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.
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.
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).