Amazon imposes limit on reviews | Hacker News Reader

Amazon imposes limit on reviews

bbc.com

35 pointsnjade49 comments

Great, but doesn't come close to solving the actual problem: Amazon's retail catalog is flooded with fakes, drop shippers, bots and low quality products with fake reviews.

I almost entirely avoid using them for purchasing home goods at this point, the risk is too great and the customer service is too poor. For things that Amazon itself sells, the cost is often not competitive. For everything else, I can get it cheaper by shopping locally, getting from big box stores or by using Alibaba. "Prime" two day shipping is often inexplicably 3-5 day shipping (and I live in a major US metro).

All this saddens me, a former Amazon employee who was a loyal user of their products for a long time. But at this point it doesn't seem like Amazon is too concerned about the quality of their retail catalog. My business will go elsewhere.

I haven't had this experience at all. Prime ships in two days almost always. Same day prime does was it says. I've had refunds without having to ship back products, and when I did have to ship back a product (shoes) I got the refund right away and free return shipping like they advertised. I'm also in a major US metro area.

Prices don't seem too bad. My latest purchase was head and shoulders. Looked up the price at Walmart and it was 10 cents more expensive than Amazon. This is my experience for most home goods. For anything not home goods, they're certainly cheaper than any in-person store that I can think of.

I'm not sure which of our experiences is the outlier. One thing that might be different is that almost all my purchases are Prime shipping items.

In the UK Prime was supposed to be 'next day' but this seems to have slipped back over the past year or so? My pet gripe is the 'preparing for dispatch' black hole that generally (in my experience) means 'you're going to be waiting a long, long time'.

Recently ordered a keyboard in UK to be delivered to Spain. Despite being in stock it stayed in 'preparing to dispatch' for a week and I couldn't cancel.

In frustration I ordered another one thinking I could just refuse to accept delivery of whichever didn't arrive first and get a refund.

Sure enough, that time I left the office for half an hour I returned to find two packages on my desk waiting for me :)

The service you experience with Prime definitely depends on where in the UK you live, or rather where the item is going.

I live in a city centre, within 50 miles of an Amazon distribution centre, and it often offers me same day delivery. Like, order at 3am, items arrive at 8pm.

But if I change it to my parents' address (more remote but still in civilisation), it takes them 1-2 days to deliver.

They were just trying to batch process ;)

I recently moved from being twenty miles from a distribution center to the middle of nowhere.

After eventually getting annoyed enough to contact Amazon, it was explained that Release Date Delivery and Prime 2-Day Shipping aren't actually guarantees.

And that mostly lines up. When I lived next door they were super fast to refund instantly. Now that I don't, they are a lot less likely. A proper return and refund is the same, but just a "So... where the hell is my coffee grinder that I ordered last Friday?" exchange results in "It is on the way. You might see it Thursday" response.

I still prefer Amazon and still go for prime shipping products (it is still worth it price wise), but I am a lot less likely to buy time sensitive stuff through them anymore and a lot more likely to just go with the "I don't care when it gets here, give me some store credit" shipping.

There is a bit of compensation available. If an item doesn't arrive in 2 days you can request a free month of Prime:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

"If you received free shipping through Amazon Prime, you may be eligible for a free one-month extension when the promised delivery date isn't met. Prime Extensions are limited to one per free trial and 12 for an annual membership. Free Amazon Student Memberships do not qualify for this extension."

Just contact support about that order and tell them the item didn't arrive in time and you'd like your free month of Prime. Since they switched to the Amazon delivery service I'm about to max out my 12 free months.

I am aware of that. The fact of the matter is that I don't mind too much (small towns are great for lowering your expectations when it comes to quality of service...). I can afford amazon prime annually and even just not having to care about making a 20 buck order for free shipping (let alone the video on demand stuff) is worth it to me.

I just recall doing a quick chat to ask where my video game was when it was a day after release and getting offered a full refund and blah blah blah. And now? It can be three or four days outside the window and I just get a "it'll be there eventually"

And I know it is definitely regional as I have had a few friends back where I used to live who still got the borderline obsessive offers of refunds.

Huh, interesting. I (and my wife) have contacted Amazon a number of times about shipping estimates being off/wrong and have only ever received the same form response (even when we respond to the form response, CS reps just mail back the same form response again). I'll keep this in the pocket for the next time it happens.

I'm not positive, but I think you specifically have to ask for it. Before I found that the best I ever got was a shipping refund if I paid for the 1-day upgrade.

Now I just quote that line and paste the link and it's always approved. They usually act like it's only done as a customer retention move and at the discretion of the support rep.

I pretty much only get two day shipping if I go into the chat and ask for it. Been a Prime member for years; I just went to look at some more baby stuff being sold by Amazon - overnight is guaranteed by Tuesday, 2 Day Prime Shipping is Thursday. Amazon is pretty good about "making an exception" if I open a chat with a rep and call them on their bullshit. I make four or five Prime purchases a week, and rarely do my goods get a guaranteed date of 2 days. (They often show up in two days, but that's not the same thing.)

I have. Many items are "Prime (ships in 3-5 days)". Seemingly at random, be they big or small (I usually shop more in the electronics and household sector).

I also live ~15mi from an Amazon distribution center, and ~50 miles from a second.

> Amazon's retail catalog is flooded with fakes, drop shippers, bots and low quality products with fake reviews.

I've been noticing this more and more as well. For example, searching for a manual coffee grinder results in three dozen pages of the same four items rebranded and sold by hundreds of individual sellers (and a few chair parts for good measure). All with plenty of good reviews. Finding an actual product amongst all the dreck is getting pretty damned hard.

My biggest gripe is that they merge the reviews of different vendors of the same product, so for heavily-scammed items like laptop batteries, the reviews are almost useless.

I've experienced this problem as well. I really wish a customer review of an Amazon purchase were tied to a particular seller.

For example, I was recently looking at a Hario Buono kettle [1] to make coffee. There are two versions of it, one made in Japan and one made in China. Unfortunately they share the same model number. The Japanese version is considered better quality.

Of course Amazon has the lowest price compared to specialty coffee retailers, but since they don't differentiate between the two origins, it's a gamble. Different third party sellers stock one version or the other. You can see in the reviews that people have received both. Without the reviews being tied to a particular seller, it's hard to say what you'll get, so I'll end up buying from somewhere else instead.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Hario-VKB-120HSVV60-Buono-Pouring-Ket...

If you go down to the right and click on the "Used & New (161) from $xx.yy" link, you can see the individual sellers including notes from them about origin and where it ships from.

The bigger problem for some of these is actually going to be with anything "Fulfilled by Amazon" because there's some chance that the products with identical numbers will be mingled in Amazon's warehouses. Never having sold through them, does supposedly-identical stock get mingled like that? I think that was one of the problems people were having with counterfeiting.

Some specify "shipping from Japan", but most don't seem to say "Made in China" or "Made in Japan" (it would be really convenient if they did). I don't think the shipping country necessarily implies the origin of the product, at least, I'd rather not gamble based on that.

It would be nice if every seller specified where their version was made, or really more correctly that the two units would be listed with different SKUs.

Yes, much too little too late for myself and several colleagues.

I seldom use Amazon now except as an ISBN-lookup and general book review facility and even then they often mix together reviews of different but similarly-titled ( non-fiction ) books, despite discrete ISBNs. Their subsidiary ABEBooks is much better for actually buying second-hand books.

What a sad state when I have been shopping on Amazon since 1999 but now find eBay a better experience. I haven't even written an Amazon review in a couple of years, just don't have the motivation anymore.

I didn't renew prime this year, for the first time since its launch. I started getting bizarrely frequent errors with small items too inexpensive to bother with returning. I'd get 1 package of floss when I'd ordered a pack of 10, or just the top part of a soap dispenser.

It's also kind of tedious to always have to go through and make sure you're buying from amazon, because otherwise the odds you're getting a knock-off or an already-expired supplement are way too high.

I stay away from third party sellers on Amazon these days as much as possible(as in I'll look elsewhere and only come back to them if they're the only viable option) and Amazon had been getting a lot closer to regular retail for stuff they sell directly, but I still find them cheaper in a lot of instances.

I've not had problems with two day Prime shipping. They seem to have good relationship with USPS locally and things get delivered quickly and smoothly. Where I've been less impressed is their so-called "same day delivery" that has been very unreliable. The company they use here for it is Lone Star Overnight, and they drop the ball all the time, sometimes badly enough that I would have gotten it as fast with 2 day shipping. Only bright side there is that I've got lots of partial refunds and a few months of Prime for free.

I can't stand the "incentivized" reviews, and found this chrome plugin to be really helpful, it basically goes through and tries to remove the fake reviews for you and give you a new, more correct score without them - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reviewmetacom-revi...

This is rather helpful. When I was looking for a cheap carry-on duffel with particular dimensions a few months ago, most items had ~10 incentivized reviews, and nothing genuine. You almost start looking for 4-star products, just because the reviews may actually be legitimate.

Aren't incentivized reviews banned now? https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/abpto3jt7fhb5oc

I didn't realize they had added that to their policy. While that's awesome, I still see a ton of them on there.

From some quick googling - https://www.amazon.com/Sentey-LS-4232-Headphones-Microphone-...

Any particular example of a problem you had with products that you could point to? It's fairly easy to link to a particular "home good" that you had problems with. I use Amazon all the time for virtually everything and have had practically zero problems over the past 5 years.

And even when its not a fake or not the correct brand, it can be expired.

Contrary to a lot of comments I've seen lately I haven't had any issues with Amazon (is this wrong to say?). Maybe I've just not been purchasing the right (er, wrong) things but I've never had an issue with their customer service or item quality. One time I received an item a day late, got a full refund and a second item was shipped out to me next day.

I've been a prime member for the past 6 years or so and I think prime is just getting better for my needs. I noticed my mouse wheel was making noise at 2 am Saturday morning. I ordered a wireless G403 and a sleep mask and had both by 8pm that night for no shipping cost (other than what I pay for Prime).

I'm not too price conscious when it comes to small items, but the mouse was $20 cheaper than at Microcenter.

On topic: I'm glad to see this review change. Personally I think they could go even more strict on non-verified reviews. I am extremely skeptical of products that provide reviews for a discount. But if it's an item that quality really matters, I already know what I'm buying when I get to Amazon -- I've done my research.

Interesting that this doesn't apply to books. Is that market just vastly different?

> "Interesting that this doesn't apply to books. Is that market just vastly different?"

Maybe people don't return books when they aren't happy with them?

They don't care about fake book reviews anyways. I noticed a "Top 100" book reviewer was just writing the same exact review for every book they reviewed. Reported that and just got their standard "We're sorry you didn't like the review" response.

I was really pissed once when I got a Steve Alten book, it was terrible, then when I looked at the glowing 5-star reviews they were transparently written by him or a delegate. I've never returned a book before, but that time I wanted to do it out of principle.

I sort by Top Critical and read those reviews instead.

It seems to work pretty well to answer the question "Is this book not worth buying?" Or, if I'm not in a rush to read it, I just check out the book from the library first instead, then buy it only if I really really like it.

Hmm, good point. Makes me wonder why that policy doesn't apply to video games then. Maybe it does.

I wonder how useful the average person finds book reviews. Regardless, that's a shame about their response.

I think if you stick to items sold by "Amazon.com" and items that are hard to or not economical to fake you are probably ok.

So complicated electronics, your probably safe. Unless its a premium brand:

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3133627/technology-law-...

The fact that Amazon somehow let 90% of a certain set of products (Apple Accessories) be sold as fakes is crazy. Basically, I no longer trust Amazon at all. I will still buy from them, but it just got a lot more tedious (verification required on all my purchases).

I hope this cuts down on negative reviews from obvious competitors too. I've seen that a lot on products where the product literally shows up on Amazon (a product I am selling) then within 12 hours has like 3-4 1 star reviews from non purchasing people. Obviously it hit some keyword they are searching for and then they go in and spam it. This is one of the reasons people are so crazy about trying to figure out how to get paid reviews and whatever because you very very often get spammers who work for a competitor who are trying to lower your rank to help themselves.

It does not address my latest issue with reviews -- the reviews don't apply to the actual item in question. Looking for a copy of "Don Quixote," the first 5-star review discussed two different translators -- neither of which was the translator for the edition in question. Most of he reviews were for other translations of the book.

This is not limited to books, either, as every now and then I see a review for a different model number of a piece of equipment I am looking at.

That or customers write reviews for things like the way the product was packed, or the shipping method that brought the product to their door.

Not only does it not have to do with the product, but same SKU is often sold by multiple sellers. So your packing/shipping experience will differ depending upon whether you bought it "sold by Amazon," "sold by $COMPANY and fulfilled by Amazon," or "sold and shipped by $COMPANY."

A rating for a book shouldn't be affected by the fact that one buyer ended up buying it from some rando third party retailer who fulfilled the order by packing it poorly and sending it media mail.

Right, I really wish when you clicked "Write a review" Amazon would explicitly ask: "Is this review about the product or its packaging / delivery to you?" and that the latter would then leave the review with the seller, not the product.

Books are a huge dumpster fire in general. Amazon is full of mass spam from extremely low quality editions of books printed by print-on-demand companies. There are literally hundreds of editions of some public domain books which are all "republished" POD works or sometimes even just Wikipedia articles on the book. And Amazon will show all the reviews together, so you buy based on the reviews of a reputably published version of the book, and instead get an awful quality POD book or even just two pieces of laminated paper with a printout of a wikipedia article.

I have no complaints about prime's two day shipping but having worked at one of these Amazon Fulfilment centers, I'd personally not buy clothing or furry toys, even non perishable food.

The experience up to opening your package is great but it's seeing boxes crumpled up or package nearly destroyed with item inside it intact that really pisses me off but having been a picker before it's really hard to give a shit when you are paid a capped hourly wage walking for 10 hours in steel toe shoe and actively timed against your peers where failing to keep up means termination

I never want to work for Amazon ever again. Not even their software or tech or HQ, it totally ruined it for me. I don't give a shit, it's built on human misery and our escapism through materialism. We are voting with our "things" everytime we shop on Amazon to structurally oppress low-income bracket folks.

But I feel hopeless. I'm chained by their consistent 2-day free shipping and overall an okay experience in helping me procure "things", "stuff".

In fact as I'm writing this I get PTSD thinking about Amazon Fulfilment and the only remedy as pathetic as it is, is indulging in Amazon's Cyber Monday sales extravaganza palooza, contradicting my own gripes about Amazon but unable to overcome the general comfort of buying things on it. It's almost as if buying on Amazon on my Kindle Fire is now an entertainment of some sort :/ which shocks me to write it.

> In a bid to put a stop to false feedback, people can now write only five reviews a week of items not bought via the online store.

> Users can still review as many items as they like if the goods are purchased via the website.

"High end" fake reviewers also get reimbursed for buying the product via Amazon so that they are considered a verified purchase.

IMO, Amazon should consider hiring a team of professional reviewers to generate curated reviews for select products. I understand they couldn't/wouldn't review everything, but given the stakes of public perception, it appears it might be a good investment.

That's a big conflict of interests and Amazon can't be trusted with it. The last thing I want is Amazon reviewing Hachette books instead of real readers. There are likely few categories where Amazon couldn't find a way to "optimize" profit based on the success or failure of certain products.

you are right - they have done one such acquisition with DPreview - https://www.dpreview.com/articles/1690663587/amazonacquiresd...

If someone started faking Amazon Basics products I find it hard to believe Amazon would allow themselves to suffer the same fate others manufacturers have.

You know a platform has reached sufficient lock-in status when its "killer app" (reviews) can go to shit without hurting the business

Speaking of verified reviews, does anyone happen to be an Amazon Vine [1] reviewer? That program appears unchanged by the new limitation.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/help

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13037024.

Good start but it should be zero right?

Why? I bought a book direct from the author, and I liked it enough that I wanted to leave a review. The only place I could think of was Amazon. That was an "unverified purchase", but it was still legit.

Because letting you post your one legitimate review opens the door to spam reviewers who each post five fake reviews a day.

If Amazon can get a sufficient number of verified purchase reviewers, why do we need your review, especially if it opens the doors to abuse?

I'm not saying you should be able to post unlimited numbers of them, but saying zero is very limiting to consumers and creators.

Even 5/mo is probably enough for most legit use cases

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