I report any merchants who make unsolicited contact. It's extremely annoying/invasive, especially when they abuse your phone number.

Counterfeit / different products are a much bigger problem than fake reviews.

Fake reviews are fairly easy to spot because of the one star curve. Amazon can weight and sort search results accordingly, if they so chose. Amazon can add additional weights based on the user's history and using graph network analysis of that user's review distribution. Bad items don't necessarily need to be banned, but the negative weight can make the listings virtually invisible.

On the other hand, if the reviews are for a product other than what you are ordering, things get a lot harder. It is hard for a user to eyeball it, and perhaps equally as hard for Amazon to verify it at scale.

Prediction - AI plus high resolution imaging of the good at high speed.

> Amazon can add additional weights based on the user's history and using graph network analysis of that user's review distribution. Bad items don't necessarily need to be banned, but the negative weight can make the listings virtually invisible.

I cannot for the life of me understand why Amazon doesn't already do this.

It's entirely possible that they already are/ have looked at it, and found this move to be more strategically effective.

Ultimately, Amazon's goal is to maintain a strong brand and keep stockholder confidence. This presents a much stronger move without admitting as much weakness, compared to allowing the behavior to continue and trying to mitigate it with AI (since the layperson -- ie most stockholders -- has a poor understanding of the efficacy of ML techniques).

Additionally even if if they did, they are less incentivized to publicize it. Secretly diminishing the voting power of particular reviewers works just as well, if not better, if they don't know it's happening at all, and prevents creation of multiple accounts to avoid said penalties.

> AI plus high resolution imaging

Unless they are imaging every item sold I don't see how that helps. Unscrupulous seller uploads high quality images of the real item, and delivers counterfeits.

Conterfeits are the biggest reason I don't buy more on Amazon. I can't say I've ever received a counterfeit item, but the stories are so widespread that I always have that fear.

Counterfeits are one reason I like buying from Amazon: their refund process is painless and they're willing to foot the bill for the customer. It actually works painlessly.

So very, very true.

I'm actually aware of some large FBA players that intend to create thousands of new 'brands' in the next year in order to push their wares.

Even still, they'll get their reviews, policy or no policy.

Counterfeit is a big problem on amazon. They are growing way to fast and amazon cant keep up with customer support

Agreed, counterfeits are a bigger problem. Not least of all because when something is 'fulfilled by Amazon' they dump everything with the same barcode into the same boxes, including the counterfeits. I've bought headphones before, with Amazon as the seller, and they were fake.

I've only been called when I've left a negative review. At first, I was very annoyed but the company offered a free replacement or a refund. They didn't even ask if I'd update my review. One thing to note here was they were not the seller, just the manufacturer.

They also need to require manufacturers to publish a changelog for the product so we can tell if a product has changed materially since the positive reviews were first published. It's pretty much a strategy now to create a well made product, get good reviews and then cheapen the product.

> They also need to ban merchants from hounding me to review their products. One of them even called me on my phone. I don't know how they got my number.

Part of the shipping information, I guess. (I know it's "fulfilled by Amazon" but I guess the merchant gets that.)

I find it super annoying. I am not quite willing to go in and give them 1 star reviews for the outreach, but I have no qualms about marking the email as spam.

Regarding the review hounding, I use Google labs experimental feature to auto reply to such posts. If any emails match the domain (something.amazon.com) and have the word "review" in them they get sent straight to the trash and get an automatically generated reply telling them that I will leave them a one star review on both their product and seller account on Amazon and to not further contact me.

I haven't thought about it since I did that, and I can only hope its sending a message that harassing your users without consent for reviews is not acceptable.

That's actually a pretty egregious violation of Amazon's Seller policies -- if you report it to Amazon, they'll get their seller account blacklisted.

There's one or two power people in the Fulfilled by Amazon world who do podcasts/vlogs, and they were telling the people who subscribe to their podcasts to start stalking/tracking down the people who purchase their products and start calling them to ask for reviews.

Needless to say, it backfired when Amazon started cracking down on it...

Amazon encouraged this via giveaway scam.

The flip side is that I'd started using these as a metric of products to avoid; if a retailer is playing this game, while they might be legit like flavor8 claims in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12631810 it's just safer to avoid if at all possible.

Although in general spending a bit of time looking at the reviews, 1 start, recent ones, etc., with a finely honed for decades BS detector is what allows me to continue buying a lot of stuff from them.

I can't _stand_ the reviewkick sourced reviews, and there is a substantive difference between those and those from "product niche experts". The person who subscribes to reviewkick to "get free stuff" is building a profile to increase their value, so that they can get more expensive free stuff which they can in turn sell on ebay (or, I guess, hoard.) The reviewer who actually _uses_ the product, on the other hand...

Personally, given the choice between products I'll definitely avoid those with obvious fake reviews. I bet it's common behavior to do so among those who actually take the time to consult reviews, and I bet Amazon saw the writing on the wall via their analytics.

Amazon passes your phone number along to merchants, mostly incase there's any shipping issues. Amazon hides almost all of your information from merchants, but it does share your phone number.

I've been thinking about the review hounding on Amazon recently. I think the only way to make companies wary of soliciting reviews short of new rules and enforcement is if every solicitation carried a risk of the reviewer leaving what appears to be a legitimate review (not a diatribe) with a low score. Maybe creating low score reviews with text indicating the seller spams its customers would be enough.

Tech accessory. I couldn't even buy a Brush for my grill without wading through those fake reviews!

I sell a niche music accessory on FBA. I didn't have many reviews, and it was hard to gain traction as a result.

I found a very relevant subreddit and offered to send a sample to anybody who was willing to leave an honest review, up to 10 total. I got very enthusiastic responses, and sent out the samples.

Every review that I received from this group was five stars. I at no time asked for five stars, and was very explicit about asking them to be honest. Maybe my product is just that good, but I suspect there's at least a little bias there.

More to the point, every organic review I've received since has been five stars, which leads me to think there's a crowd effect going on.

I think what I did was a good deal less scummy that what ReviewKick et al do, since they explicitly find "good" reviewers for you, and the reviewers aren't necessarily knowledgeable about the product or niche. That said, even my targeted approach yielded a lot of bias.

For what it's worth, this exercise doubled my sales. I now effectively earn the equivalent of a full time minimum wage job through one tiny niche product, and an hour's work every couple of months.

> Every review that I received from this group was five stars

There is a certain bias effect to consider.

When you purchase something, your criteria for it to meet your expectations is a bit higher (subconsciously) than if it was given to you for free.

Also I suspect that people who leave positive reviews for products that they get receive more products to review.

In the review kick model, yes. For the folks interested in my product, not so much... They were niche enthusiasts.

Out of curiosity, what do you sell that takes you half an hour per month to manufacture but sells for enough to make a living?

Honestly it's easy enough to duplicate that I don't want to describe the product itself on HN of all places. :)

But I will say that FBA is very easy to get into. If you ever find yourself thinking "I wish that exists" about a relatively simple product, and can't find it already on Amazon, jump on to Alibaba and source a factory that makes something similar and ask them if they'll make what you want.

And there's the bit that makes me never want to get into FBA. Half the sellers won't even mention what they sell because their business is so indefensible that if someone found out and competed it would no longer be profitable.

Doesn't strike me as particularly sustainable. Especially if you have all your eggs in Amazon's basket given their willingness to take over entire product lines with their own brand.

This used to be my feeling too, but I changed my mind when I worked with a company doing just what you describe. They grew it to a 50-people company within 5 years. Initially I felt smarter than them and wondered how on earth they could have put all their eggs in the same basket in such a way.

Then I realized that with the money they had, they had been able to hire me to do this work, so perhaps I wasn't the smartest guy in the room after all...

The thing to understand is that capitalism is about identifying opportunities to accumulate the largest amount of capital in the shortest amount of time.

The truth is if you focus only on "logical", sustainable, defensible, infinitely scalable business models, you'll be missing out a good 60% of the opportunities.

If you could let's say accumulate $600,000 in 5 months with a non viable business, you'd have all the time in the world to work on the viable businesses you mention.

In capitalism, you rarely know for sure which game the other person is playing. It's not because she is moving cards around that she is playing cards.

So the bottom line of my comment is don't be too smart . Being able to make dumb money is as important - if not more important - than being able to make smart money.

And I can even say : making dumb money at the right time is more valuable than making smart money at the wrong time.

Fair enough on your main point. But I'll ask the obvious question... What stopped you or the other employees who understood how the business worked from sourcing the same or similar products and competing?

I won't mention basic things like non-competition clauses, honesty etc... The majority of people are usually honest - especially those senior enough to be exposed to this kind of secrets / overview.

But past that starting a business, especially a physical product one is not a trivial thing to do. You need to be very motivated. Like with software you discover many time-consuming details as you implement. And here not everything can be automated once solved. Even established competitors do not copy as fast as one may think because of these forces.

It might be dumb money but it still isn't easy money - and that's what make it even dumber : why not invest the effort in something "better" someone will say.

Great point r2dnb. This used to be my mentality as well and it hurt me.

I was looking for a "smart" business that was "worthy" of me. How could these people spend so much time on such an indefensible & unscalable process?!

Well, the joke was on me. My brother stopped consuming info and started Amazon FBA. And he does really well (full-time job replacement). Instead of waiting for the perfect idea - he executed.

Now I'm happily off my high horse and trying to follow in his footsteps.

Lesson learned - there is no perfect business. Get started with something simple and build from there.

Great article on this incremental approach for anyone interested: http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2015/03/26/the-stairstep-approa...

There's no such thing as a sustainable business. Every business is in the process of being commoditized (some are further along than others); in essence every business is an arbitrage (this thing can be done more cheaply than what it costs). The niche will exist for a while and then it will vanish. You can either make hay while the sun shines, or not.

It's a fair point, but as long as you "diversify your portfolio" it seems reasonably sustainable. And, the product is only as good as the effort you devote to sourcing...I went through a good half dozen factories before I found one with the options I ended up with on this particular product, and iterated on some of the variables for a few months before settling on what works well in practice. Somebody could duplicate what I sell, but unless you're also a user in this niche (as I am) you might miss some subtleties that make the product good. I have a couple more complex products that have been in "r & d" for the best part of 2016, and I'm still not close to market with them (if I was doing this as an actual full time job then for sure it would have taken less time). There's enough cheap shit on Amazon...I think it's worth doing the legwork to ensure quality.

https://www.reddit.com/r/guitarpedals/comments/4h2dy0/uflavo...

@dang. Flagging this comment for the same reasons listed elsewhere in this thread.

I don't think I'll take this seriously until Amazon stops gaming their own review system.

For instance, if you take a look at Comcast's rating on Amazon the have 4 stars, but if you click in and look at the breakdown 85% of the ratings are one star. The fact that this magically translates into a 4-star rating in Amazon's world is a huge issue.

If others want to see what they're talking about, search for "Xfinity Internet" on Amazon. It has a four star rating, but 90% of the reviews are three stars or less.

It doesn't make any mathematical sense.

I was in sort of disbelief so I had to look it up.

https://www.amazon.com/Xfinity-Internet-Mbps-12-month-term/d...

Yep. 4 stars with 85% one star ratings. Amazingly awful.

To be fair, there are certain categories that amazon weights differently based on the average rating of those categories. Some types of things are just always rated poorly. Maybe that has something to do with it?

Quoting...

"Amazon calculates a product’s star ratings using a machine learned model instead of a raw data average. The machine learned model takes into account factors including: the age of a review, helpfulness votes by customers and whether the reviews are from verified purchases."

But what is the machine learning to do? It sounds like it could be optimising for sales.

I actually mean that quite seriously - a machine learning system needs to have some goal to optimise for, sone way to tell whether the rating it produces is "good". In Amazon's case that is quite likely to be some measure of clicks or sales.

[Edited to remove typo]

I only buy from Amazon when the product isn't available anywhere else: Between counterfeit products, external vendors that I don't know how to distinguish from Amazon itself, stuff "Available in 2 days" that gets delivered 2 months later, bought reviews, strange ratings and pictures which don't natch the description — I have a 70% chance of paying the return shipment.

Sounds like secret sauce and not transparent. I really liked IMDB's rating scheme developed back in the late 90s - openly transparent but not a simple mean of rating values. Of course, back then they weren't part of Amazon yet.

Throwing a little bit more data into the conversation. Filtering to only the verified reviews shows 16 reviews:

8x 5 star reviews 1x 4 star reviews 1x 3 star reviews 4x 2 star reviews 2x 1 star reviews

Mean star rating of verified reviews: 3.5625

That's a lot closer to the overall star rating.

Disclosure: I work for Amazon Lab126 (not related to the retail website).

> Amazon calculates a product’s star ratings using a machine learned model instead of a raw data average.

A machine learned model optimizing what output measure? Ideally, a machine learned model for ratings should optimize for what I, as a potential consumer, would most likely rate the product were I to purchase it.

That's noble but it's going to be difficult to overcome the temptation to train their machine to produce the rating that gets the most sales.

Up to the point where it starts affecting their reputation or it concerns their branded products, Amazon doesn't care too much what they're selling, just in what volume.

The fact that they don't care what they sell is why you can mostly trust them to be trying for accurate ratings. If you can trust the ratings, you'll buy more of your stuff on Amazon. Boosting the ratings only changes what you buy (which we agree they don't care about) and leaves you with a sour experience.

There also appear to be satirical reviews. Consider the top one: 169 people found this helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars "Hitler highly recommends Comcast" Adolf Hitler was quoted saying this about Comcast: "Beeindruckend, das ist böse" Rough translation: "Wow, that's evil"

I heard that it's because Amazon gives higher weight to reviews backed by verified purchases. If you look closely, you'll notice that most reviews are from people who didn't purchase the product. I agree that it doesn't make sense in this case - Comcast is just evil - but the system seems fair in general.

Which is a bit disingenuous. So if I'm a Comcast customer my rating doesn't count unless I bought through Amazon. I honestly don't know anyone who's done that.

Amazon used to be the place to validate if something wasn't crap (and maybe buy it). Now it looks like they're not interested in that anymore.

Is there any product site that's not infested with secret-sauce ratings schemes and/or outright fake reviews?

I think it's more Comcast's fault because they're the ones who got listed on Amazon. The way I see it is Comcast is using Amazon's algorithm to mislead potential customers who just look at the Amazon rating. It's not Amazon's fault at all.

This is a glaring loophole that Amazon should address of course, but the system they have in place is fair imo and prevents trolls from affecting a product's ranking for no valid reason.

Its Comcast, I doubt they could get a good review simply from the piling on that many people do just to be part of the in crowd.

There are many products I do read from the 1 star up direction, but any company as polarizing as Comcast is not one to take most of them seriously.

In all cases just use your head, you cannot do much to help people who want to believe what they read. The only reason the system bothers me is that when it comes to sorts

Yup, the system is pretty broken, 4.5 stars is "pretty good", anything else is questionable. This is because the average is a mean, and the scale is 1 to 5 stars.

The average of 1 and 5 is 3, so 3, not 2.5, is a "mixed reactions" score. With two 1s and one 5 the average is 2. So if you ever see something with a two star average, run. With a single 5 star review, it takes 16 one star reviews to bring the average down to over star, to reflect the majority opinion.

I still don't know why we use scales to rate anything. It gives us the illusion of being able to compare two scores with each other. By dumping everything into a scale the only thing we know is: on average it might be good or bad. It doesn't tell us whether it's actually good or bad.

It makes far more sense to just ask a few yes or no questions with some context.

Did it deliver on time? Did the product arrive without damage? Is the product fit for purpose? etc

Different people value different things. With a linear score a good "attribute" that you don't care about might cancel out a bad "attribute" that you do care about since both end up in the same pot.

That actually looks like fraud of the kind that the FTC should look into. Just saying "the algorithm made me lie" isn't a good enough excuse.

Could it be that there was 'review brigading' against Comcast? I could see e.g. a popular Reddit thread directing people to leave poor reviews wherever they could, which might lead to some spikes of one star reviews that are then given very little weight for the overall rating.

Just trying to apply Hanlon's Razor.

Maybe someone should create a browser extension to calculate "TrueReview" scores.

So when you're on a Amazon product page click the TrueReview button to show alternate models such as average, average last 30 days, average after removing reviewers who disclose receiving a free product, etc

Keep in mind that this is more of a monopolistic move than a quality move; Amazon was already scrubbing for a while. 1. Amazon Vine reviews are still live and will still go live -- there's no more editorial quality to them than some of the other services. 2. This policy doesn't impact book reviews, where fake reviews, incentivized reviews, and review trading is most rampant. 3. The easiest way around the policy will be for vendors to get shadier and not offer upfront discounting. Instead, you'll see non-disclosed reviews where the reviewer is compensated for the product costs afterwards. If done properly, that'd be hard to catch.

As disclosure, I'm CEO of Intellifluence, which is essentially a marketplace for reviews (one supported platform of which is Amazon). We emphasize honest reviews and have been trying to fight some of the shadier players, but this policy move isn't going to fix things...it just is a move to push Amazon's own program.

Can you share any stats on the distribution of your review scores? I'd be shocked if it didn't skew positive to highly positive since presumably those who don't rate positively would find nobody wanted them to review or would stop using your service.

This came up recently: Article summarizing the embedded video "Data Proves Amazon Reviews with 'Free or Discounted Disclaimer' are Extremely Biased"

http://lifehacker.com/why-amazons-incentivized-reviews-are-b...

On that note, I'm sure this announcement will make for an interesting day over at ReviewMeta.

Searched to see if anyone here mentioned ReviewMeta. If anything, this will make their service even more important because the beauty seems to be in tying all the fake reviews together, not necessarily using these keywords.

Hmm. They actually may have a really good pitch to make to Amazon if they're even interested in being bought. If they have some really good models for detecting fake reviews (which presumably they do beyond disclaimer string matching), that might be a good investment for Amazon to make for enforcing their new guidelines.

True. I'm close to Tommy at ReviewMeta because we're "competitors" in the supplement space (he's a great guy), but I'm not sure what his end game is.

What's infuriating is that you know that Amazon has the talent and data to stop all the fake reviews. Makes you wonder why they allow it..........

I ended up installing the plugin after their video went viral, although I haven't used it yet to make a purchasing decision.

They could pivot to filtering reviews based on web of trust - users could be able to provide a set of reviewers they trust, or it finds reviewers a user has a lot in common with.

I don't review most Amazon products, mainly because I'm lazy. But I do like them. That means that if I were exchanging the product for a review, then in all likelihood it would be a positive review.

I suppose it is a bias even if that wasn't the intention.

The bias is that many of these people are serial reviewers that have been selected because of their willingness to leave positive reviews. They jeopardize their participation if they leave a negative review.

The quid pro quo is simple: leave positive reviews in exchange for more free stuff.

you can read results many way, including "this means that incentivized reviews makes otherwise lazy but happy customers, to leave a review."

Just to promote your link a little more incase anybody browses past it - the video in the post is very interesting, it was at the top of reddit a few weeks ago[0]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdLI62JKpCk

The video is a well produced and informative plug for a startup that produces a browser plugin to filter out incentivized reviews and to replace ratings with filtered ratings. The startup is ReviewMeta[1] - and you'd think they would be pivoting after this decision.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/53i2wo/i_analyzed_1...

[1] http://reviewmeta.com/

This is our story, We have been selling on Amazon since 2011 and about 5 months ago, some hijacker took over our listing and started selling smilar item but of lower quality. It took us 3 months for amazon to take action and got the seller kicked out of amazon. Basically he used of of those review services to upload over 1000 reviews with images to make it seem like they are the owner of the listing. We have been trying to clean up all this mess and we are getting no help from amazon.com . Here is a sample review of counterfeit product. https://www.amazon.com/review/R2X5VE3JT02KCU/ if you look at the listing, our product is totally diffrent.

Very interesting but I think there is something more at play here.

Look at the person who left you that review: SpilledInk788

She is "Stay at home mom" but she reviews over 30 products DAILY - some not cheap at all.

I suspect this is some sort of paid troll who writes positive/negative reviews (depending on the order/assignment) and post it online to whether boost someone's company rating or lower them.

No wonder she never replied to you.

How in the world will this new policy be enforced? I see only one possible outcome:

The reviewers who used to begin their review with "I received this product at a discount in exchange for a fair and honest review" will now begin their review with "I totally paid full price for this product and am a legit reviewer without paid-for bias."

Amazon already annotates reviews to indicate if the reviewer has purchased the product on Amazon.

The scheme discussed here involves buying the product, so Amazon can't identify these reviews as being incentivized (unless they track use of discount codes)

Of course they can, and have for some time: the "verified purchase" badge does not show up on reviews that come from an incentivized purchase.

first of all it is illegal to lie like that. so most reviewers will not do that.

also, amazon employs statistic engine (i am afraid to call it ai yet) and also a lot of humans who constantly monitor content (results of which goes back into stats engine)

so yes - they can enforce it on a global scale.

It certainly is not illegal to lie like that, or astroturfing would be illegal. Sometimes lawsuits arise from astroturfing, but the practice itself is legal.

You're wrong. Here's an example:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2016/07/warne...

Well, he's right in the sense that it's not illegal to lie - it's the companies paying the people who don't disclose who bear the liability.

I think it's a stretch to think most reviewers will care about the legality (especially because it's pretty unlikely to get enforced against them) but it may get the "career reviewers." I wonder what proportion of these reviews are from those "whales."

Every once in a while the FTC goes on a rampage and Amazon not doing due diligence to ensure product reviews it uses to sell it's wares poses too much of an organizational risk as its one of the largest targets out there.

I know from first-hand experience that as soon as you ask to deviate from a more or less standard workflow on leaving a review in exchange for a discounted product, MOST reviewers flock away. Of course very few reviewers might do illegal things, but these will be minority and highly unscalable for a purposes of launching product (plus these people will be quickly caught by amazon itself)

A business that runs on a perfectly legal, accepted practice is not the same as one which employs illegal or unacceptable methods. Like perjury laws, it doesn't make people honest in court, but it encourages it and provides for penalties or redress.

Amazon knows if a product has been bought with a discount and the amount of the discount; it can outright ban reviews from people who bought with a discount, or put these reviews up for special "review" (either human or automated).

You can still leave a review when you didn't buy the product via Amazon (or at all), so in theory vendors could send products outside of Amazon to get reviews. This however would become very complicated, and Amazon could still spot and review reviews that don't follow an Amazon purchase.

The only option left for vendors would be to ask reviewers to buy the product on Amazon for the full retail price, and then refund them outside of Amazon; not impossible, but difficult.

This change may be good in theory, but it will make it very hard for new products to exist at all / rise above existing ones, esp. given the way Amazon search engine (A9) apparently works -- ie, strongly favoring products that already sell a lot, even if they don't quite match the search keywords.

One could think of another option, which would be to offer users the possibility to filter out all reviews that don't come from a "verified purchase" (incentivized reviews aren't "verified purchase"), but still let them exist.

Conducting any transaction with an Amazon customer outside of Amazon is against the seller agreement and cause for removal.

It's probably worse than the spread between 4.74 average rating (product discount) vs 4.36 average (paid full price).

If you paid full price, you probably did at least a little bit of research and made a semi-informed decision, so it would stand to reason that you should be pleased.

For a generic product being used by someone with no particular vested interest in that product or category, you'd expect a much lower rating.

(on the other hand, I suppose you could argue that the high expectations of the 'desired' product might tend to bring down satisfaction a bit)

Most people who are happy with a product will never leave a review. Everyone who receives a discounted product is required to leave a review.

Interesting, I hadn't thought of this, and this effect could actually explain the difference without any bias from incentives.

As both a buyer on Amazon and a seller, I have mixed feelings regarding this.

On the buying side, I've seen how hard it is to wade through the reviews to buy simple products. Though I would say that it's mostly recently about product quality rather than review quality.

On the seller side, the issue is that when you launch a product and have no reviews, you won't get sales. Without reviews and sales, your product slides down into the depths of Amazon. Without the ability to give away products for reviews, we are only left with waiting for reviews to come in naturally or paying a lot for Amazon PPC to continuously force the product to the top of the stack hoping to generate some sales and then ultimately reviews.

There has to be some sort of middle ground for this sort of thing. I would think there has to be a way to launch on Amazon that can get products out to real reviewers, and still somehow weed out the "fake" reviews. It's telling that they didn't remove it for book sales as pre-release reviews are so entrenched that they didn't dare mess with it. If it's working for books, in theory, it should work for other categories.

Of course, Amazon does have a way to do this legitimately through their mysterious Vine program that you need to be invited to. Though it doesn't seem they really have a direction or know how to handle the issue themselves. For the time being, I can only assume that this will drive the review sites underground.

I have a lot of respect for Amazon here. Having every product have a 5 star review is great for Amazon in the short term, it lets you "do your research" and hit that one-click ordering button without hesitation. Making the scores go down will probably reduce sales (of items that would make people unhappy anyway, but reduced sales are reduced sales).

Long term, if nobody trusts Amazon reviews, then they'll turn elsewhere to do that research. And elsewhere probably links to a retailer other than Amazon, that you might click on because you happen to be there.

It is weird that I have to be happy about the right long-term business decision, but I guess that's the world we live in. Every day I think Amazon is going to grow complacent and slowly cease to exist. That day is not today ;)

About time. I hate these "free reviews".

I had to start looking at verified purchases and read a few of these with 5, 3 and 1 star ratings to get a sense if the product is worth buying for.

Was becoming too much of a hassle.

One of the few of those silly "life hack" tips that I've seen floating around that was really useful was a suggestion to look at the 3-star reviews on Amazon, if you aren't sure about something. They generally aren't especially biased (people who are biased for or against the product are going to leave 5 or 1-star reviews) and tend to have the most useful weighing of pros and cons.

That's not to say there aren't valid 5 star and 1 star reviews -- including my own, because I tend not to review products unless they stick out for some reason -- but a lot of the 2/3/4 star reviews are the most diagnostically useful.

Among products whose review distribution is heavily skewed toward 5-stars, the 1-star reviews are often the most useful, since this is where you might learn that reviewers are being offered compensation in return for removing their negative review (either by stating it directly, or as evidenced by an aggressive comment left by the seller in response to the unhappy customer).

Understanding the rate and nature of bad reviews provides much better signal than high-star reviews.

You will get a lot of garbage in 1-star reviews but I find you also find information about expected uses of the product that don't work, or other types of important feedback (for example, I was looking for a "bluetooth splitter" a while back and lots of 5-star reviews said that the product worked as advertise, but some percentage of 1-star reviews stated that several of the products added a few hundred milliseconds of latency to the audio). I also use the percentage of low-star reviews between similar frequently reviewed items (for example, coffee makers with hundreds of reviews each) to approximate design defects, manufacturing defect rate and/or ease of use issues.

If Amazon doesn't realize its reviews are one of its main selling points, then it's stupid. I'm surprised they don't meticulously curate/maintain reviews to ensure high quality/accuracy.

This is long overdue! I'd like the option of a partial refund on all the items I've purchased that had these sorts of reviews.

Not far enough. They need to flush all reviews from their site and let them re-accumulate organically over time.

They can do this in phases and as a percentage of sales for a product. They have the data. I am sure they can come up with an equation to determine how many reviews to flush out per week. Having all products go to zero reviews overnight would not be sensible.

Good products will continue to receive good reviews. Same with bad products. It's the products with scammed/paid reviews that will suffer. Yes, some of those products might be good and, if they are, they'll receive organic reviews just as the others.

The other approach, and probably fairer, is to simply age reviews. Anything more than N years old (or N months old) is deleted. Simple.

I applaud this but how about getting rid of the vine reviews too? I don't trust any Amazon review where someone has gotten something for free.

If they want to keep Vine (essentially monopolizing paid reviews), then at least give me the option of filtering them out with a checkbox or something.

Still not exactly forthright.

In my experience, the Vine reviews have always been clearly marked in bold green text at the top—while you can't filter them from being displayed, it's pretty easy to ignore them if you want to.

Agreed. I would like the opportunity to filter them out. I read an article once about people who spend most of their day reviewing products, even products they never purchased. I sense these are the types that get invited to Vine.

Vine reviews seem legit. Amazon picks the customers so the vendor can't select for positive reviewers. The vendor also can't retaliate by withholding future free products if you give something 1 star (a common thing with game reviews).

Vine reviewers are still people subject to feeling like they owe something for getting the free product. It's one of the big lessons in Cialdini's book Influence.

Vine reviewers no longer get it for free. The cost of the item they receive now counts as taxable income.

That's a completely different issue, and probably has been the case all the time (since it is not something for Amazon to decide, but the tax authorities)

Yes I don't disagree, but my point is that it's not free.

Why doesn't Amazon have a simple 'verified purchaser' flag that users can filter by?

  They know who actually *paid* for the item (since they collect payments).

Manu could easily provide a GC with the exact cost of the item post-review.

They do. Note the "&reviewerType=avp_only_reviews" flag in this set of reviews:

https://smile.amazon.com/Marvels-Captain-America-Civil-Blu-r...

Meanwhile here few tips for fake reviews:

Select "Show only Verified Purchases" to get rid of most of fake reviews according to this 96% of "Incentivized Reviews" are not verified purchases

http://reviewmeta.com/blog/what-can-we-do-about-the-problem-...

Another tip is finding products with most reviews so you get more overall rating even it has some paid/sponsor reviews. "Most reviews" sort option is hidden in most of the categories but there is a way to do it. Here is my detailed writing about this. Disclosure: I am the author of medium story and http://www.jeviz.com which provides more sort options including "most reviews" to Amazon searches.

https://medium.com/@ceyhunkazel/amazon-search-hack-eliminate...

I suppose that would also work against the reverse (paying for 1 star reviews). This charity pays for one-star reviews of "culturally appropriative" halloween costumes.

http://heatst.com/culture-wars/this-charity-will-pay-you-to-...

For me personally it will mean way harder to launch new products on Amazon, i.e. to get that initial visibility. This is since their search algo is based on sales of product and reviews of the product, so any new product will be lost in their search results.

(Vine they mentioned is invite only program for large corporate sellers)

This is the outcome I desire. The number of times I've been looking for a specific product, only to find all the reviews are from people who clearly only have the product because of these programs, is bordering on infuriating. Reviews like "I don't really understand how to use this but it seems well-made" are completely useless. Even for institutional purchasing I made the decision years ago not to conduct business with any seller who behaves like this.

When I got my S7, I went to amazon looking for a case and screen overlay.

I ALMOST pulled the trigger on the most reviewed and almost 5 star average product when one of the negative reviews caught my eye. The screen overlay didn't fit. Then I went digging and almost all of the negative reviews pointed out that the product didn't actually fit. Hundreds of 5 star reviews for something that would not work at all.

On occasion, the reviews are helpful, but that is becoming less and less frequent and frankly I've soured on Amazon as a supplier as a result. Prime isn't the deal it once was, and pricing isn't particularly competitive for a lot of products when I shop around.

I remember this happening with Ebay a number of years back and I rarely look to ebay for anything these days. Amazon is a little stronger because they are still the go-to resource for books and cloud compute resources.

Keep in mind that amazon has listings per product (vs eBay with listing per product and seller)

It is quite likely that original product was fine, that's why all the reviews, but then it got out of stock and new seller brought new product, which was different (by mistake or on purpose) and that one was people complaining about.

Not saying you did this, but on the balance I'm glad that this tool is taken away from sellers.

The shopping experience on Amazon has turned to crap ever since these sorts of reviews flooded the scene. They were clearly overwhelmingly positive and I've seen many people burned by them.

Maybe Amazon needs a program like Steam Greenlight where people can sign up to try new products.

Honestly if these sorts of reviews were easily marked and filtered out it would solve half the problem.

Amazon does have an equivalent to Steam Greenlight called Amazon Exclusives, but it's not as inclusive as Steam Greenlight.

In other words, it will be just like selling any other non-online product. At least you get a search algorithm...

About time! The paid reviews were getting really annoying and I started to feel that Amazon's amazing review system was going down in terms of quality. It's a bold move for Amazon and it sends the right message: high quality, trust-worthy reviews are much better than high quantity, biased reviews.

For all those complaining about reviews based on free products, I'd just point out that most non-crowdsourced reviews have been based on free products (which may or may not be returned after the review is written) for pretty much forever. Some exceptions like Consumer Reports of course.

Arguably, Amazon reviews are different--because you theoretically expect the reviews to be coming from regular buyers. But I strongly disagree, as a general principle, with the view that if you're given a free copy of a product/book/etc. to review, you're going to simply give a positive review no matter what. Frankly, discounts feel much more like an implied quid pro quo.

I don't do a lot of reviewing (and I do reviews on my own blog, not Amazon) but I give an honest assessment and I clearly disclose if I've been sent product to review.

You don't seem to fully understand the issue. Companies aren't giving out free products to random people in the hope that their products will receive positive reviews; instead, companies are using services like Amazon Review Trader[1] and Review Kick[2] to find reviewers who only write positive reviews and who accept free products and discounts in exchange for reviews. For more information, visit the ProductTesting subreddit[3] where these reviewers chat about their favorite freebies and discounts.

[1] https://www.amzreviewtrader.com/

[2] https://www.reviewkick.com/

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductTesting/

I do get the systematic issues with respect to Amazon reviews specifically and agree that they're an problem. (Systems that become especially important tend to encourage gaming.) I just react negatively when some people make this into a general statement with review-ware along the lines of financial motivations throw ethics out the window.

They do not leave only positive reviews. This is not encouraged by group owners, nor reality I experienced first hand.

That's not really the reality.

Have a look at the FAQ on AMZ Review Trader where they gloss over issues that will "make Amazon delete your review", including mentioning the product name in the review, and other things that sound spammy.

They talk about reasons why your request to review might not be selected and hint about how your previous reviews may not appeal sufficiently to the seller.

The sites advertise to seller as "make more money!". You as a reviewer get free products to use in exchange for these reviews.

It's an exercise in hopeless optimism, or naivety, to say that the expectation is that you'll write honest, including negative reviews.

I'm sorely tempted to sign up and write honest but negative reviews and see how long my account lasts. I suspect "not long". It'll be flagged for "other reasons".

In their list of tips for "awesome reviews", great headlines and such are up there. "Things you didn't like" gets... half a sentence from twenty bullet points.

"Leave a disclosure. But don't do it at the start. No one wants to hear that anyway."

Whatever the theory, years ago I used to find Amazon reviews mostly helpful -- you had to read between the lines sometimes, but for an intelligent reader the bogosity was basically under control -- and now I see many products with an unearned high rating, but I have to wade through the reviews for each one to make that judgement.

These free-copy reviews are not the worst of it, but they're mostly noise. They're not like either a professional reviewer with a reputation to groom or a regular person with an opinion they want to share.

Eh, I'd treat them as ads. The person is paid to review them, the manufacturer can pay to have that review displayed on Amazon, clearly marked as "Sponsored Content". Amazon's already showing ads, so there's precedent.

but then I feel like the point of an ad that looks like a review is to intentionally mislead. Even if it's labeled sponsored content, the idea that it looking like an ad would be better than a normal ad admits a level of knowing that it's misleading.

ads should look like ads, and reviews should be left to real humans.

I agree; that was my intention with the 'clearly marked as "Sponsored Content"' bit. At a bare minimum, if it's clearly marked it can be flat out ignored or even filtered out.

Its about TIME. I emailed amazon support about a month about this (many items I was looking for were 80-90% "incentivized" reviews), and they responding by saying they would forward it to a team to look for "fraud", but gave no indication it was a problem.

Their response afterwards was:

> "The vast majority of the millions of reviews on Amazon are authentic, but we will continue to protect the integrity of customer reviews by taking action against those who abuse them."

which left a bit of a bitter taste. I suppose I didn't expect them to say anything about a change in policy but I wish they had admitted that it was even a problem.

Amazon is in a weird position on this.

On one hand, they want more and more sellers and try very hard to grow FBA, because

1. having outside sellers trying to market new products offsets the cost of market research and development to those sellers (instead of doing the work in house)

2. competition between sellers drives the prices down, which drives prices up

On the other hand, they need to police sellers and try to keep reviews honest, or they risk losing customers' confidence.

My guess is, the first objective (many sellers) is more important than the second one (honest reviews), so they will probably not enforce this new policy very aggressively.

> so they will probably not enforce this new policy very aggressively.

I don't know about that. I left one of those "in exchange for my honest review" reviews without using _that_ exact language, and they refused to post it. I had to re-submit with the right phrase pasted in.

The language I used in the original review was even more upfront about receiving the product for free and my review procedure. So I'd guess that they will enforce something broadly across the board and then be kind of tone deaf about the way they enforce it.

I think a big part of the problem with reviews is, when you're looking for something to buy, _and_ you're a savvy buyer, you generally want the product to fulfill conditions X, Y, and Z. If you receive it for review, you are generally only looking to fulfill condition X, and _maybe_ Y. For example, you'd probably never think, "oh, I should test this bluetooth transmitter from the back seat of my carpooling minivan" if you work from home all day.

That you didn't think of condition Z and still gave the product five stars will probably piss off somebody somewhere, but really, people with special conditions or who are aware of specific issues with that kind of product should be researching _within_ reviews, not just taking some random reviewer's five stars as a green light. They should be asking product questions. They should be contacting the manufacturer directly if they buy the product and they think it sucks. But they almost never do those things.

I agree there are dishonest reviewers, but I think Amazon's goofy review system--in which 3 stars == failure, and 4 stars == "think twice," is really the perfect setup for that kind of situation.

I'm not saying those paid for reviews are good. I think they are worthless, for many of the reasons outlined in the article (vendors select reviewers that only leave 5 stars) and in your comment (professional reviewers don't "need" the product they are reviewing and therefore don't even know what qualities to look for (even if they were inclined to be completely honest)).

But what I am saying is, Amazon needs new sellers... and new sellers need reviews.

I like the move, however small sellers will have a hard time gaining traction now. It would be nice if they limited the number of reviews, or there's a tag where if you leave a review you say you were incentivized. Those reviews are hidden by default and does not contribute. Or Amazon shows two reviews, one incentivized and one not. Even their vine program reviewers can have bias, so really it's about more control for Amazon.

Full disclosure: I was given a chance to read the article for free in return for my unbiased and honest comment.

Can they please go back and clean up all the existing reviews? I never understood the 'honest review in exchange of the product' thing because it was always 5 stars and rarely honest.

Amazon Vine requires you provide tax identification number as to declare FMV on your income tax. That's a real non-starter for a lot of reviewers.

> However, it has allowed businesses to offer products to customers in exchange for their “honest” review.

Seems like a pretty bizarre exception to begin with.

I've been in the Vine program that they mention in the article for several years - I can tell you that, seriously, honestly, no kidding, there are no repercussions for posting a negative review of a free Vine product. I've posted scathing reviews of terrible (but free) products, wondering if I'd be mysteriously "removed" from the Vine program for doing so, and never gotten so much as a question about them.

I know someone who spends a good part of day looking to get these discounted products, although the reviews he writes are honest, biased - I am not liking the addiction he has got, buying cheap unnecessary stuff non-stop.

Everyday he has to buy something, this might not be sane on a long run, happy it will end soon.

Sure these trumped up reviews are not arms' length from the vendor, but they often give details of the product that are not in the official specifications. That's been useful to me on more than one occasion when deciding between two similar options.

This video[1] posted Sept. 19th 2016 got more then 500k views, I wonder if it has anything to do with Amazon's decision...

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdLI62JKpCk

Finally. Reviews, especially on highly contested catgories, had turned into a cesspool over the last couple years. The varieties of gamesmanship will doubtless continue but this is at least one of the hydra's heads.

About time, but I think it would be beneficial to have a way of filtering these "paid" reviews or not counting them towards the overall rating. Something for everyone ...

This is actually a terrible idea, IMO. Currently people announce when their review was of a freebie. Now people will still do it, they just won't disclose it.

http://imgur.com/a/QQ4bk

If you're "Me" in that chat, you have this chat record to fall back on. My mom is an Amazon Seller (got the top 25% Holiday Seller Award twice) and her experience when asking about policy matters is the SellerCentral Associates tend to shoot from the hip and give whatever they think the answer is.

So note to other sellers, ask first and save the record of the conversation, instead of relying on the something you found on Imgur. Seller Performance (the legal team) will always give you a pass for bad information from Amazon Reps when considering the death penalty. No such leniency is granted for "the other guys were doing it" or "a third party told me something that directly conflicts with the Amazon Business Services Agreement".

I don't know. The phrase "free and unbiased review" were a strong negative signal.

It's about time. I can't believe they ever allowed it in the first place.

Good. My highest up-voted comment ever on HN was specifically about this problem. Clearly something that resonates as a problem with their customers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12033964

"Set up an Amazon Giveaway" They promoted it to boost the sale.

I buy almost nothing on Amazon without using fakespot.com these days.

Is this a move to consolidate paid reviews into the vine program?

Is this retroactive?

Really should be.

There are plenty of budding entrepreneurs that will be unable to move new products because everyone is going to be afraid to buy without reviews

... except their own

I think reviews tied to discounted products should be be given a weight reduced by the amount proportional to the discount received. So a product with a 75% discount should be given a 25% weight in the weighted-average review score.

Sellers will just game this by paying someone to buy the product at full price for a good review.

Maybe, but how? I mean, how does it scale? You can call a few friends for your first product (maybe) but at some point you run out of friends and you need to recruit people you don't know.

It's easy to circumvent this by offering 4x as many discounted items at the discounted price to get the reviews (I bet it still makes sense for the manufacturers to take even this loss up front if they can top the search rankings).

That was meant to be a bit of a joke, btw. Ratings lose their value to customers when they're too opaque to fully understand.

As a top reviewer, I got sent a link to a secret Chinese Amazon with 31 pages of free and discounted products to review (some show lingerie in this screenshot so careful if you're at work):

http://imgur.com/a/LfO82

This sucks. I worked REALLY hard to become a top reviewer (ranked ~10,000th) so that I could get free and discounted stuff, and just these past few months, I've finally gotten to the point where I get 1-3 offers per day now.

How often do you give free products negative reviews?

Not a whole lot, even before when I _was_ giving unbiased reviews.

I found that many people "downvoted" my negative reviews as unhelpful (maybe they were friends of the seller?), despite the fact that they were critical, yet not inflammatory, reviews (and what most people would consider to be very helpful) --

-- Much like how some HN users downvote similarly-constructive posts that they disagree with.

Incentivized reviews do skew the score distribution. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a reason to ban them.

I agree. I didn't even include the "unbiased discount" footnote/disclaimer in my "unbiased" reviews because I didn't want it to hurt my own personal credibility as a reviewer. My partners-in-crime actually really appreciated that omission.

I read this a few times and couldn't quite parse it. Are your unbiased reviews the ones for which you weren't offered the product (eg, paid full price)? Or are you saying even your discount/freebie reviews are unbiased? Who are your partners in crime? The sellers?

I read it as there was a time before he tried for top reviewer when his reviews were unbiased (meaning the free items were the unbiased), and the sellers were the partners in crime.

Edit: free items were /biased/ not unbiased

But how do I know you really needed the product and use it in an everyday situation?

That's the problem I have with these freebie reviews. I want to know if the product that I need works as advertised as told by people who actually need it and use it themselves.

Not by people who just liked getting free stuff.

Or do you actually pick what you actually need for free and thus are able to give a good review?

I (not OP) am in the Vine program that they mention in the article. I admit that it puts me in sort of an odd position to be trying to write an unbiased review of something that I got for free, but I always do my best to mention in my review whether I feel like I would have paid the cost of the item, all other things being equal. For me, the most difficult part of the review is that we're on the hook to review the product within 30 days of receipt - in some cases, that's not enough time to really get a sense of how well the product holds up.

Personally, what I'm looking for is a biased review by a person who bought the item intentionally.

I tend to not accept a review unit/book/etc. (for off-Amazon review) for something I wouldn't have considered buying anyway. I see zero appeal to getting stuff for the sake of it. That said, I've written reviews of items that I probably wouldn't have spent $200 (or whatever) on. But then, I often say in my review that it wouldn't really be worth $X to me.

There was a lot of junk I'd never use, so I just didn't accept the offers to begin with (countless charging cables and LED bulbs, for instance).

If my friends or family needed something, and I had an offer for it, I would get it for them and let them review it for me.

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