Amazon makes good on its promise to delete “incentivized” reviews
techcrunch.com
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Aside from the review mess, the quality level of the 3rd party listing themselves, customer service, shipping speed, and products...is really hurting them. And, of course, separately, the issue of counterfeit products.
My non-techie friends are taking notice.
Amazon really needs to deep dive into this before they hurt their brand in a way that's hard to recover.
It's great for competition and price pressure, but completely fails when dealing with generic items and vendors aren't held to account for outright fraud.
Bought some clothes from UK. Never arrived. Amazon refunded.
Amazon is great. But any vendor can be as dodgy as any eBay seller.
Consider, the story is just as powerful with "I ordered from a vendor who had a ton of negative reviews for not delivering products." Even better, that instructs to start paying attention to reviews, and not origin of vendor. :)
If the original comment had mentioned how the purchase was from a black vendor, or a gay vendor, people would be up in arms about what that unjustly implies, and how without any sort of data to back that it's just stereotyping (at best). Do it for China, where people already have a strong preconception of the types of vendors present, and all that rational separation of anecdote and data and needing to justify your statements goes right out the window.
This isn't to say you can't call out vendors from China if you suspect they are a problem in higher proportions than other vendors. The original comment could have included "I suspect this may be a problem exhibited more often from vendors from China, but don't have data to back that up" or more strong statements with some data, but did not. Instead we have a statement that only adds to the comment when combined with your own preconceptions, since it adds nothing to the circumstances of the described situation without your own preconceptions.
> rational separation of anecdote and data and needing to justify your statements
No statement was made though. An anecdote simply provided additional data, and you objected on the basis of what people might assume.
> but don't have data to back that up
You might also assume that from no data being provided, and indeed, no claim being made.
> we have a statement that only adds to the comment when combined with your own preconceptions
or allows another thread on the topic to emerge, in this case if it's relevant that China was involved, causing someone with knowledge on the topic to comment.
If you manufacture in China you find huge legal and social issues with maintaining quality. It's still possible just far from the default.
I've read, without adequate if any sourcing, that this is a pattern that's at least centuries old, specifically, building things to the required specs, then backing off on quality until the buyer complains....
If so, it's interesting it survived the harshest decades of Communism and the attempts to do away with the old ways, then again, it could well be aligned with the incentives that were force back then. Although I'd hate to be issued a weapon or ammo that was from a factory running along those quality lines. Although back when we were allowed to buy ammo from the PRC, that sort of thing was not apparent from what I remember, but I'm not sure I would have noticed since I was never in the market for those particularly types.
RS and Farnell in the UK use parcel force and UPS respectively. The success rate for me is higher on stuff shipped from China.
I've had some stuff from Leeds to London end up in Belgium for two days.
Went to look at the seller's reviews .. and they were all 1/5 negative saying the product was never delivered. The A-Z guarantee got me my money back but I wasn't impressed the seller was allowed to continue doing this for so long.
After I complained, the seller appeared to have all their items removed from Amazon.
As an aside, you can generally trust the FBA items from 3rd party sellers.
Luckily we have the prices from other merchants to compare the amazon prices to, and could implement a filter for unreasonable prices (way over uvp or way below what other merchants ask for).
Amazon is full of scammers.
Edit: Answered my own question. You can find a place to restrict seller to "amazon.com". It's not 100% useful for all searches though, as you filter out sellers like "Apple", or "Bose". Would be nice if you could filter seller down to "Manufacturer or Amazon.com" in some easy way.
[1] www.fakespot.com
You'll pay local sales tax since they have stores everywhere. Wish I'd started using them when I recently bought a case of Sapporo Ichiban Miso Ramen, Amazon, which I think had a slightly lower price, was out, so I went with a 3rd party which a high rating, which had the brilliant idea of unpacking the case and stuffing it into a Medium size Priority Mail box, which can comfortably only hold half as many. As long as none of the soup base packets were punctured by this stunt I'll come out OK, but....
... of course, you still have to carry the stuff in and find space in the fridge yourself ...
Recent Real Life developments have resulted in logistics limiting me to cold stuff I can put in an insulated backpack with a ice pack, but, yeah, I could use this to get cold and frozen stuff without much hassle. Thanks!
Also had to give up on Vanicream soap when I assume the company they contract with to make their stuff massively dosed two quite separated in time batches with perfume. Which also taught me to try 1 of every new batch of stuff I buy (I tend to buy stuff like that in April and October when the weather is mild, and increase my inventory to ~12 months so I have plenty of time to find a new brand or solution if the old one goes bad or is discontinued).
Hay, save the nose of the allergy sufferers in your life, get the perfume free stuff by default! At least if it doesn't cost any more to speak of....
And, yeah, I gather the whole shtick of Amazon Pantry is that you buy enough stuff to fill up one big box, no doubt by weight as well as size, which I assume they've worked out deals to ship cheaply. Haven't tried it yet since I've found WalMart.com to be so much cheaper, while there's some Pantry exclusive items, or, say, they're available in quantity 1 that way, I just haven't been able to come close to filling up a box. WalMart doesn't care, except in giving you a strong incentive to buy at least $50.01 of stuff at a time, which isn't hard.
I still use Amazon, I just don't pay them $99 a year for the privilege or treat them as the first store I go to
Note of warning: You'll discover a lot of random items are now "Prime exclusive" for no reason other than spite. No special discount, they just will refuse to sell you odd and end items unless you buy Prime.
What amazes me, is given Jeff Bezos' general attitude towards providing excellent customer service, is that Amazon has said nothing about this practice, and it's decidedly anti-consumer. If it was just a Prime discount or something, it wouldn't bother people nearly as much, but Amazon will outright refuse to sell without Prime for a lot of these items, unless it's also being sold by a third party seller you can buy from instead.
This. Amazon makes it very easy with it's "frictionless" 1-click buying functionality to buy loads of crap that you don't really need. I make it very hard on myself, and put barriers to buying. Sometimes I will add something to the cart (since they force you to do it to show price for some items) and then let it sit there for days. Many times, I've come back and wondered why I even added something to the cart in the 1st place.
- What is the likelihood this description matches the product being sold?
- Are the reviews real?
- Is this item safe?
- Is the price double what it is from other retailers?
Perhaps Amazon is having a similar moment Google did when Demand Media just obliterated the quality of their search results. It really is going to take a multi-pronged approach to clean things up. Depending on where their cashflow is coming from, this could be a very punishing task.
How does physically going to Target help with this?
It's probably just because the locals don't want to be seen as "rednecks" for shopping at Walmart. (Of course there are plenty who don't mind, and I guess, better deal for them)
I tried to buy some dishwasher detergent on Amazon recently because my local store is almost always out of the brand I like. It was $16/12oz on Amazon, versus $3.99/12oz at my local store. I assume that's what he's talking about.
Couple years ago. I was looking to buy a couple staples on Amazon once to spend enough for free shipping. I love Kraft Mac and cheese and it's a commodity item. Amazon was selling them for 3x the cost of the grocery store. Decided to check Walmart.com out of curiosity. They were normal grocery store price at Walmart.com, if you needed to order it online. I wonder if people actually think Kraft Mac and cheese actually costs that much.
I also noticed that the price of many toys skyrockets during December.
As an aside I've ordered Kraft Mac and cheese from jet.com at normal price since. Their prices and inventory change a lot though so you can't always get the same stuff and the same price.
http://www.npr.org/2015/06/04/412046900/retailer-arbitrage-h...
COHEN: So this is interesting. This is a Babies R Us 800 baby wipes.
GOLDSTEIN: The wipes are in one of those displays out in the middle of the aisle. They're selling for $16.99. As the father of two young kids, I feel like I have some insight here.
Baby stuff - I know how much baby stuff costs.
COHEN: OK. Is this a good price?
GOLDSTEIN: Not great. It's not great.
COHEN: Seventeen bucks for 800 wipes? It's a value box.
GOLDSTEIN: I mean, buy it if you want. I don't think there's a lot of margin in it for you.
COHEN: I think you're wrong.
GOLDSTEIN: Sam has brought along one of his employees, a guy named Jay Freiday, to help him with the shopping. Freiday pulls out his phone and looks up how much this $17 box of wipes is selling for on Amazon.
JAY FREIDAY: This is currently selling for $46.
GOLDSTEIN: Wait a minute. People are paying - what did you say?
FREIDAY: $46.
GOLDSTEIN: For 800 baby wipes?
FREIDAY: Yeah. It's a lot?
GOLDSTEIN: It's a lot.
All my recent purchases have been disappointing, from futons of 'odd' sizes or misleading descriptions, "no assembly required", or products which just aren't good quality with 4-5 star reviews.
I've got to the point where I'm going back to only buying direct from amazon (if I can even still tell, it's not as easy as it used to be). Even sticking to "known" brands is difficult since brand licenses are often re-sold cheaply to different qualities of third party manufacturers in an era of globalization and cost-cutting driving down margins.
What can be a completely "buy it for life" quality item one year can in as short a time of 5 years have "sold out" their name and the products a shell of their former quality.
I suppose that's an issue when you sell tens of thousands of art items and try to do categorize automatically. It just makes me trust them less.
This is even worse in Canada. There appear to be tons of listings which consist solely of people finding things on Amazon.com that aren't on Amazon.ca and listing them for absurd prices. Example: a 4-pack of Kraft Dinner for $20 ($5/box), or a 12-pack for $48 ($4/box, a discount!).
Likewise, lots of people seem to take advantage of absurd shipping rates from American companies. I wanted to get my wife an iShower for her birthday, and while it was about a hundred bucks in the US (from them or Amazon.com), I was looking at $170+ Canadian from Amazon.ca (and this was when our currencies were almost at par). Tried to get it shipped from the US and the shipping was FedEx only, and it was something like $50-60 to get it shipped.
Now I order from Canadian retailers whenever I can, and I just get junk from Amazon when it's on sale.
There are plenty of good, large sellers, and they didn't get that way by skimping on quality. You don't need to take a chance on smaller sellers if you don't want to.
(Also, many sellers use FBA which avoids most of the issues, the only concern there is really product quality, which again is something you don't need to worry too much about if it's an experienced seller. Commingling can cause problems, but it's very rare, if Amazon saw a significant number of problems from it they'd have stopped the program.)
Amazon packs, warehouses, and delivers your package acting as payment manager, and customer service while hosting your IT infrastructure.
They want to sell pickaxes and do laundry for gold miners.
The part where Amazon isn't packing and shipping your product is a weak link – killing fake reviews helps this though.
I became a seller on Amazon two months ago, because I'm developing new (unique) products and I thought it would be simpler to have them distributed by Amazon.
But making said products is taking much longer than anticipated, so in the meantime, and as a learning process, I started selling one product in "private label" mode (ie, a product that I buy "as is" from a Chinese factory, with my brand printed on it). It's kind of selling, although the competition makes it hard/impossible to turn any profit (since all products are virtually identical, competition is on price and maybe listing quality/exhaustivity).
But what is amazing to me is that a service called "Amazon coach" regularly sends emails to encourage me to sell more PL products. Today, Amazon coach recommends selling a meat tenderizer on amazon.de: there are already over 350 different listings for meat tenderizers on amazon.de, how many more do they need???
Some time ago I used to regard the "ships from Amazon" or "Prime" logo as markers for quality, because I figured, somehow, that Amazon did some kind of vetting before accepting a product for shipping. That's completely wrong. The sign only means that the product is stored in their warehouse (and will therefore probably be delivered on time); but it has no meaning whatsoever regarding the quality of the product. There is zero curation.
Selling on Amazon is teaching me to trust Amazon less.
And of course, the ocean of similar products makes shopping much harder; meat tenderizers are not the worst case by far: if you're looking for a corkscrew in the Home & Kitchen category, you're looking at 2,500+ options on amazon.de alone... and 16,000+ on amazon.com!! Crazy.
You need to look for (or limit your search to ) "Sold by Amazon". Not so say that Amazon doesn't sell some duff products, and they have some "private label" products of their own (Amazon Basics), but all of those will have had some degree of vetting.
https://9to5mac.com/2016/10/19/amazon-fake-apple-chargers-ca...
When I was looking at selling my creations on Amazon, they had an option to commingle stock with other sellers of the same item, but I don't know if that includes Amazon's own stock.
Another trick for the best price is to not always go with the buy box by default. Amazon doesn't give up the buy box unless the competitor's price is significantly lower than theirs. It's always worth taking a look at what else is listed in the 'Other sellers' box, especially on products where Amazon is the vendor. It's likely their the cheapest, but that's not always the case.
Link to my original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12832605
Personally, I avoid buying any electronics or valuables from Amazon due to counterfeit risk. They have the ability to curtail this activity but they choose not to. Also, the fake reviews damage the integrity of the marketplace. It really shows how much they care for their customers.
For a lot of other things, the price is so close or the exact same, I'll just buy it from the store. I do a lot of woodworking, so I buy a fair amount of stuff from a number of brands that people aren't really counterfeiting (yet)- for those I'll buy using prime, unless it's at one of the woodworking/hardware stores in the area. Then I'll just go get it myself, the prices are always within a small percentage of each other.
It feels like, for me, I do my window shopping at Amazon and execute my purchase locally, just because Amazon has gone downhill for me. I would be interested to know if other people are slowly coming to the behaviors I have.
Pretty much I get random small electronics components that don't need a great level of quality and just random other things that I don't care all that much about quality or origin. They've become my Alibaba in a way.
I still shop Amazon for many categories, but my guard is always up. But for some categories like apparel, the Amazon experience is so horrible that I don't even think to look there.
This discussion does highlight the issue though, we all had to go check, and check a number of different options, and are we still REALLY sure that we're getting an Anker product? Now, if you're my mom and you're not checking the right boxes and looking for the 8pt font of who it's being fulfilled by, what's your success rate with high counterfeit categories?
Bottom line, if I'm buying a brand, there should be NO DOUBT that's what I'm getting. Do you doubt the brand that you're buying when you walk in to Best Buy? I don't. When the prices are the exact same, I'm buying from Best Buy. If the price is significantly lower on Amazon, then I get super suspect about the authenticity.
Just bought a part for my Dyson vacuum cleaner and I found a number of suspect listings before I got the the one that seemed authentic- catalog shots, posting copy, lack of "Engrish". I was completely expecting to have to return it when I got it, but to my relief, it came in an "Authentic Dyson" labeled box and the fit, finish, color, and production seemed exactly the same as what came off my vacuum.
That's too much doubt for my liking.
edit: here is some discussion. FBA vendors appear to have control:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hel...
But I still don't think the amazon customer can see if an fba vendor allows commingling.
But, no, we can't tell if a vendor commingles, we can only infer it in special cases like Anker as manyxcxi noted, or pick out vendors with high ratings and otherwise cross our fingers.
It's a colossal mess, and nowadays, if I'm not buying used books (where I go with < 95% rating and Very Good quality), I find a BS detector honed for decades, literally about 4 and half, is the single most useful tool in navigating their swamps. Which for me confirms they indeed have big problems, and that's not even counting their search engine, which as others have noted is bad; for me, by far the worst I regularly use, and like others I often use Google's instead.
All this implies to me that if AWS wasn't such a money machine, Amazon's stock holders ought to be very nervous. The company really need to get serious about these problems.
At the root, the problem is that Amazon's stock is not discoverable. Their search engine is terrible, I've had situations where I knew the exact listing I wanted and wanted to see if anyone else was listing it cheaper, I searched a few keywords and had the listing I knew about plus a sea of other listings, then I added more words from the listing's title and suddenly the listing no longer appeared in the search results. What in the actual fuck is going on there?
To be honest nowadays I just google search "[item] amazon" because the Amazon search is such utter trash. If it doesn't pop up in the best sellers list and you can't manage to filter down by "prime" and "ratings" it might as well not be there according to Amazon's search, it's just lost in a sea of junk listings. The terrible search is one of the major reasons why nobody buys low-rating items, and that's why people bought ratings in the first place, so really it all comes back to the terrible search.
For starters the results need to be weighted by number of items sold though that listing. The brand new listing from a brand new seller yesterday gets the same weight as the item that's been a #1 bestseller for years. But other stuff, like items going away when you try to narrow down to them... I don't even know what's going on there.
It's pretty bad that some third party startups are offering products to determine if Amazon reviews are likely fake and Amazon with all of their resources doesn't seem to be doing it themselves.
This feels like MySpace all over again. It's clearly possible to build a superior product, in contrast to something like Google who have constantly reinvented themselves to stay on the top of the curve... it doesn't look good..
Perhaps it's a bad thing they started with books, where counterfeits certainly exist, but aren't quite at the same level of problem, shouldn't be any problem when they were sourcing from that big wholesaler of boos, and ... how long did it take them to enter the used book market with third parties? And, again, that was a well developed market before they entered....
Of course, no filters to what does ship to me. One year ago that somehow wasn't even an issue. It seems that Amazon is turning into same crappy service as Ebay :(
a. Their search is broken.
b. Same item is listed by different sellers as different SKUs.
c. You cannot rely on reviews anymore.
d. You cannot filter by merchant and rely on receiving an item that is genuine since Amazon will comingle inventory from multiple merchants for the same SKU. Ie buying a product from Amazon has no guarantee that it is actually an item stocked by Amazon.
e. Their price competetiveness appears to have eroded. Best Buy etc no longer feel like a complete rip off in comparision.
f. Other retailers (Macys etc) have much more hassle free return policies.
Prime is the single thing that Amazon gets right in the whole selling experience - which is why I now think of Amazon as more of a logistics company than I do as a retailer.
I can buy the complaints about Search (though really it's a problem of having too much selection). However, I've had universally positive return experiences, so I have no idea what you're on about there.
a. If Amazon sells a 64 GB Sandisk card
b. Merchants A and B also sell the same card
c. Merchants A and B have opted into the fulfilled by Amazon program.
Question: You purchase the 64 GB Sandisk card and pick Amazon as the seller. Whose inventory did the card come from?
Answer: Undefined.
For semantic purposes we can think of the following mental model - For a given SKU Amazon takes the memory cards from its own inventory and inventory from all other resellers who have opted into the "Fulfilled by Amazon" program (in our example A and B) and puts it together in a giant heap in its warehouse. When a order comes in a card is picked at random from the heap and shipped out to you.
So for Sandisk specifically this isn't a concern, although your comment applies to other, unrestricted brands.
This listing came up in the top 10 when searching for "Sandisk 32GB": https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-microSDHC-Package-Extenders-A...
The seller is "VP Distributor" and the brand is "Sadnisk" (sic). I don't see any links to see more info about the seller.
98% positive and 2250 lifetime feedback ratings means it's probably a good seller, just not authorized for sandisk and listed there to get around the rules. If someone took the time to report them the listing would be removed.
OTOH the same seller lists https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00M55C0VU, which I've confirmed on my account is restricted. So maybe they are authorized, and just listing on any ASIN they can find that matches the product? I've done that sometimes.
It doesn't look like customers are being harmed in this particular case, it's possible some unauthorized seller created the listing and VP distributor simply jumped on it at a later point, the first seller could be suspended now.
No. Sellers have to opt-in to co-mingle, so it's certainly not "all other resellers".
Besides, I think co-mingle only applies to resellers's stock, ie Amazon stock and 3rd party sellers' stock aren't put together in the same basket -- although I could be wrong about that.
If you buy the one that's sold by Amazon it will come from the stock that's bought by Amazon.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-amazon-pooled-merchandise-ope...
Do you have any sources which specify that Amazon treats it own inventory seperately?
I always use the "Amazon Prime" filter when I search, and I've never had any issues with those items. Sellers have to share a little more profit with Amazon to be listed as Prime, but I think that's enough of a bar to eliminate the fraudsters.
The only times I've had problems were with non-Prime sellers, but luckily those were just long-delays rather than outright fraud.
The problem with reviews on these sites in general is that they're not written like editorial reviews. You've got to take them with a grain of salt whether they're incentivized or not.
The negative reviews can be useful only if they identify specific problems, but I see a lot of negative reviews by people who just didn't spend time reading the manual.
In terms of the "purge", some people on the reddit product testing forums have noted that many of their incentivized 3 star reviews were deleted while their 5 star reviews were not.
The new rules also don't ban reviews on products that were received for free. The catch is that there must be no obligation to write a review at all, and that the sample provider does not try to influence positive votes by making future samples conditional on those reviews.
You'll notice that the "I received a sample/discount in exchange for an honest review" has been replaced by "I received a test sample with no obligation to provide a review here. I am doing it on my own, bla bla".
There are a lot of honest incentivized reviewers out there. They may slant toward positive reviews, but if you read the text of their reviews, you can tell if the product is good or not. Full disclosure, I've done my share of incentivized reviews. Having said that, I spent way a lot of time writing those reviews (and doing photos/videos for them) than I did for my verified purchases. Mainly because I wanted to dispel any notion that my reviews were complete BS.
I actually look at other incentivized reviews for the products I've written, and about half are honest, and the other half are hyperbolic BS. I always do disclosures, but the #1 ranked reviewer in Amazon in my country does not disclose his incentivized reviews (he has gotten the same samples as me around the same time) and does not appear to have been penalized for that. I'm sure I get downvotes on reviews just because of my disclosures in my reviews, but I'm not going to leave out the disclosures just to boost my rank either.
In terms of "positive" reviews. I accept only stuff I want that doesn't look like it's crap in the first place. That already tilts me towards a positive review. Next, I always ask myself "is this good for the price". Most of the stuff I get is very low priced compared to their competition. Am I supposed to treat a $20 set of Bluetooth earbuds with the same critical ear as a $150 pair? I don't think so. So yeah, my bsr to hit 5 stars is pretty low. As long as it's well made and performs well for the price, I'm not going to be particularly harsh.
Finally, I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon and have a Prime subscription. How do I evaluate products I want to buy? I look at all the reviews, including the incentivized ones. I read them carefully to determine if the reviewer knows what he/she is talking about and whether they bring up any insights that the other reviewers don't mention.
One star - Amazon screwed up the delivery.
Of course the real moral of that story is never buy anything made of any kind of fabric from a China seller. You'll get something 2 sizes too small and only roughly similar to what you saw in the picture, and in my experiences anything you think you're getting from China which is a "name brand" will indeed be a knock off (fake) one.
I see a lot of "you're problem is solved by doing X", and maybe that's fine for me if I care to remember the advice but I'm not the big spender in my family, and I certainly don't care to put in the effort to keep up-to-date on how not to get screwed by shopping at a particular website.
From what I can tell, there's are issues with fake reviews, fake vendors, and counterfeit products being commingled with genuine products. Why would I put myself in a situation where I know any of these are potential problems?
Add to that when I have had problems with Amazon, the support channels have historically been unclear and they have an extraordinarily poor reputation for how they treat their employees.
What is the logical path that would make me want to spend my money with this particular vendor?
(1) It's always been standard practice in the publishing industry to provide free Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs) to reviewers, and I've noticed that many independent ebook authors on Amazon have adopted this practice. Am I to understand that Amazon will now disallow providing ARCs to book reviewers? Because that would fly in the face of standard industry practice -- a practice that I think very few people have ever complained about over the years.
(2) Isn't this exactly what the Amazon Vine program does? I.e., provide free products to people so they can review them? Are they stopping Vine? (Maybe they already did.) Are they admitting that the Vine program led to inflated reviews?
Look at their search quality. Terrible even at its best. I searched for laptop and wanted to see the cheapest so selected "sort by Price low to high", lo and behold, I was flooded with a never ending list of wired and wireless mice, keyboards, usb cables, and what not. I had to click on multiple pages before I could get to the first laptop entry.
This is ridiculous or do they prevent their engineers for experiencing this pain?
They are better off outsourcing their search problem to Google, just as Apple learnt to outsource the maps problem to Google. No offense intended.
Several people I know - including me - wish for a real Amazon alternative, and I've been a customer right from the beginning spending 90% of my online money at Amazon.
I stopped using Amazon same-day shipping (even when offered for free!) because it almost always used OnTrac and I would have about a 50/50 shot of actually getting the item the same day.
On Ebay, it's clear that you're only buying from a 3rd party seller and you can see who it is and what's his reputation.
I know this is not going to fix the problem, unfortunately. I just find these puerile attempts at humour rather sad and don't understand why they are tolerated; both by Amazon and even other site users, who mark the reviews as helpful, and comment approvingly. Amazingly, some of the approving comments are even voted as helpful. I guess that everyone who can afford to spend GBP 20K on a TV are probab;y not influenced by reviews.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2DQ4KXJL8RIJR/ref=cm_cr_rdp...
Incentivized reviews, if I'm using the term correctly, are designed to be indistinguishable from 'real' reviews. The reviewers aren't going to reveal which ones are incentivized.
If you think you can identify them, what you mean is that you can identify the ones that you identify; it's literally that much of a tautology. You have no idea of your accuracy, how many true and false positives and how many true/false negatives.
What Amazon is done is the same; they remove reviews that meet certain criteria. Amazon claims the criteria are an accurate proxy for incentivized reviews but I doubt they can confirm that.
At best they are raising the bar so that only better written incentivized reviews remain, and incentivized reviewers will adjust to the new standard. Users, no longer seeing incentivized reviews that they can identify, will assume the situation has improved. Really, they are still being conned but now don't know it.
Looking at https://snap.stanford.edu/data/web-Amazon.html and http://jmcauley.ucsd.edu/data/amazon/, I can't find any mention on what process they used to generated these datasets.
https://www.amazon.com/Creed-Millesime-Imperial-Spray-4-0/dp...
And if it's sold by Amazon itself, hope it's either in one of the categories where they don't commingle, like food, or that you luck out. I'd hope anything you ingest or put on your skin like this would be in a "No Commingling!" category....
It's a shame, because they had a great service, and their delivery infrastructure remains great. But I don't need same day delivery if you're delivering junk.