How Sellers Trick Amazon to Boost Sales
wsj.com
wsj.com
My strategy has always been to read the 1-star and 2-star reviews, most recent first, unless there are so few total (e.g. under a dozen) that I may as well just read them all.
Positive reviews, even 4-star and (enough of the) 3-star tend to be useless to me. What I want to know is why people hated the product. If it's exclusively for reasons that don't apply to me or for risks/problems inherent to the type of product, then I have what I need.
Negative reviews are often also where the best referals to alternative products can be. Of course, those have a high enough likelihood of being posted by a shill that one can't assume it's actually better without reading those reviews, too, but it can beat grinding through all of Amazon's search results.
All that said, the worsening counterfeit and delivery situation means I've bought hardly anything in the past year, after a progressive decline in buying the year before.
Content-free ones like "hated it" or "didn't work" or even "DOA" (and nothing more) can generally be summarily ignored.
Other ones I don't exactly ignore but, perhaps, dismiss, are of the form "it was too complicated for me to use" or "it didn't solve my specific problem". In general, I already know ahead of time what I'm up against in terms of ease of use, problem "fit", or similar issues. However, if not, these comments can, in aggregate, be helpful in setting expectations, just not in rejecting the product.
Another dismissal-worthy category I alluded to are complaints that are generally universal to all products of that type. A trivial, historical example would be complaining about hard drive capacities being advertised in SI units not matching the power-of-2 units displayed by the OS. A more modern example would be external battery pack mAh capacity claims, where it's often the nominal (raw) capacity of the 3.6V internal cells, not the 5V USB output (which isn't 100% efficiently converted), further confounded by the fact that capacity varies widely by discharge rate.
If there's a truly high volume of content, I end up trying to scan for people who have written both lengthier reviews and mention something that sounds like my personal use case. It's time-consuming, unfortunately, and, with today's chance of getting a counterfeit anyway, not even worth it for most of those items.
I'm not merely counting 1-star reviews but actually reading them for content.
IOW, what content would a competing vendor be leaving in a review that would confound my research?
How is Amazon thriving? I don't get it. Don't other people have the same experience?
I've started experimenting with Walmart to replace lots of the stuff I usually get from Amazon. Unsure about them yet.
Unless Amazon ditches the 3rd party sellers, I won't be back.
But amazon wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to offload all that inventory risk into others and it wants its customers to pay the same or more as other retailers who you can trust to not sell counterfeit goods.
A consumer’s only solution is to switch your purchases to actual retailers who are selling goods you can trust.
At the very least, Amazon should mark the commingled vs. non-commingled status for each offer. Right now, you only see this once you hold the item in your hands - if there's a barcode starting with "X" on the package, it's non-commingled AFAIK.
(But I wonder if Amazon actually authenticates X-labeled incoming merchandise, e.g. by requiring a shared secret on the package slip. Otherwise, if an attacker sends in a fake item that's X-labeled as if it came from an honest seller, they would still be able to tank the reputation of the honest seller. Maybe this could even be done from the position of an Amazon customer, i.e. they would apply the fraudulent X-label to a swapped "returned" item. Who would believe the honest seller in this circumstance?)
If so...I'm just going to buy name brand items in stores and get a price match.
Another Amazon horror story would be I was listening to an Amazon seller podcast. The person being interviewed sold supplements. He said he imported some herbs from South America, picked them up at the airport, dropped them off at the plant with some bottles, got them, and sent them off to Amazon. Nowhere did he mention fda or anything. I'm hoping things are a lot harder now to sell your own private label supplements on Amazon, like requiring GMP certificates or invoices from a credible manufacturer... Or even worse electronics from China that do not have any of the required testing that retail brick and mortar stores require. Or ah maybe the worst story of all. The Amazon seller who sells used bras as new on Amazon. I stopped buying bras on Amazon after I heard that one at an Amazon seller event.
"Dietary supplements" are essentially unregulated. The manufacturer is responsible for doing any quality control/inspections/etc. The FDA might come after you after you sell something, but they do absolutely no verification before. I can't find any evidence that the regulation requires anyone but the manufacturer to do anything and it doesn't seem there is any verification. (in other words, don't trust supplements no matter where you buy them)
On the other hand, all meat that isn't privately sold is required to be inspected before and after slaughter and processing by the USDA. The packing plants have to shut down if there aren't inspectors there.
Sorry, but they do. I've sold new stuff on Amazon. I ship it out to their warehouses. When you look at the product, you will see my price amongst the various Prime sellers. However, when you ship something new to Amazon, they ask whether it is OK to comingle your product with Amazon's. There's no good reason to say "No". So when you buy from me, you could be getting the one owned by Amazon, and vice versa.
Nowadays I feel almsot more confident to buy on ebay from sellers that have thousands of ratings with a high positive percentage.
Newegg so far hasn't done either of those things, and I simply select "Sold by Newegg" as the only options I'll consider when looking.
I also get annoyed at every damn e-store now being a giant import of some silly bazaar database - but at least Newegg still gives you the ability to ignore it.
As a result the services suffer, and they will continue to do so which then opens up a niche for a new seller to come along. Ebay has suffered the same cyle.
He emailed me repeatedly offering refunds or a new rope, etc to change my review. This only encouraged me to post more pictures and comparisons. Eventually, they just added like 20 reviews to push mine down.
I don't buy anything on AMZN anymore unless it is something where I know I'm getting the real thing at a good price. Typically you can find those cheap Chinese items on AMZN for a lot less at Walmart or a local store. It's a shame that AMZN isn't able to police their reviews culling all the fakery.
amazon was always the wild west. since 2009 when I started to use amazon heavily I remember having to always police myself to never buy from items without the "sold by amazon" note.
it has nothing to do with evil foreigners or going down to alibaba level. amazom was always the alibaba of the US.
Just 10 minutes ago I paid 10% more for a tool at home depot because I honestly wasnt sure if I would get a fake version on amazon and 10% was worth being relatively sure.
A lot of other stores will do the same with online competitors (or their own online pricing). My example from 2 days ago is Target price matching 2x2032 batteries from $7 to the target.com price of $3.
What you've missed is that ever since Amazon added "fulfilled by Amazon" what "sold by Amazon" means is only "pulled from stock in an Amazon warehouse, with that stock coming from both Amazon wholesale orders and stock shipped in by third party sellers." Basically commingling of stock means that "Sold by Amazon" is entirely an accounting function now and says nothing about the physical products or their origin.
Ironically you only supported your own argument through a personal anecdote.
I see a lot of books, especially business, productivity, time management books, written by authors who churn out poor quality (but legit, in that they're not filled with nonsense which is another scam) books by the dozens that mostly are the same book but freshened or rearranged. These books are low-cost so I've taken a chance on a few of them.
What made me try them if they have hundreds of legit looking reviews and 4 and 5 star ratings. I imagine there's some sort of "farm" for Amazon self-publishers that does this.
[https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/truth-advert...]
Maybe they meant this to be a positive statement, but to me this just means they're not catching anything except the most egregious cases. Any cursory look at a popular product makes this look like a silly statement.
How many of the reviews from 1998 are fake vs 2018? What is the probability of a marginal review being fake. My guess is 15-20%.
Oh, good. So there are only millions of fake reviews on Amazon. That's just fine, then. Not a problem.
I'd bet in competitive categories - electronics, clothing, etc. - it's more like 50% fakes.
Apparently in many cases the expense of buying and shipping (usually to a random US address) is well worth a top product placement spot.
They don’t seem to ship the actual items but random junk instead (to get a tracking number?).
The worst offender recently has been a fitness tracker called Goqii which is a completely useless gadget imo but has more than 22k positive reviews on amazon.
Because VPNs to American servers are dirt cheap.
Maybe even not blocking them outright but just rate-limiting would provide comparable friction. It could even be more effective if they never try the VPN route to discover that it's faster.
Now, if Amazon would be sincere about preventing fraud, they would ban the IPs of fraudulent comments and somehow cooperate with the providers if they use random IPs. In other words, you would have to rent a new apartment for every bad review. That's an exhibitive cost.
With "wages low skilled" at 4650BDT [1] that's $55.50 at today's exchange rate. I'm standing by my estimate of "some", as a 2.7% "tax" on income isn't negligible, and could have far greater significance for those who earn at the bottom of the scale.
Why not add some obvious QA features like: - reporting fake reviews - reporting fake/misleading listings - reporting fake reviewers - reporting listings where the product has been changed for something else
Many other glaringly obvious issues: - vastly different products listed on the same page (to gather more reviews & sales = better ranking) - shipping cost > item cost - sellers promising a refund for a good review (especially to those that complain) - fake 'only 1 left in stock' listings - always-on-sale listings - ...
Also while I'm complaining, as a frequent Amazon shopper there are a few missing filter/search options, in particular: - listing age - not deliverable to your address/country (frequent issue I have with cross-border shopping)
Are they injecting their amazon affiliate code into your amazon shopping session via their browser plugin?
From their privacy policy[1]
Additionally when you make a purchase or attempt to make a purchase through the Service, we collect certain information from you, including your name, billing address, shipping address, payment information (including credit card numbers), email address, and phone number. We refer to this information as “Order Information.”
We share your Personal Information with third parties to help us use your Personal Information, as described above. We use Google Analytics to help us understand how our customers use the Service. You can read more about how Google uses your Personal Information here: https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/. You can also opt-out of Google Analytics here: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
Finally, we may also share your Personal Information to comply with applicable laws and regulations, to respond to a subpoena, search warrant or other lawful request for information we receive, or to otherwise protect our rights.
That said, I don't use their browser extensions so I'm not sure how they (if they) monetize that. I just paste in the URL to the product I suspect is 'too goo to be true' into the fakespot site. If it passes that, I do my own other digging on the item to determine if I think I can 'trust it'. Mainly, co-mingled inventory, seller ratings, cherry picked 1-star and 5 star reviews, other review websites, etc.
If it did happen to me though, it would definitely sour my experience.
I don't know what to think about you and other "Amazon is all hunky dory" posters not seeing ripoff garbage all over -- because I see it literally everywhere. Do you not actually shop that much there? (Unlikely, otherwise you wouldn't have posted.) Are you easily duped? (Uncharitable and unlikely for HN demographic.) Do you buy only books?
It was always par for the course to be extra careful before I buy, never had a lot of trust in online retail products.
Amazon "won" in this case because for the cost it wasnt worth my time in returning them.
Https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CHV2WI8/ref=twister_B00J29O7AO?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
They came in real Hue packaging. Opening the packages, not a one of them contained a Hue bulb. One was even an incandescent!
I got a refund for all three and got real bulbs.
>"There was an interesting podcast about this."
Do you happen to remember what podcast this was?
Found it. Here you go. It's a Planet Money podcast and is very interesting. They actually interview people in China who do this.
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
When the Amazon review system was created back in the 1990s, there was no requirement to purchase the item. That led to people often reviewing books they got from the library, or books that they already owned in their home library before Amazon existed. There were no scammers around to ruin things yet, and even if people weren’t buying every book from Amazon, they were still drawn to the site by these social features, the very vibrant "community" of book fans.
Over the past few years, Amazon has already removed various community discussion forums. Apparently, now that the site has reached a dominant market position, it feels that social features are no longer necessary to attract or retain customers. As part of these changes, Amazon has also reduced the visibility of non-verified purchase reviews on many listings. Still, its efforts are gradual, maybe it feels that completely limiting the review system to verified purchases would be too drastic a step.
So I ordered the set. After some days, I get a notification that the set has been shipped. But no tracking number, which is odd for a shipment of such value.
After a week or two, I contacted the seller if they could give me a tracking number or at least confirm the address they sent it to. They gave no tracking number a confirmed the shipping address, but left out the country.
So I asked in response if they could confirm the country. I then was told that the address the shipment was sent to was the address in my contact info, without details.
So I again contacted them with the request to explicitly confirm the shipping country. Then I was told that they could not find me other and therefore refunded my money.
Two weeks later, I went back to Amazon and noticed they re-listed the item (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01A68XF9I/).
Then, I noticed several buyers complaining about items sent to the wrong address, packages being incomplete, etc :
* "1 out of 5 stars I ordered Love is in the Earth, a Kaleidoscope of Crystals. 7/30/18 -I received the wrong book in error Love is in the Earth- Laying on of Stones. I have contacted the store through Amazon, received a response and sent photos of the wrong book cover, back, spine and invoice. Awaiting response"
* "I have been back and forth with this seller about sending us two copies of the wrong ISBN. They have yet to provide a full refund for both books we ordered. They only provided a 50% refund at this point, and it has been more than a week of attempting to get our money back. Do not trust this seller to provide you with the correct items!"
* "Only one book out of the 10 book set arrived. A mistake was made. The seller responded timely and was very courteous."
* "The book arrived well before the expected delivery date but it was definitely not the version I ordered. The description was for the beautiful UK cover edition and I received the cheap mass market paperback production version. Contacted the seller and after multiple e-mails back and forth and pictures sent they ended up refunding the cost of the book so I ended up just paying for shipping."
* "The order that was listed as delivered on June 26, 2018 never arrived. The seller had us confirm our shipping address on July 7, 2018. Now it is July 26, 2018 and the missing order issue has not been resolved. Time for a complete refund of purchase price and shipping costs bookercafe."
* "I have not received my order and it is saying delivered. Can you tell me who signed for this? ORDER NUMBER 113-3032376-5177066"
* "I have purchased two books from this store and one of these orders had been canceled without notification and a fake tracking number has been submitted for the second one. Please refund as soon as possible."
* "lists books they actually don't have. now I have to be troubled to ensure I am refunded."
* "My book never arrived at my mailing address, even though there was a USPS tracking number. When I contacted USPS, they told me it was delivered to the shipping address listed on the packing slip (which was not mine). I contacted the seller, and they told me it must have been a bad tracking number. Haven't heard back...haven't received the book either. I have now submitted a refund request."
* "1 out of 5 stars Another reviewer called it a scam when the book didn't arrive even though there was a tracking number that said it did. Seller told him it was sent to another address. Guess what? Same thing happened to me. A bad tracking number and the excuse that it was sent to a different address. I never heard from them again after they said they would check into it. I've submitted a refund request."
* "I ordered five books from them. One arrived OK, the other four never came but they kept my money for almost a month. One had no tracking number, the other three all had fake tracking numbers, re-used numbers that showed the books were delivered to three other cities. I had to fight them and contact Amazon to get a promise of refunds, and they are still stalling. Cheaters"
* ...
Overall, however, customers appear satisfied and the store has a feedback score of 91% for 335 ratings.
However, judging by the fact that 309 of those reviews were from the last 90 days, the store seems to exist only about 4 to 6 months on Amazon.
Something else I noticed, is that I get their > 400,000 results and that there are quite a few items listed for the same amount of $509, most of which I can't imagine are actually worth that much and are sold by other sellers at much lower prices :
* Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker Trilogy (https://www.amazon.com/Douglas-Adams-Hitchhiker-Trilogy/dp/B...)
* Diablo III: Book of Cain (https://www.amazon.com/Diablo-III-Deckard-Blizzard-Entertain...)
* The American Pageant (https://www.amazon.com/American-Pageant-fifteenth-Kennedy-Ha...)
* Calculus: Concepts and Applications (https://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Concepts-Applications-Paul-F...)
* The Free Range Cook: Simple Pleasures (https://www.amazon.com/Free-Range-Cook-Simple-Pleasures/dp/B...)
* O'Connor Violin Method Book I and CD (https://www.amazon.com/OConnor-Violin-Method-Book-CD/dp/B005...)
* Winnie the Pooh Complete Collection 30 Books Box Set (https://www.amazon.com/Winnie-Complete-Collection-Books-Slip...)
* No Excuses! The Power of Self-discipline (https://www.amazon.com/Excuses-Power-Self-discipline-Brian-H...)
* Straight White Men (https://www.amazon.com/Straight-White-Young-March-Paperback/...)
* Sequential Spelling 3: Teacher's Guide (https://www.amazon.com/Sequential-Spelling-3-Teachers-Guide/...)
* ...
The item I ordered has been re-listed at the same price point, a bit after I received my refund for it.
Interestingly, there are now 6 sellers offering the same set with "Used - Good" condition and prices ranging from $506.00 to $548.32. There were only 3 sellers when I checked last time. All of these 6 sellers have a storefront with 300,000 - 700,000 items in them. And this includes a new shop that hasn't sold anything yet!
Since I received my refund As the store I ordered from is the only one shipping to Europe, I asked them if they'd ship be willing to sell it to me again. First they were eager and even offered a 30% discount. When I asked if they could add tracking for a second order, the tone became less friendly and I was asked to remove my (negative) feedback for the initial order.
I'd also asked an explanation for what went wrong with my order but haven't received any.
I also came to notice that this seller uses a kind of broken English very reminiscent of the broken English of sellers on AliExpress. So I suspect that her native language is Chinese and this account is a good example of a Chinese scammer account. And the same probably applies as well to the other 5 accounts I spotted which sell the same item at roughly the same place.
AliExpress sure has its flaws, but I never really had that much issues with ordering on AliExpress. And I certainly never came close to experiences as strange / fishy on AliExpress as my recent experience with third party sellers on Amazon... which really surprises me, as this type of seller should be easy to spot, even by an algorithm!
I'll definitely think twice next time I see an interesting book - or set of books - on Amazon that's sold by a third party seller! I feel like Amazon urgently has some serious closet cleaning to do!