How Scammers in China Manipulate Amazon [video]

Speaking as a longtime Amazon customer:

* I do feel the authenticity of products in some categories can no longer be taken for granted on Amazon. For example, if I search for electronics, the search results look like "a sea of endless crap," full of the kinds of products you might find at a counterfit-goods store in a shady part of town.

* Product search no longer works as well as it did in the past for me. Frequently, I find myself having to invest time and effort to identify which items are of decent or good quality in that "sea of endless crap." I find myself having to click on results and scan descriptions to find products that are sold "by Amazon" instead of third parties, to minimize worry.

* Product reviews and ratings no longer seem trustworthy. It's not just that there are large operations cranking out fake reviews every day,[a] but that I often find it time-consuming to sort out which reviews are true versus fake. Fake reviewers seem to be getting better and better at fooling human beings.

Over the past year, I've started going to local "brick and mortar" retailers like Best Buy more and more, because I find they provide a better-curated shopping experience. There are fewer products from which to choose, but I feel more certain that they're authentic and of known quality.

I'm hoping Amazon will address all these issues... soon.

[a] For example, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18262101

But this title made me think of the fraudulent practices by the buyers. It's a well-known problem in China, a small percentage of scammers will always try to abuse the system to its knees, as a result, vendors are forced to end their favorable policies (e.g. RMA), effectively causing a Denial-of-Service of convenient and high-quality services to the majority, legitimate customers. It is not limited to vendors, customer, but also widespread in the public services and financial sector. I think this is called a "low-trust society".

I believe having a system based on trust can be a viable solution. Unfortunately, this type proposal has been intentionally scaled-up by the government, leads to the upcoming "social credit system", based on mass surveillance.

And I think nowadays this approach as a solution is a dead-end, any similar system proposed by a government or a corporation will eventually become a mass surveillance system. Even the """relatively""" harmless financial credit system seems to go out of control, and a more concerning issue is that, unlike the Anti-Encryption Bill, a trust-based system can be legitimate, and solves real, severe problems, making it harder to argue against mass surveillance systems in disguise of trust and credit.

I have seen too many "Amazon's choice" products with few hundreds reviews, all 5 stars, but the problem with these products are they were just listed a day ago and already got 400 or 500 five stars reviews. Looking at the review, they were all put on the same day and time. These 500 fives stars review push the product to the top of the search. Yet, Amazon did nothing about it as long as the products sell.

I sell only Amazon and I am telling you, I get a product review under 1% of the sales.

1) Search Amazon with a description (ie, "Qi wireless charging stand"[0])

2) Results are full of clearly duplicated products whose only difference is the screen printed brand. Sometimes, the Amazon tag of "Amazon's Choice" or "Best Seller" is applied multiple times on the first page, as a re-brander has taken over a subcategory that is irrelevant (eg, "Sports-Tennis Equipment"). These results also have ads injected and sometimes even totally irrelevant categories, deals, etc injected, further confusing the layout.

3) Look at several products pages and am unable to distinguish the differences or advantages of any. Obviously, most of these products are manufactured in a handful of OEM factories in China. The brands typically do not match the "sold by" section of the product page, either, further confusing me.

4) Scroll down to reviews. These are essentially worthless as they have been gamed to irrelevance. I mostly come down here to see if some angel who genuinely bought the product for their own use decided to write a review, with pictures. Even these can't be trusted now, though.

5) Check a review rating site, such as Fakespot, although I generally don't know what to do regardless of score, besides keep looking. (That is, a good review typically won't instill enough trust to flip me to "Buy it").

6) Go to Google and search from there. Results are sometimes better, but not always. I'll check several results.

7) Look at the Wirecutter to see if they address the category. Just buy whatever they recommend if so.

8) Go to a specific community for recommendations. This would be a subreddit, looking through a trusted Twitter user, forums, etc.

Now, I mostly skip all this, and my default behavior is to not trust anything on Amazon's website, and either start my search elsewhere, or buy whatever is cheapest and save my time. I used to go to Amazon to save time, but now I'd almost prefer going to Walmart and buying whatever option they have.

[0] - https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3...

This time of year the fake reviews are especially bad as well. For example, if you go to something like the Electronics › Camera & Photo › Video › Camcorders category, every top rated item is padded with, or only contains, fake reviews. They have hundreds of non-verified five star reviews all occurring on a single day. On a few items you can see where there's a whole series of padded reviews, than a few bad, real, reviews from the people that fell for it, than a later series of fake reviews to re-up the score and bury the real ones. Many of the fake reviews are painfully obvious too, like they know they don't even need to try to hide it. You can view a users review history by clicking their name on the review. If you follow most of these fake accounts, all of the activity they have is unverified 5-star reviews for questionable products coming all within a sequence of a few days.

If Amazon is using some internal/automated system to detect these things, it does a fairly horrible job. My guess is its not much of a priority for them though.

By not developing a close to foolproof protocol for detecting and eliminating 'spam' (i.e fake products), this incentives the sellers to keep doing what they are doing.

I am not saying that this is not an easy problem. It is an incredibly difficult problem, but what has made Amazon super successful in the past, is figuring out incredibly difficult problems.

Maybe I am being impatient, but this problem has persisted for quite a long time. Their are ads everywhere.

I just speak for myself, but having to spend close to an hour sifting out what is a fake review and what is not, does not encourage trust from me.

I would be really interested what the customer retention is like for people who have received fake products.

In a different tangent I found myself disgusted with AliExpress lately when every listing I was looking at had semi-related bait items for higher listing position when sorting by price. Amazon isn't that bad yet.

Note: I have no affiliation with the company.

That has blockchain all over it.

In terms of technology, one can use machine learning for fraud detection. In terms of business operation, they have dedicated e-commerce site for official sellers, and there are several sites aiming up middle class market where products are curated and QCed by the sites.(sort of higher end Amazon Basics)