Amazon Dark Patterns
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This is shady as hell, because I am 100% sure I wrote this review. I even wrote it twice, once on amazon.com and once translated on a local amazon site. This is slightly infuriating.
And it encourages and even facilitates shady shit.
A bit hyperbolic, but also applies to pretty much every culture which has ever existed.
They said that they wanted their review to appear in the "top negative review" column since it didn't have a shot at the "top positive review" column.
I was dumbfounded.
Really makes you question what is going on in the heads of people around you.
Not her fault. What choice do you have but to assign your own arbitrary meanings to each star, and how aren't those going to vary from person to person?
I never looked at 5-star rating systems the same.
On the other hand, I don't think it's really a problem as long as users are consistent. It doesn't matter how "harsh" they are as long as everyone has similar odds of getting a harsh reviewer.
I do tend to leave slightly below-average ratings because I like leaving room for truly exceptional products/experiences to get a higher rating.
Many times a (good faith) vendor will make small, incremental changes to a product that addresses concerns that low-star reviewers point out. However, the product page remains the same - it does not distinguish between "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch A" and "Seattle Coffee Beans - Batch C". It simply says "Seattle Coffee Beans".
So if you leave a review for Batch A, but the product being sold is now Batch C, should the review still be displayed?
Here, it creates the impression that my comment was swept under the rug for some dubious reasons. And this is probably the last time I ever comment on Amazon. That does not really create a great trust in the system.
That said, video games these days can change a lot from one year to another, whereas almost all of the products on Amazon will not do so.
I believe that got added to help people recognize and filter out review-bombing.
A bad book is a bad book. Batch B of the said book is mostly a new "product" listing on Amazon with its own set of reviews and ratings.
Also if Batch C is being sold or something similar (to batches), a better idea would be (IMO) to have the product owner comment on the review, saying we have fixed this in batch 2 or batch B or something
That is a good idea, but that still does not fix the aggregate data. When someone searches for "Coffee", the aggregate number of reviews is still considering that low-star review. So the "Seattle Coffee Beans" overall rating for Batch C could be a 4.5 / 5, but for all batches is a 2.5 / 5.
The easiest way to fix this is to remove old, out-of-date reviews. This should apply to positive reviews too, but I have no idea if Amazon is doing this.
Another approach is what Steam did - have a long-term rating and a "recent" rating. See "No Man's Sky" as an example [1] - a product that started poor, but improved over time. This helps prevent product brigading and gives vendors an opportunity to bounce back from negative reviews.
Tastes change. That said, you can still find those old reviews. Not so in all cases on Amazon...
For example, No Man's Sky was one of the biggest letdowns in recent gaming releases. It was later patched to be much better.
Check out the reviews here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/
Or make a new listing, and in the description mention what has been fixed.
I was doing this for free, so I just shrugged my shoulders and moved on. I'm not gonna fight the system, but there is money involved I could see how someone would.
Books for example. Some print runs are terrible. So even if the content is great, terrible print quality or construction can lead to bad reviews.
Some books have numbered editions. But if the content is unchanged, should they be different products?
However, I am quite sure I have seen elsewhere this feature. It's not bad. It allows to have more recent opinions about the item.
"Amazon calculates a product’s star ratings using a machine learned model instead of a raw data average. The machine learned model takes into account factors including: the age of a review, helpfulness votes by customers and whether the reviews are from verified purchases."
Selling a marketing tool for businesses and products.
Then I watched the statistics about how many people found this helpful. At that time this was in two numbers: people who think its helpful and people who don't. Over months that ratio kept the same. Started with 1 helpful, 3 not helpful. Then 10 helpful, 30 not helpful. Then 30 helpful, 90 not helpful. I found that highly suspicious.
Since then, amazon reviews are dead to me.
I couldn't find similar stories online (although admittedly that's pretty hard to search for). I'd think it would be a big deal if Amazon was caught doing that, wouldn't it be?
The guy you're replying to probably just forgot what he wrote.
To be fair, you're also giving them the benefit of doubt on this, for which the dark patterns don't seem to justify. It could just be a scandal that hasn't broken, yet.
No, definitely not. But this was almost 10 years ago and I never saved my original writing so I can't tell the exact differences. I guess for the censor at work they where just minor changes but I remember how upset I was because some things I wrote became out of context.
I have no idea of that's true but certainly there are competitors. And Walmart is certainly know for shady tactics.
Obviously there is also some bad UX thrown in for good measure (being able to write a review without being able to send it), but we aren’t necessarily looking at dark patterns here.
This could just be Amazon struggling with and failing at a task (avoiding fake reviews).
Not all bad UX is a dark pattern, sometimes it’s just bad UX … (a dark pattern is bad UX with a positive consequence for the person or company offering up the UI or maybe just and intended positive consequence, even if the UI doesn’t achieve that goal)
I think it’s a stretch to argue that Amazon is really benefiting from any of this and long term this erosion of trust is not at all good for Amazon. I do honestly think that if Amazon could snap with their fingers and remove all fake reviews they would do it. (Which is not to say that Amazon does not employ dark patterns elsewhere.)
I seriously doubt this.
I review most products I purchase and most of the time I leave a description and written review. I tried to leave a 1 star review on an Anker Auxilary Cable I bought that was an "Amazon's Choice" product. I tried for 3 days and every time I receive an error trying to review the product telling me reviews were unavailable. I then tried giving it a 5 star review and it was immediately accepted, at which point I immediately changed the review to 1 star and explained why.
* So oddly I just tried to review a piece of electrical safety equipment I purchased through Amazon a few months back. I tried to give it a 3 Star (and 5 star) review and received the "Sorry, we are unable to accept your review of this product." notification.
Oddly this product has zero reviews. Are sellers allowed to disable reviews for their product listings? If so, do the existing reviews remain visible?
Seriously though, I canceled my prime after I got a fake SD Card that was sold by Amazon. There was no straightforward way of returning it, had to contact customer support.
Later I looked closely and I noticed the reviews warning against fake SD Cards but these were buried in enthusiastic 5 star comments celebrating their new SD Cards and trying to tell the world what a good purchase that was.
Maybe it’s just due to the scale, maybe it’s in the business model but dealing with fakes wasn’t working for me. If I wanted the eBay experience I would have been buying my SD Cards from eBay.
There's also a myriad of custom Perl templates that are essentially impossible to maintain. I once had to investigate where a feedback form sent feedback to, the answer was nowhere for about a year.
Amazon has lax standards as to who can use them to sell their wares (leading to fakes being sold). That’s not UX or a UX dark pattern, that’s a business strategy. (Which doesn’t make it necessarily better or worse than if it were a UX dark pattern if you are judging it morally, it’s just something different.)
Amazon makes it hard to initiate returns. That might be a dark pattern. (In my experience the returns process for things Amazon sells directly or more or less directly, returns are straightforward and simple. Third party sellers are here, again, the problem. And that’s then more a mix of UX and business strategy, where third parties either cannot or are not required to use Amazon’s returns process but have to provide their own, e.g. fall back to writing emails back and forth.)
Reviews are overly enthusiastic, even though the sold product is not genuine. This might be an issue with fake reviews or uncritical customers (themselves unable to recognize fakes) or both – but it’s not really a UI dark pattern.
I would also argue that Amazon’s way of surfacing negative reviews (with the stars histogram and ways to filter reviews by number of stars) doesn’t suggest that it’s Amazon’s intention to hide negative reviews …
There are details like "Sold by SomeScammySeller" or "Fulfilled by Amazon EU S.à.r.l" on the page and there are caveats like showing the same reviews for the same item sold by different sellers.
After the title, there would be a clickable link with the brand name after the title making the impression that you are buying something from that brand.
It Makes it very hard to know WHAT and from WHOM you are buying from and what are all these reviews about. Sometimes you change colour and everything changes.
You need to study the title, you need to study the comments, you need to study the Amazon's way of doing business and have understood what Fulfilled means, What is Amazon EU S.à.r.l, What is their relationship with the sellers and what guarantees they provide.
I don't know how dark or light coloured are these design choices but, in my personal opinion, these create a lot of cognitive loads and combined with not providing a return option and requiring to go by the customer support looks sketchy to me.
Also, consumers believing they had a fake product could then go to the website of these manufacturers, who would have an incentive to make a web-ui to reveal duplicates/phonies.
I'm not gonna pretend I've invented a perfect end-to-end solution here, but if I'm getting 90% of the way there in 10 minutes then let's not pretend it's unsolvable.
I agree in thinking a full on handshake would be required. Not sure how instrumented all of the suppliers would be. And I'd imagine that is where a lot of the pain to build a solution like this would be.
Any other approaches that you could think of that don't require cooperation from every party?
There is also the question of cost and basic reach. You assert this gets 90% of the way there. Do we really think the fake problem is over 10% of traffic today? I'd be surprised if that is the case. I don't have numbers, but I would expect this to be in the .1% range. At the scale of a large store, that is still a giant number.
It has some drawbacks:
- You need a significant number of people to start registering their purchases online, which no one does
- I've heard counterfeiters sometimes operate from the same factory. Legit serials could be generated for fake parts.
- Customers will obliviously try to pursue returns with the victim manufacturer instead of Amazon.
A few years ago I ordered 60 computers from Dell with office 2016. About half of the 2016 serial cards were from the US, they all worked. Of the other half from China, half were already registered under office accounts. These were cards with scratch off covering part of the serial.
I actually went ahead and dug out the conversation for you.
This is my refund request: https://imgur.com/bthMMoN This is the response from Amazon: https://imgur.com/xWK8FVH
Yeah, they refunded me without a fuss but I prefer an experience where the items arrive in expected quality and I keep them.
I think I actually kept the Prime membership for a while but I found myself disillusioned and felt uneasy when shopping at Amazon and later canceled as I was no longer buying stuff from Amazon.
When you end up with a counterfeit, you are being defrauded. How could anyone be happy in that situation just because your money was refunded? I just wanted what I was trying to buy. I didn't want free junk that wastes my time.
Yes, I’m unhappy. A happy purchase is not one where you get a refund for low quality product, a happy purchase is a purchase that you end up spending your money on a product that satisfies you.
I don’t care about 7gbp, that’s not the issue.
Last week I returned a rotary airer that was damaged upon delivery. Amazon online 'help' told me I had to find a courier that could take the outsized parcel AND I had to pay out of pocket for it. They insisted that it be returned. They didn't refund the full postage cost or the cost of packaging.
Amazon are throwing away their hard-won reputation by penny-pinching and treating customers as badly as other retailers. I'm out.
Having said that, Amazon's product mixing is causing a lot of problems and trust issues for a lot of product types. I really hope they fix it.
A dark pattern is not about taking someone's money an running away but it's about impacting their decision making by designing processes or interactions that exploit common behaviour.
An example of a well known dark pattern is adding things to the shopping cart just before check out. Another one is starting a subscription with a click of a button but requiring documents to be faxed for the cancellation.
On my specific case with Amazon, the dark pattern is to make it hard for me to spot a fraudulent item and not making the standard refund process available therefore increasing the chances of purchase and decreasing the chances of refund by making it a hassle. Well, maybe it was not intentional, maybe it was a screw-up but that's again a lot of maybes.
That is vastly different from dark patterns about trying to inflate review scores or encouraging subscriptions to unwanted services. They do those things too, and pretty effectively.
I don't think they can really solve it without a complete top-to-bottom shift in how they track and inventory products internally. Most of the fixes that I've seen proposed just lead to the vendors and merchants gaming the system in different ways.
I've also heard that if a listing receives too many reviews in one day, they will prevent it from receiving any new reviews. I think certain unscrupulous sellers have also figured out how to take advantage of that, which is a little funny. Just post all your fake reviews before your unhappy real American customers wake up...
Products with good reviews generate more sales than those with comments stating problems with the product or delivery process, specially among infrequent buyers. (Frequent buyers may learn to ignore comments altogether, or at least spot valuable comments from fakes).
So the bad pattern is not allowing fake reviews as much as it is rejecting legitimate negative reviews.
Having a cheap/free way to evaluate products by letting the customers do it is an advantage, especially if your goal is to sell everything (so you have no hope to evaluate it all yourself) – but it’s only an advantage if some useful signal is provided.
With strings of negative purchasing experiences customers might begin to look somewhere else. That’s why Amazon has a vested interest to provide reviews that are more signal than noise.
Gaming the rankings/listings isn't an issue exclusive to amazon, every single website has this issue, in fact even phone books (remember those) had to contend with people listing their name with leading A's to try to get to the front. Gaming listings is as old as lists and until we can come up with a solution to that problem we're always gonna have problems like this.
For example I would expect lots of legitimate users to review the same small set of TV shows or video games if they buy into a series or franchise.
I suspect that Amazon just have an incentives problem - purging their site of fake five-star reviews would go a long way to restoring trust in their platform, but it would negatively impact sales in the short-term. From what I've heard, Amazon has a very decentralised and data-driven management culture, which is antithetical to the short-term pain/long-term gain implicit in fixing their reviews problem.
I would rather have less, but more accurate, reviews than have all of them but many of them being fake.
It seems like a use-case where a high false positive rate would be acceptable. Unlike say, medical diagnosis or something.
Take, for example, the review of the weights in the article. I would have ignored his review, even if it had been posted. He reviewed Amazon's warehouse rather than the product on hand.
A bit deceitful but maybe better for UX.
Maybe you meant make a system that can do it, and do it without false positives to not upset legitimate users when their own reviews are removed.
I’m confused about the ease people expect this problem to be solved. It’s so easy to solve it exists on every popular platform: see the paid, fake reviews on the Apple App Store.
I reported this to Amazon via Twitter on July the 18th [2] (Sorry, German).
I checked yesterday and despite Amazon promising to look into this, all reviews where still there. So I tweeted to them again and, at last, they're deleted today.
But why is this not detected automatically? 378 verified 'customers' that all review the product, with five stars, on the same day?? What are the chances?
And the language of the reviews was also so similar that even a Markov model could be used to detect they must be from the same person (or bot). No machine learning needed.
[1] https://www.amazon.de/MAOFINE-MacBook-Adapter-Charger-Replac... [2] https://twitter.com/virtualritz/status/1019741791422173185
Depends on the product. For a highly anticipated release like a video game or an iphone, pretty high.
I would say that this sort of thing should raise an automatic ticket in a moderation queue, but I wouldn't autodelete the reviews.
There's a whole industry around this - The Reply All podcast interviewed people who make these reviews. They talk about the economics of reviews and Amazon's reluctance to admit there is a problem.
I guess keeping the user captive leads to more sales
I thought that was a shady way of closing a sale.
Well you did just show that it's not :)
Unless you were joking, in which case, whoosh me.
So I thought you had figured out a way around that.
Hah, joke's on them. When the item arrived I'd honestly say, "I didn't order that," and shut the door without paying.
I can’t prove it’s not a bug, but it seems such a blaring issue that it’s impossible that they haven’t been noticed, specially since some people can’t ever ship to a home address.
I agree with other commenters that this behavior is not very dark and probably mostly bad UX, but it stuck me as they maybe not telling me that due to regulatory/shipping/safety issues it was better or more economic to ship directly to home.
Now a dropdown pops out and asks if you're sure you wanna leave checkout, you can choose "back to cart" and "continue checkout".
This is for US desktop. could be different for other devices/locations.
Still true over here (outside US).
Those reviews are indeed suspicious, and Amazon should do a better job of detecting fake review accounts.
The third issue is the author complaining about the shipping in a product review. An understandable mistake, but Amazon is right not to publish it. When trying to learn about a product it's annoying to scroll past shipping reviews like "Arrived quickly, five stars!"
In total, I see no dark pattern at all.
The platform and shipping are relevant in a product review.
I don't want to get a TV that gets shipped badly, sure. But if the only problem with shipping is that it is slow, maybe I'm still interested in the product because I don't get it anywhere else and I can wait. In that case I'm mostly interested in the product review.
I recently ordered a poster through Amazon. They sent me the wrong item 3 times. I gave up. And I can’t post a negative review despite it clearly being Amazons fault (not the shipper). I tried. Couldn’t. At least they have excellent customer service, they didn’t jerk me around and each resolved the issue as best they could.
Yes, you can, if you ever get to the review page. The ratings on reviews average out into the product rating. If there is a zillion one star "shipping is slow and Amazon customer service sucks" reviews, the product (which might be of very high quality otherwise) will have a one start rating. So you are not likely to see the product, since it will not make it into any sort of rating based list and even if you do see it you are likely to ignore it based on its one star rating.
Amazon does actually have a system for that, but it's only applicable to third party ("Marketplace" in Amazon lingo) sellers. For third party sellers, you can review products with the usual Product Reviews, and then for things like shipping issues (and customer service issues, and anything else that isn't the product itself) you'd mention that in your Seller Feedback. When you buy from a third party seller, there'll be a "leave seller feedback" button when you view your order. You can view a seller's feedback by clicking on their name when you see it in the product listing.
There's no "leave seller feedback" button when you place an order from Amazon though.
I've ordered enough stuff from Amazon to know how I feel about the shipping and platform. The only thing I care about in reviews is the product itself. A product shouldn't be penalized if Amazon stuffs up the shipping.
Totally disagree! The product should be the same every time, but each customer is going to have a completely different shipping experience based on stock levels, warehouse proximity, carrier selection, and even based on whether the warehouse employee packing your order had enough sleep last night.
You saying the shipping was good, bad, fast, or slow, tells me virtually nothing about what my shipping experience will be.
It would be cool if there was a meta-item in Amazon inventory to represent Prime or the "Amazon experience" where you could leave reviews like this, but they don't belong on individual item listings.
I have to say for all the people complaining but still staying with Amazon, there's a simple solution that will force their hand if enough people act:
Stop buying from them.
Personally I cancelled my Prime subscription because no service is worth enough to me to force other human beings to pee in bottles to avoid work breaks for fear of being sanctioned.
[cancel prime membership]
...
"do you want to terminate your membership?"
[ask me later][keep me signed up][terminate]
...
"you'll lose [x], do you want to terminate?"
[ask me later][terminate][keep me signed up]
...
"but even shipping will cost!"
[keep me signed up][ask me later][terminate]
...
you're now unsubscribed
[sign me back on][ok]
I can't count the number of low-star reviews where it says something like "the guy tried to deliver at the wrong time" or "I bought the wrong product by mistake and Amazon wouldn't take it back" or whatever. That doesn't help me at all.
Between this and a few more incidents, I no longer buy anything on Amazon where getting a valid OEM brand version of an item is important to me.
The good news is that for the few years I was pretty much Amazon exclusive the rest of the internet got really good at ecommerce too so it's a much better ordering from other companies online now.
Whoever receives a faulty example, they'll obviously get their money back, and I find this type of review misleading when trying to evaluate a working version of the product.
Since it was otherwise well-reviewed and cheap, I took my chances. Sure enough it was minorly-damaged when I received it, but worked out ok.
Show a custom review dialog, if the user gives 4-5 stars send them to the app store for the real review, if not just say "thank you" and close the dialog. Repeat until one day they'll give you a good review.
But now the growth hackers of the world had the brilliant idea to treat bad reviews like "the user isn't ready for a review"
Some app-store marketing guru told the startup I'm contracting with, that this is the way to go, because you're pretty much f*cked if you get reviews below 4.
Basically, once some start gaming the system - the others have to follow or they are dead.
It's similar to how irregular migration or general screwing over of workers works: if some farmers are paying 'under wages' or some factories are 'undercutting' ... then the others stand to lose business and are sucked into the same practices.
It's one thing when a massively successful entity like Amazon does shady stuff, but for most businesses ... it seems to often be kind of a quandary.
Its sad that this is the way things are done but what can you do about it really? You can't fight every battle you need to pick what matters
I'm only half kidding. I once had an issue with a Google product that they only fixed after ranting about it here.
They should prohibit that function call completely and ask users randomly for reviews, maybe when they pause or close the app...
Just seen too many quality apps get relegated to obscurity because of a few 1-star early reviews from people expecting perfection from a free or cheap app. Or needing functionality that just isn't part of the app. I don't have any apps in the store, so this really isn't personal for me.
What I don't understand is why more devs don't use the API for the in-app overlay review versus a weblink that forwards to the app store. Clearly they're tracking the behavior, but not sure what is tracked via that means that can't be done in-app.
I said WTH did it happen? I cancelled payment and found that Prime Membership Renewal was added to the cart without my permission.
When I didnt want to renew it why did Amazon add it on its own?
One more similar experience with AWS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17652134
I wish every service would give me days notice before a scheduled fee hits. No surprise auto-renewal would even be possible that way, no undesired continuation of subscription, all it would take is a courtesy email days in advance.
For the same reason I avoid 1 star reviews on some services (especially recommending books or movies). They are often related to a strong, emotional reponse, rather than a balanced option that can be reused.
In general people use maximal, and minimal, score in a diffrent way that all other options. For a stricking example, see: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2322441/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
I don't think there is an automated solution to "liars will lie for money". I think the only real solution is brand trust. We have to go back! Back to a time when you knew something was good because it proved that it was good, and word of mouth spread to let you know it was good. Don't trust anonymous word of mouth either.
Also, the idea that sellers would pay $10 each for a 5-star review is laughable.
It's easy to make something economically viable when you're numbers are complete drivel.
I opened up several helpdesk tickets about this and got no answers. In fact, they had the audacity to tell me that it’s impossible to remove reviews and that it was probably user error.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/07/ios-app-developers-will-be...
I always tell people who ask me for store/product recommendations that I can't really give an honest opinion of something until they've fucked up some how. Its pretty easy for a business to look good when everything goes well, but when something goes wrong it is extremely telling about how they respect their customers by how they work to remedy the situation.
- Company shipped the wrong item? Keep it and we'll ship you the correct one! --> Great!
- Company shipped my product with the wrong service (when I paid a premium)? Here's your refund! --> Also good!
- Company failed to send half my order (or it got lost during shipping)? "You're a liar, get bent" hangup --> Avoid avoid avoid!
This is highly speculative, and without evidence it's pretty shady to suggest it, imo.
Yea, that's not shady at all
Amazon is a machine running off of too many fake reviews and so I've been significantly cutting back supporting them by purchasing from. I'm sure, eventually, my return requests will be revoked due to a low review or when their algorithm shows my purchase cadence declining. At that point I'll be done.
Why would he have to ship the damaged weights back? Amazon essentially never insists on that.
To me the core issue is poor communication. They could easily explain all of the processes, ML models, logic, and human interactions that are in place for review posters and readers. Then it'd be trivial to compare that with (for example) OP's experience and identify possible improvements.
But the fact that they don't at all is very telling. Clearly not impeding growth or revenue.
Or maybe the product just has poor QC, again, it should be allowed to show up in reviews.
If it's just a one-ff then it will be watered down by all of the other reviewers anyway
Also, perhaps a higher percentage of people with bad experiences will write bad reviews than people with good experiences writing good reviews, so the watered down argument isn't perfect. I would have left out the word 'perhaps' but I don't actually have any hard evidence.
When suspicious reviews appear, everybody can track down the accounts which abuse our trust (and let the bots in). That way we could provide blacklists for accounts that are untrustworthy and everybody can decide who (or which blacklist) he wants to trust.
Needs a good business model though
Goodreads does something similar, at least out to the first degree. When you're looking at a book, it shows all of your friends' reviews (if any) before all of the reviews by randoms. It's really useful because there's some of my friends whose opinions I really trust, and who I know have similar tastes.
Goodreads is owned by Amazon now, it's worth pointing out.
1. Counterfeits mixed in with legit supply
2. Fraud everywhere
3. Fake prices ($.99 with $30 shipping)
4. Fraudulent reviews
5. the article - Dark patterns everywhere
6. Not competitive with other e-retailers
7. Scammy and fraudulent pricing (raises prices by 10% to have a 10% off sale.. Prime Day)
walmart online (order and pick up at store for no shipping cost) eBay for random assortments aliexpress for a direct pipeline of electronic chinese stuff mcmaster carr for hardware that lowes and menards doesn't have Misumi for aluminum extrusion IRC topic groups (like freenode #reprap) for 3d printing specific stuffs from individuals Craigslist, but this is obviously realllly spotty
Amazon is unreliable, obfuscated, and scammy. I can't even guarantee that what I order is what I'll get. It's just not worth the effort or time.
Pissed, I wrote a one star review and how this was explicitly against Amazon's rules. It was up for a few weeks, then it just disappeared. I figured it would at least generate an apology via email, or something from Amazon about doing a better job of taking care of companies who do stuff like this. Never heard anything from either the company or Amazon.
I guess it was easier to just take down the bad reviews or keep a few negative reviews so it doesn't look completely nefarious. Seeing as how both companies and Amazon has a vested interest in keeping companies on board, I can only assume they're passively allowing this to happen.
"With great power comes great responsibility" --> We humans only like the power part.
Every monopoly that ever existed abuses its monopolistic power for its own benefit.
Talk about a broken heart.
I know I tend to buy what has the best price/star ratio. Whether or not Amazon is directly involved, I don't know. But given how quickly marketing got attached to social media, I imagine gaming reviews is just another part of an online presence package, along with controlling search results, and getting something popular into social outlets (a meme is highly desired).
Irony being people are starting to adapt and most of these social media and reviews will just be bots commenting on each other.
"ACTUAL RATING 1 STAR".
Let's see them handle this :)
Companies like Amazon like to pound interviewees with algorithm and data structure questions, so you'd think they'd be hiring the right people to solve this. So, no, they don't really want to.
besides that, yeah it sucks if this is really happening.
Not sure what’s going on with that first one though.
Reviews should either "age out" or there should be a way for the seller to indicate that a revision has been made. Granted, they would probably game both.
The product isn't bad because it arrived damaged, you can not argue against this. What you should do is contact Amazon and have the product replaced. If the next item also arrives damaged, then you can start claiming that the product is badly build.
Why should I have to deal with the whole process of ordering, reordering, customer service, voice-response systems, returns, etc. in order to get permission to leave a factual review of my experience with your product?
There is only so many avenues of distribution and you literally can not affect who deliveres and handles the package on the way to the customer unless you roll out your own complete chain which is stupid to even suggest.
Just beause post office has a lot of temps and miss handles package doesn't reflect actual review of the product if you think it does then frankly you are an idiot
If you think it is the sellers fault, review the seller. If you think it's the parcel delivery service's fault send it back with that as reason. That is signal enough.
https://darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern
Their homepage video starts with a bunch of examples from Amazon: