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Comment by duskwuff | Hacker News Reader

Or reviews that were transferred over from other products. Here's a case in point:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MH9HPTR

Over 3000 reviews... most of them for products completely unrelated to the one on sale. I see reviews for a bicycle lamp, a phone screen protector, and a voltage converter.

This seems like a bug. Surely Amazon shouldn't allow sellers to transfer product reviews over from other products?

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They're abusing the "color" parameter to be multiple products instead. It's astounding that Amazon has yet to actively prohibit this.

Nothing about Amazon’s abuse of their customers surprises me anymore. Their “Amazon’s Recommemdation” is a joke too, and they’re associating their brand with garbage.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gflpf0DrCgw

Par for the Amazon course, cheap Chinese knockoffs. If they had anything other than a highly permissive refund system, they’d already be drowning in lawsuits. They must bleed refund money though, and I thought Bezos was all about right margins?

> They must bleed refund money though, and I thought Bezos was all about right margins?

That's the part that worries me. Amazon surely knows this is a problem, and I'm sure they know much more about it than we do. And yet they allow it to continue. It genuinely makes me concerned for the future of their business, where they know actually providing a quality experience is going to hammer their revenue/profits.

Many customers (myself included) don't bother going through the refund process for a <$20 item. I've been shifting my buying to other sites, instead.

What percentage of customers go through the refund process? I think I refund maybe one purchase every 4-5 years, for all of my retail activity combined. I don't believe I've ever bothered with Amazon.

I wish I was as discerning a buyer. I send back half of what I get off of Amazon, something like once every other month. By volume it's a lot more than I return anywhere else except for games impulse purchased and "returned" to Valve on Steam.

> I send back half of what I get off of Amazon

If you return too much stuff amazon will cut you off: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/05/23/a...

I'm sure the people who get cut off are serious outliers though. Like so far out there it is obvious that they should be cut off.

The article mentioned one example of someone returning around 1/10 items. Considering how bad their counterfeit problem is now, I'd say that's pretty low when an uninformed customer could probably expect more than that many items to be disingenuous.

If it's around 1/10, it must be over a long period of time. There have certainly been periods where I've returned _way_ more than that, including things like 'These headphones I bought a year ago have broke, this hard drive I bought 6 months ago has stopped working, AND I'd like to return this expensive item I've just bought, and the only other things I've bought recently are £5-10 books'.

I suspect it's more likely to be done on total purchase _price_ - I spend a fair amount of money on things that are very difficult to counterfeit (video games), so they are obviously never returned, which probably tips the balance back in my favour (the fact that I'm in the EU, and have a statutory right to return (for any reason) may also be a factor).

You’re right, they go after the serious outliers. Amazon announced this policy change right after this case[1] was charged.

Honestly, after reading the facts, I was shocked it took Amazon so long to take action.

But it certainly seems the average shopper/returner has nothing to worry about.

[1]https://bgr.com/2017/10/02/amazon-returns-fraud-theft/

Their refund system is great. Any time I've gotten something subpar I've messaged the seller and had my money back in days with zero hassle.

Also vendors buying UPC codes off eBay. Ends up getting merged because surprise, those “unique” codes are not so unique. Amazon needs a better system for that.

I'm not sure that's the source of the problem here. There are multiple variants of this particular product, but they are all substantially similar to each other, and completely different from most of the products being reviewed.

That's hilarious.

it's not a bug, it's a exploit that fraudulent sellers are abusing.

Since any seller can list on any listing. Some sellers will list their products on listings that are out of stock, and gain editing priviledges.

Then they will edit the page to whatever other products they want, and merge it with a new listing they create.

The end result is that they get a listing with hundreds or thousands of reviews. So unsuspecting customer will purchase based on social proof.

This is a huge problem and major source of frustration for legitimate sellers on Amazon. I've had it happen and had to threaten legal action to get a fraudulent seller off of my listing.

> Or reviews that were transferred over from other products. Here's a case in point:

> https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MH9HPTR

> Over 3000 reviews... most of them for products completely unrelated to the one on sale. I see reviews for a bicycle lamp, a phone screen protector, and a voltage converter.

And it's "Amazon's Choice for 'iphone headphone charger splitter'"!

Archive link in case the product morphs again: https://web.archive.org/web/20190226210646/https://www.amazo...

We call this "Review Hijacking" and have a bit alert that pops up on our report when detected. It's not a bug, it's a loophole that sellers are exploiting. They are taking advantage of the "product variations" feature that's supposed to be used for listing products of different styles together in one listing (size, color, format, etc).

However these sellers are essentially stealing old, expired listings of products and collecting all the reviews associated with them to pump up their rating and review count.

This has been going on for over a year. I really don't understand how Amazon hasn't figured out a way to close the loophole at this point...

I just ran into this last night searching for a converter dongle, and got hundreds of reviews for silicone rings, which... what?

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