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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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 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.
* Drop the product from the store completely.
* Put a Warning Misleading Listing stamp on the listing.
* Penalize the seller in the results.
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.
I cannot for the life of me understand why Amazon doesn't already do this.
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.
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.
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.
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).
They sent me huge rant about how I couldn't have a refund and what their return policy was.
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.
I'd be calling the Information Commissioner as well.
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).
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.
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.
http://static-s3.sokoloff.com/random/amazon/IMG_1880.jpg
On other labels it's after the "DF3..." ID.
Apparently they chose to leave that field off the label, but it's still sent to USPS by the software.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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...?
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...
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.
I would consider phone calls out of bounds. Did you complain to Amazon customer service about this?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.