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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Well.. this story directly provides an answer (potentially) -they get an additional marginal ranking benefit inside some market appraisal score because they double their international successful completion count, for low marginal cost of posting negligible weight content to you successfully. The benefit to them is fraud, but not against you: its against the ranking engine inside some digital marketplace like alibaba. You are an unrelated third party who validates (by accepting) delivery. Since you don't know if the package is shrinkwrap "free gift" or the $20 meter, you accept. Are you willing to monty-hall reject the random package :-)

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So if I understand this right, they are creating a fake account on some other site (aliexpress, etc...) with his address attached. And then they ship the 'gift' from the Amazon tracking number, so that he is more likely to accept that package, and then ship the multimeter from the fake account tracking number, allowing them to leave themselves a positive review on that site.

I always suspected something was going on with the aliexpress ratings. If you look at the reviews it is a lot of one liners like 'i got the item as described!' with a 5 star rating.

This is the most convoluted thing I've had to think through in awhile.

Jeez. Honestly, I mostly ignore reviews on Chinese listing sites unless they're low. It's all about two things:

1. Is the price in line with other listings? From both directions?

2. How many people have ordered it in the past 90 days?

Sometimes that does mean taking a risk with specialty items, or foregoing them. But hey, if it's a critical application I'm not going to source it from sketchy international cheap-o listings.

My hypothesis: Suppliers of goods rank by satisfaction, the web search pages show them first. Front page ranking is the endgame: nobody goes to the second rank. Completed sales. foreign delivery sales rank higher than domestic. So a seller who can make a real sale, and couple into it a fake gift as a satisfied sale overseas gets a cheap 2x legup in the ranking. They sort higher, therefore they get more primary sales. Therefore they make more money.

Why couldn't they just say that the purchase of a multimeter includes a free gift that will be shipped independently, and then ship the multimeter with the regular tracking and the free gift later using whatever economies of scale you are proposing?

Yeah this is what I'm wondering too.

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