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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Fakespot when buying anything I don't trust on Amazon now. It's amazing how many highly-rated items with 300+ reviews get an F grade.

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That's brilliant. Here's Fakespot page for the headphones I wrote about: https://www.fakespot.com/product/bluedio-f2-faith-active-noi...

If Fakespot is able to spot the fake reviews, Amazon could have also utilized the similar tech. What stops them?

May be the spotting is actually not that great. One way to test it is to find a popular, known-to-be good product that you have and see what the result is. The example I tried was the Instant Pot (which is rated D): https://www.fakespot.com/product/instant-pot-ip-duo60-7-in-1...

Oddly enough, the same product listing on the US site is rated as A (the above is for the Canadian site): https://www.fakespot.com/product/instant-pot-ip-duo60-7-in-1...

It's not the product which is rated, but if the reviews seem to be genuine.

Right. And the point of my test is to test fake spotting algorithm by finding product that is highly unlikely to have fake reviews.

Just did a quick check again, the Canadian instant pot reviews are now rated as F while the US ones are rated as A. Same product, both ship and sold by Amazon, the algorithm returns polar opposite result.

And a known-good product doesn't mean it won't have fake reviews. The fake reviews are there to boost sales, even for legit products.

If it's an arms race for reviews, at some point, even good products will have to pay up to keep pace.

I don't understand. If your product is already rated 4.5+ stars with thousands of reviews, what's the point of adding fake review? How does that boost sales?

Normally the first hundreds were faked, followed by occasional fake reviews to drown out dissatisfaction

Even for known-good, popular, top-selling products? The example I cited has 24k+ reviews for the US and 3.8k+ for Canada.

Seeing as the site lists 11k reviews that were removed from the page, yes.

Why waste engineers times when you're on top with hardly any competition? Google and Facebook only started caring about fake information under congressional pressure.

Fake reviews are usually positive. That is just advertising for Amazon which unlike normal advertising HIDES the fact that it is paid-for advertising. Amazon benefits when there is fake positive advertising about stuff sold through them.

Now it is possible that Amazon actually does a good job of stopping fake negative advertisement on its site. Good for them. What would stop them? I don't think there are any laws against putting more money into stopping fraud which does not benefit you than fraud which does.

Fake reviews are mostly 5 star, and people reading the reviews want confirmation of their purchase intent.

Amazon has an incentive in showing positive reviews first, as this makes a sale.

Look at an Amazon listing and the 5 star review is always shown first.

Likely because it isn't actually costing them much in lost sales?

On the contrary, it probably improves their sales to have extra positive reviews scattered around.

Jeff Bezos is no idiot....he knows he can let this run until it starts to become truly scandalous, and then Amazon can have a big showy come to Jesus change of heart, and all will be forgotten. Rinse, repeat.

so, you mean, Amazon play the price whatever they want? If they hide real price and show fake price?

Profit they make from extra sales due to fake reviews? Why do you assume fake reviews are bad for Amazon bottom line?

When a customer is burned by a bad product with excellent reviews, especially more than once, ordering from Amazon could quickly become more trouble than it's worth.

I think in that case people will fall back to buying the brands they know rather than trusting the reviews. There are plenty of other reasons people are loyal to Amazon, so bad reviews on their own, I don't think, will be enough to stop people shopping there.

Fake reviews don’t push bad products necessarily. They just make it a bit harder to get the truly best one.

Well if you buy something that is really a load of garbage. They will get more returns to process

Money. They only care about short term sales. Amazon doesn't care about how much you trust amazon... for now. Once they've lost everyone's trust then they're start to care.

As far as I know (and in my experience so far, e.g. reflected in very lenient return policy) customer trust has been their highest priority from their beginnings, which is one of the main things that made them successful in the early web in the end.

They have been risking it by their issues with counterfeit products and fake reviews only in the most recent years, but I would be surprised if they had no engineers who are thinking about ways to solve these problems.

That’s not true at all

Er. Profit?

This is a great idea. They need to hook this thing up to Glassdoor.

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