"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
I don't know a way around this with Amazon but it is getting increasingly annoying using a site where everything is 4-5 stars with hundreds or thousands of reviews and you need incredible intuition to tell the fake reviews from the real ones.
But now, you're right. It has gotten so difficult to trust any review and I often find myself ping-ponging around competing products trying to intuit what reviews are the least fake. Good reviews have simply become a target that don't necessarily signal a good product.
It's not perfect, but it's something.
Another strange thing about the "Amazon's Choice" label is this: I've seen a product get that label in part due to a low number of returns ... but the seller doesn't accept returns! That should be a con, not a pro.
As you can probably tell, I have not been happy with the results of following Amazon's product choice advice.
Then you notice the keywords attached to "Amazon's Choice". Oftentimes, they're strange and esoteric. Oftentimes, that flag is put on what appears to be a random off-brand item sitting right next to a much, much better product more deserving of that "Choice" insignia.
https://bardsandsages.com/juliedawson/2018/05/06/amazon-froz...
It will be like de-monization (of YT videos) all over again.
Anecdotal evidence: when my mother and her team were running for student council (in college), the opposing team introduced blatantly fake votes (photocopied) in favor of her team; my mother's team got disqualified for cheating, and the opposing team won.
So I could certainly picture a way in which a mischievous seller could submit fake-looking reviews for another product and get it taken down.
> but the seller doesn't accept returns! That should be a con, not a pro.
US? In the UK, the seller has to accept returns, so that removes one variable (and if the product is bad, you can just send it back).
It feels a lot like Consumer Reports to me, where the reviews of products are handled separately from the vendor.
Just make people research what they're buying elsewhere--which will probably also get swamped with fraud--or just let customers roll the dice without the false sense of security. They're already doing it, but with a bunch of fake 5-stars instead of a bunch of unreviewed items.
While it's definitely a problem, there are WAY more 1-3 star listings than you know, but you'll never see them because the sellers stop selling them or their sales slow down and are dropped from the rankings.
Vendor sells Amazon 500 shirts at $4/unit, retails at $10.
Once in stock, vendor sells the shirts very quickly. They do this by either putting the shirt on sale for pennies, or by using hacked accounts to buy the shirts (or by paying people to buy the shirts).
What happens when Amazon sees that the shirts they ordered sold out in 3 days, and are going to take 30 days to replenish?
They buy more, and although the vendor may have initially been down the $4 * 500, when Amazon places that reorder for 5,000+ units, the vendor is up substantially and bails, leaving Amazon with a ton of inventory.
The socialist solution is some kind of collectively-funded watchdog organization that provides useful review information. The capitalist solution is an organization that straight up charges for reviews, ie, Consumer Reports.
I'm sure someone's working on their startup about it now.
That's more like the liberal social democrat solution.
The Socialist solution is to abolish exchange based production of goods so there's no longer an incentive to lie to increase sales of poor quality products.