Her Amazon Purchases Are Real, the Reviews Are Fake
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
Of course I understand why this is wrong and unethical, so I tried to report it to Amazon.
There is no way to report this to Amazon. They have no facility for reporting a product that someone tried to pay you to review positively.
The only thing you can do is contact customer service who as far as I can tell do nothing with the report.
All they need to do is add a category to their customer service section to report fraud. It blows my mind that they do not do this. But not really. They make more money by allowing this behavior, both from the fake buyer, as well as the other customers who are duped into buying highly reviewed items.
But why would they. They have your money already.
Because you're basically being paid $5 to receive the product. Basic economics says this is financially nonviable in the long term.
Something VERY interesting is happening behind the scenes with the store you stumbled upon.
I read these two articles recently that will probably resonate with your experience:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/14/20961523/amazon-walmart-...
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketpl...
There are several things that Amazon could correct, and it doesn't. I've tried to report other types of clear-cut frauds (e.g. "placeholder" ads with good reviews), and either I couldn't find a way, or they didn't care.
The late borderline-scammy behavior of Amazon is obvious in different ways, for example how they intentionally make opaque the shipment origin and price.
The most ridiculous allowed misbehavior I've experienced is an item sold in a number of trivial variations that took hundreds of (search) pages. It was obliterating any chance of looking similar items from other brands.
I often look at the one star reviews to see if anything is up with a product.
It’s a complicated problem and I wonder if eBay’s best effort/don’t get involved strategy isn’t ultimately better because it forces everyone to pay attention.
And Ebay definitely did not have a “don’t get involved” policy (source: I worked on EBay’s fraud prevention team for years). There was a reason you could only communicate via the platform messaging and you couldn’t send email addresses through the platform.
Cables are notorious for this - almost every knock off type cable I've purchased from Amazon has come with an envelope asking for a review and they will provide a free gift for me. Most of those purchases go back to Amazon and I try to review them accordingly, but it's hard to judge when you've got more than 200 reviews and averaging 4.5 stars on a very specific cable you're looking for (length, color, specs, etc). In these cases Amazon eats significant shipping costs for the send and return labels - you'd think they'd want to get this under control better. But if anything I'd say returning the item is the best way to get Amazon to crack down on this since these fake reviews then cost them time and money.
No need for a check box, fake reviews are already against their ToS and against the law.
Amazon can take action anytime it wants.
Jessica and the rest understand it's immoral to do this. She even says so in the article.
I've only reviewed a few items on Amazon, mostly when an item stood out as really good or absolute crap. For instance, my last review was 1 star for an esp8266 that was so poorly faked they had mounted an op-amp instead of the microcontroller (I assume because it was the cheapest thing they could find in the package size). If there are barriers to leaving a review, actual customers will leave less reviews. I certainly don't want to have to tick multiple checkboxes in order to review an item, I will just not bother leaving a review.
Who cares about barriers to legitimate reviews? There are millions on Amazon, hundreds for any popular product. The problem is they're swamped out by the millions of fake/illegitimate ones.
> Suppose you meet someone who tells you about a great new product. She tells you it performs wonderfully and offers fantastic new features that nobody else has. Would that recommendation factor into your decision to buy the product? Probably.
> Now suppose the person works for the company that sells the product – or has been paid by the company to tout the product. Would you want to know that when you’re evaluating the endorser’s glowing recommendation? You bet. That common-sense premise is at the heart of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Endorsement Guides.
And yes, they can go after you for it:
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/05/ftc-a...
The intent of the scheme is to deceive other shoppers, regardless of the specific arrangement between her and the sellers.
[0]https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/02/ftc-b...
These new verified purchase review scams are because Amazon took action against incentivized reviews (which had disclosure rules that most reviewers obeyed).
Yeah, incentivized reviews might not have been great, but they were easy to spot and ignore. Their ban has led to something much, much worse.
Consuming reviews well is a skill you learn as you shop online. Frankly I think Amazon should stay the course. You can't possibly eliminate all the fakers. If they want to improve the service, they should just stop selling knockoffs altogether and be done with it.
For example: When I was shopping for surveillance cameras for my home, I found ones of apparently good quality that I liked. The 1 star reviews were nothing but bitching about spyware and the NSA, and the 5 stars didn't mention any possible drawbacks. A long and well written 4-star review, however, described the picture quality in detail, the issues with installing, but that once it was installed it was indeed a good product. And they included the technical details needed to establish firewall rules to prevent them sending data back to Singapore.
Maybe, but it's hard to get a clear picture of what an appropriate rating would be for an item that's 4.7 stars with 500 reviews, and only some of the 5-star reviews claim to be incentivized.
Reviews are the opinion of the person.
I think if you don't stand to make any money or get free stuff and just like posting fake reviews on Amazon for fun, then that's legal (although likely against the ToS).
One interesting thing I learned while trying to find a link -- You may not use the exact wording provided by an advertiser unless you specifically disclose that you used their exact wording.
https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-re...
That would cause a lot of problems for the business model described.
My guess is you should factor the sheer volume of purchases here as well. She’s definitely not leaning on the middle of the bell curve either way, which should prompt investigation from Amazon.
However, I’m not sure Amazon has any motivation to clear these kinds of things up. Fake reviews at least for now don’t seem to be hurting their business model.
> Almost every day, Jessica’s boyfriend of eight years begrudgingly hauls Amazon packages in from the porch. “He hates it,” she told BuzzFeed News. But Jessica proudly points to all the items she's acquired for their new house: “I got our new showerhead, shower organizer, side tables, coat rack, coat hangers. … We would have had to pay for all that stuff.”
Then it later states:
> The spreadsheet helps Jessica make sure she’s on top of due dates and getting paid on time. BuzzFeed News reviewed the document, which showed 117 open orders that hadn’t been refunded yet. A column titled “Total currently out of pocket” — or what she’s still owed — amounted to $2,282.01.
So she isn't _REALLY_ getting everything for free. According to her own records she is down $2,282.01 and it's quite possible she wont see that money. If this continues, that number will either grow into serious debt or "Jessica" will move on to something else.
Sounds like an addiction.
The IRS considers payment in kind (goods in exchange for services) to be taxable income. [0] So, I’d say she’s getting paid.
1) Buy product - taxable expense for business/work purposes 2) Write review 3) Get sent money equal to purchase price - taxable income
Net, the money cancels out to no taxable income but she has the product. It was bought with her own money and still belongs to her.
It's like if I run a blog, I bought a new PC to do my blogging (business expense), wrote about how nice it was, then the company sent me some money or a gift as thanks. I wouldn't have to pay tax on the PC if this happened.
See also Gregory v. Helvering (U.S. 1935) for the quintessential example of this principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_v._Helvering
I find this interesting in your link:
"if a transaction has no substantial business purpose other than the avoidance or reduction of Federal tax, the tax law will not regard the transaction"
I don't see how that doesn't apply to all the shuffling we see from big corps these days, licensing things they own to companies they own just to shift profits. Though that's another tangent.
I imagine high volume returns to Amazon paired with the deletion of reviews (or seeing all her reviews on 3rd party sellers goods have only 5 stars), one may start to unravel what is occurring.
Wonder if it would just be worth it to "eat" those costs.
That said, you're right in that there's definitely a discrepancy in the value of what she's getting, and the real dollar cost of what she has to pay for them. If she pays $100 for a shower head she didn't need and gets stiffed on the refund, she's out (almost) $100 even if she gets to keep the product.
Makes one wonder why we even have 5 star systems. Habit I suppose.
If anyone, with any star value, says "I wasn't shipped what was advertised/listed", I just close the Amazon tab, and look at other retailers. I don't have time for counterfeiter roulette any more.
There are a lot of Steam reviews complaining about the lack of a "neutral thumb". In this perspective, a more usable Steam system would have three evaluations, which would be a gross equivalent of 1-, 3- and 5- star Amazon ratings. I agree with the judgment, in fact, several times, positive or negative is pretty much a coin toss.
In other words, at least the 3-stars rating has a use.
I think you're succumbing to a moderation fallacy. It's simply not true that things must have some positive aspects to offset their negative aspects, or to use that belief to somehow interpret "sucked" as that they worked well enough to deserve better than the lowest rating (which may have increased after the replacements arrived, all we know is that the rating remained less than 5 stars.)
You can't consider having an extreme opinion on something as prima facie evidence of bias without distorting your perception of the world.
Perhaps part of the problem is that there isn't actually any standard for what these stars mean, and what they seem to imply to you is not necessarily what they imply to other people.
To me a one-star review means "I regret purchasing this and I believe many other people will too, and consequently I want to minimize the number of other people who buy it." That regret might be the result of some 'essential feature not working' or it might very well not be. A product that works but is very low quality for the price will get a 1-star review from me because I don't want other people to get ripped off.
"Would literally never listen to these headphones due to awful audio (their whole purpose), but it seemed like it had good build quality and I liked the color. 3/5 stars."
I think there's plenty of reasons things shouldn't get 5-stars just for being "good enough", but giving a 1-star to something that literally doesn't work/is defective seems ok?
5 - amazing, can't think of anything to improve product
4 - great product, but has some flaws
3 - good product, happy with purchase but has some downsides
2 - poor product, gets the job done with serious flaws
1 - defective product, would not recommend and will return if possible
No, it's sellers on their marketplace soliciting customers who make an initial legitimate purchase and leave a positive review.
> Jessica also doesn’t trust health and beauty products on the site, because of her boyfriend, a chemist, who has found toxic ingredients in analyses of unregulated products.
She'll happily give them five stars, though. Gross.
I hope Amazon investigates her, tracks people who contact her, and kicks the lot of them off the site. I also know that the chances of that happening are close to zero.
All said and done, identifying her doesn't sound like an impossible task for a motivated person with access to the necessary data on Amazon's end. And that's before even cross-referencing with specific items shown in the photos.
Personally the customer trust is gone since it's been years now that I've been seeing articles and hn posts on this subject with nothing being done. The "world most customer obsessed company" really sold their customers out for profit over basic service and let fraud run rampant on the platform.
At this point seeing these articles is like seeing another post about Facebook secretly being malicious with user data, it's known they're a shitty business and a risk to use.
They're still impersonal.
Unlike the reviews when you go around to a friends BBQ or are at an event, and you say "Oh hey Sarah, I see you are driving the new X".
Then they proceed to tell you how great/bad or mediocre it is.
Surprised no-one has been able to engineer a more personable review mechanic, then again with all the privacy concerns. Do you really want to know what your friends are buying, and equally for them to know what you are buying too.
The bigger problem seems to be critical mass of friends reviews to make it a worthwhile endeavor.
How many similar products have my friends bought? If that small group, how many have written reviews?
That subset of a subset is probably too small to be meaningful.
It's clear from the article that she retains two separate and unequal ratings of each product: one that she provides to her "online" persona, and one that she would provide to her "authentic" persona. It's clear that she would not purchase these products herself or recommend them to friends, yet rates them 5 stars on Amazon. As many will point out, the ability to do this is not new; the ability to do it at scale and with zero consequences (where consequences would be to your own personal reputation, for example) is the innovation.
What's truly sad is that we're missing out on such a crucial piece of information that is available to her: namely, her boyfriend's expertise in chemistry. They could blow the lid off shoddy and downright dangerous products on Amazon and provide a valuable public service to boot, but hey, it's easier to run the grift, right?
Amazon eventually shut down the message boards, probably because it felt moderation cost more than the feature brought profit. Successive changes to the site's design obscured most of the other social aspects.
Maybe what we need is a Kevin-Bacon-degrees-of-separation style system. I can review something and my 'friends' can see it's me. Friends of friends can see someone just outside their circle bought it (maybe they can ask their friend for further info). And strangers get the usual 'Trent from London' with no further info.
You'd go from anonymous reviews to seeing which of your "friends" are more interested in a shitty side hustle (e.g. there would still be.the kind of gaming noted in the article)
> Jessica’s activity, as far as Amazon is concerned, looks legitimate. She makes purchases from her own Amazon account and credit card, so her reviews are labeled as a “verified purchase.”
Don't know if Jessica or Amazon is the bigger crook here.
Would indicate that Amazon are and if they are in effect fiscally encouraging this practice then people like Jessica would take that as some form of legalised legitimacy.
Which is not the case [edit add]
[EDIT ADD] This is just cashback from Amazon credit card, just badly worded in article
there is no system in place to stop those truly dedicated to work it.
My wow moment was the claim that Amazon already had to take action on over five million seller accounts! How do you even manage that number?
still to combat buyers like her you would need to limit the number of reviews by any account, CC, and email address, to a set number per month and year. Yes they can still cheat it but no need to make it easy.
You start by not making it so easy to open a seller account. These fraudsters just open up new accounts after they've been caught.
The only solution for it is regulation. Without regulations, asbestos will still be in our homes, lead paint will cover schools and pollution will fill our lungs.
Most consumers do not have the time, money and education required to look for quality products. If we let Amazon sell crap, is crap what will be only available for most of the population. And Amazon has passed a long time ago the line between low quality and fraud.
I usually look at reviews from the Consumer Associations of the Netherlands and Germany (Consumentenbond and Stiftung Warentest), which helps a lot. You usually end up with products of the same type of brands though (Bosch, Siemens, etc). Which isn't bad, but it makes it very hard for smaller brands to have a chance at some market share without resorting to scummy marketing techniques.
Reviews on the German Amazon store used to be fairly trustworthy, but this has changed in recent years. As it is, you are better off going to physical stores where you can at least hold the products and see what the build quality is like.
I’ve already started buying things from Target and Walmart for things that are commonly counterfeited, like batteries and SD cards. I know they have a marketplace too but I avoid them for these items.
For me, the biggest thing Amazon has going for it is the dead-simple return policy. I’m comfortable rolling the dice with many products because I can easily return it, if it ends up being garbage.
Repackaging and returning can sometimes be a pain, so I’ll be reluctant to gamble sometimes. However, I’ve been more lazily repacking items and it hasn’t been an issue.
It could be that I just avoided counterfeited goods by chance, or just didn't notice...
Well, how do you know?
Maybe they’ve been good counterfeits?
Another possibility is that you’ve never seen the genuine version, so you don’t know what to compare the counterfeit to.
I don't really understand why anyone would buy originals to be honest...
I am an engineer, so claims like 'it's made in china and might explode' I can take with an appropriate sized grain of salt. One thing to watch out for is that chinese made devices are not expected to be safe if you don't follow the instructions. For example, if a device says 'do not charge for more than 2 hours', that means if you leave it on charge overnight it will catch fire. In the USA, devices need to be safe even if the instructions aren't followed.
I've always thought there should be a .adv TLD, and if you're caught serving anything but first party information outside of that, there would be severe penalties.
Let one TLD take all the cutthroat inhumane tracking, malware, scum adserving, all of it, and let the rest of us browse in peace.
Oops, I took the bait.
China is just a little behind, and the public has quickly come to assume devices are safe even if abused.
Designing with Murphy's Law in mind is essential for not killing your customers and burning down their cities, or downing their passenger airliners, or crashing their cars.
It doesn't even cost more, in a company that can be sued for the liabilities of their defective products.
> Well, how do you know?
> Maybe they’ve been good counterfeits?
Well, sure. I've bought SD cards (frequently mentioned as a problem category) off of Amazon without ever experiencing a problem. Maybe I've received counterfeits, but I still think it's fair to say I've never gotten screwed by a counterfeit.
For the consumer, I only realized something was wrong when I filled the actual size of the SD card and started getting errors, but still those errors came from my phone and basically said the SD want being detected and to reformat. So it could have been a phone issue. Only after going down the internet's Amazon counterfeit rabbit hole and then finding a program that checks counterfeit cards did I find out the card was actually a 32GB card with probably some awful I/O rates and not the 128GB that it was a announcing to devices. And for all that time, energy, frustration, money, and data lost to phone reformats, Amazon didn't give two craps. They said I was outside the return window and if my item was defective I should contact the manufacturer. They probably only didn't say "seller" because they were the seller, no 3rd party. It clearly want on the CS script to consider that you can't call the legitimate manufacturer about a defective counterfeit product sold as legitimate by the same business they count on to sell their legitimate products.
For example, we used to buy GE fridge filters from Amazon. Every once in a while we would receive a filter which would change taste of water in weird way. New filters usually make water taste slightly different but it was just a bit more off. But we used to ignore that until we start reading about fake products.
So next time when we experienced weird water taste with filter change, I carefully checked our old filter with the new one and sure enough there were subtle differences. Really impossible to notice accidentally.
Since then we started buying filters from Home Depot, and we have had pretty consistent experience so far.
Maybe it's more a marketplace issue ?
I can't see how and why Amazon would sold counterfeits goods.
I've read some reviews complaining about that but it was always from a marketplace seller.
On that note, while I have no idea how Amazon.com works, on .ca it is pretty clear on a product page whether or not the item is sold/shipped by Amazon or a 3rd party. Whether or not this has any bearing re. counterfeit goods, I generally recommended people buy the "Sold and Shipped by Amazon.ca" option even if a 3rd party's listing is cheaper.
I have continued to buy stuff from Amazon in Europe since and I have to report that I did not receive any counterfeit stuff (I believe, I checked everything as best as I can). I bought things ranging from screwdriver, SD cards (famously prone to be fake) to electronic/high tech. Costs ranging from 10€ to 1000€.
I'm starting to believe that it is indeed an US problem or like you I'm just lucky?
This is common, where a manufacturer will reduce costs by taking a formerly imported luxury product and re-create it with different ingredients from a different manufacturer, but all the reviews from the old product remain.
https://www.amazon.com/Its-10-Haircare-Miracle-Product/dp/B0...
Sometimes it’s even more expensive. A Wyze smart outlet is $20 for 2. Amazon brand is $25 for one.
Wyze https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07XZT24B8/
Amazon Smart Plug https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MZEEFNX/
Isn't Wyze's market placement as a low-cost alternative, anyways?
We just got an email from Amazon that they identified that the water filter refills I bought 6 months ago were fake, so they issued a refund. But I hate the idea that they allowed it in the first place itself. And this is something that's affecting the health of my family. (Thankfully our unfiltered tap water won't kill us but still...)
We've been trying to avoid Amazon as much as possible and it's been hard. But not impossible. They've got such a head start over everyone else on their solid logistics operation.
They're actually open to competition... from ex-Amazonians. It's like all the ex-googlers that left and took those ideas to make open source versions because Google was so far ahead.
1) Retail return policies are mostly liberal. It's the smaller stores that tend to be more stingy. 2) Price Matching solves any issues with regard to lower prices 3) Returning is actually easier since you get the instant gratification of a refund, not 5 days later. Anyway with amazon we've always had to drop it off to UPS, so we don't save time making the trip.
The bigger issue is that since Amazon is so large and pervasive everywhere, it's very tough to actually boycott the company. Brands like Whole Foods, Ring, AWS etc are still important parts of our lives and careers.
The problem is, I want to buy a generic filter because fridge manufacturer has the typical massive markup that a manufacturer does (like printer ink) but finding a reputable generic is difficult.
I've since learnt real Samsung water filters come with an authentication tag, and none of the ones I ordered on Amazon came with one. I think we've been drinking water from counterfeit filters for a year now.
https://www.samsung.com/us/home-appliances/home-appliances-a...
What a bleak, horrible future we live in.
I don't own a TV, don't own a car, don't drink coffee anymore, don't subscribe to any streaming service, don't have a TV, don't have social media. My internet usage basically boils down to NYT, HN, Reddit and Youtube.
I can't say I miss much of what I gave up. My life is far from deprived. The caveat is that I live in western Europe, with good public transport, accessibility to plenty of nature and many things to do outside of glowing rectangles.
Another example: I recently needed new brush heads for my electric toothbrush. I hesitated before buying, because I can't be sure that the toothbrush manufacturer-branded refills on Amazon are genuine. Going with a generic, compatible refill with good reviews is preferable in this case, aside from the lower price, because presumably no one will counterfeit it.
(I ended up buying the manufacturer-branded refill ... from Best Buy, not Amazon.)
And in a 'fridge, it can help reduce some scale, etc, in the internal workings of the ice maker and water dispenser.
In contrast if you are getting a counterfeit Chinese filter from amazon, it can be very hard or impossible to even figure out who to sue even if you have proof the product is bad.
But a filter that uses toxic materials could.
There's nothing in my life that I buy where I would accept a counterfeit. I accept that it has absolutely happened, that it will continue to happen, but I have nearly completely retreated from Amazon since having children.
I considered buying a pet fountain filter, but checked the reviews and found lots of horror stories about build up of slime and mold on counterfeit filters. One story even had a cat dying in way plausibly connected to the filter [1].
Unfiltered tap water won't kill you, but a counterfeit filter might.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2T55842GRHFBG
I wish Costco would up their online presence. I always feel safe buying from them.
Whichever vendor offers me time savings in exchange for good quality products will get my business. Amazon no longer qualifies for that.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/02/26/target-like-...
https://www.target.com/p/steel-hammock-stand-10-sunnydaze-de...
Biggest Amazon draw for me is price. I make a concerted effort to avoid them these days.
I'm not sure why you think that I think that.
To me, this implied you thought that competition could do better
What I mean is that these problems make people more open to giving another company a try. It lowers the loyalty someone has to Amazon.
One of the hardest parts of starting a new company is having customers even consider buying something from you.
With all the problems Amazon is having, convincing someone to try an alternative company isn't as difficult.
In fact, some are actively looking for alternatives.
That goes for buys and sellers.
For the reviewer in the article, how can Amazon know these reviews are purchased? Yes, she buys a lot of stuff, but from Amazon's point of view she may just be a loyal customer- especially given the fact that she mixes personal purchases in.
Amazon does a bad job curating reviews, but this is a difficult problem. I'm not sure how anyone could police the type of review fraud discussed in the article effectively.
Pay professionals to pick and vet reputable, high-quality vendors.
Costco is actually a very bad actor in this particular area; they generally order their stuff with a unique SKU (often the same product, but just a different SKU) specifically so that reviews of outside products don't apply to the (again, identical) Costco product.
More product categories than Costco. Fewer options within those categories than Amazon. I can't buy an Apple Watch screen protector at Costco; at Amazon I'm presented with 8,000 Alibaba resellers, often with identical photos of the same product.
For example:
https://www.amazon.com/Lalagen-Women-Sleeve-Peplum-Blouse/dp...
https://www.amazon.com/KaleaBoutique-Womens-Sleeve-Cutout-Pe...
Two different "brands" (there are probably dozens of other sellers with the same item, but these two show up on the same page) selling the exact same shirt, with the exact same photo. I want a site that doesn't allow this, by sourcing reputable vendors.
The problem isn't fake reviews per se, the problem is products not matching the reviews. You can check a sample of products then stop people who are responsible for "fake" products from being involved in Amazon selling in any way.
Basically do "Which" style consumer reviews on products being sold.
Trusted reviews are better left to 3rd parties.
I guess Amazon have no reason to implement any sort of techinical checking unless it gains them customers, so people have to vote with their money first.
I'd kind of expect those two dozen sites to accept PayPal...
PS, BoA did an awful join and totally bungled the sunset of their virtual card program.
When it comes to things like batteries and chargers which can catch fire, I always aim to buy direct from the manufacturer or a non-marketplace retailer.
In addition, Amazon is unable to stop sellers gaming the system by getting 5 star reviews on one product, then swapping the listing out for a different product. So when looking for an audio cable you will see reviews saying things like "Great Waffle Iron".
I didn't realize that was even possible... that's a really crappy loophole to leave open. I can't imagine why Amazon would let anyone completely swap out item info that way. Edits, perhaps, but everything?
This happens on Aliexpress all the time. The idea is that they put up a super cheap item ($0.99 iPhone cables), get a ton of sales, some good reviews then swap it out for a more expensive item. Sales rank and reviews stay, and the new more expensive item gets that data. The new item will be much higher margin and/or will never arrive (they just take the money and run).
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/amazon-rev...
A common tactic will be selling a cheap USB cable for well below the market rate (because a cheap-to-make USB cable tends to perform identically to a more expensive one) and then swapping the product out for something similar but more expensive like a USB hub. If you go and read the reviews, you might have to read very carefully to see the difference between a USB cable and a USB hub.
Another tactic that sellers exploit is having one listing for multiple products but specifying each product as a different "color". So one "color" of the product is an SD micro-to-full adapter, another "color" is a USB SD card reader, and another "color" is an SD card, and so on. The key here is that the reviews are linked to the listing and not the separate products. So most of that 4.5 star rating could apply to only the adapter while the SD card might be garbage.
A while ago, I was looking for a wireless phone charger. A friend recommended Wirecutter for reviews. I took a look and bought their favorite charger. It's great!
I then later wanted to buy a 3D printer, so used the same strategy. I bought what The Wirecutter recommended, and as soon as I got the printer, I realized that they are completely clueless. The printer I bought doesn't even let you use gcode from an external slicer. You have to use theirs, and it is awful. It adds supports and rafts to everything. It has to be connected to a Windows computer for the entire duration of the print. And it requires you to create an account to even open up their software. It is so unbelievably bad that I was blown away that anyone could like the thing. And that's the problem with reviews; these people don't know anything about 3D printing, so they opened some software, inserted a cube, printed it out, and hey! a cube! wow! But you can't actually do anything useful with that.
I ended up extensively researching everything on my own and decided on a Prusa i3, and... yup, exactly what I wanted. I enjoyed spending a day putting it together. I enjoy hacking up the firmware and flashing my own build. I enjoy the huge community of printable add-ons. That is what I really wanted. And, of course, the prints are great. (Why did I read the Wirecutter and not something dedicated to 3D printing? The reality is, everything 3D-printing-related seems like machine-written blogspam. Writing a blog post that contains the word "filament, slicer, spaghetti, and geared hotend" 100 times and getting some ads from AliExpress equals instant wealth beyond your wildest dreams. Or at least that's what Google search rewards.)
Anyway, where I'm going with this is that you kind of have to be an expert in the field of products you're going to review. You have to develop extensive test protocols, beyond what manufacturers do internally. Remember all the bad USB Type C cables? Benson had to develop his own hardware and software to properly evaluate them. And that's for a strand of wires. Intelligently testing a 3D printer for its print quality, software quality, and long-term reliability would probably take years. By the time your review came out, the product wouldn't be on the market anymore. So nobody does it, and it will never be profitable to do it. (With the Prusa printers, what gives me hope for reliability is that they manufacturer the printers using their printers. If there is a fatal longevity problem or irritating software bug, they have to fix it, or they can't manufacture any more. That is the real review.)
I used to subscribe to Consumer Reports, who does seem to do a lot of testing. But they are too far behind and their test coverage was too limited to be useful to me. I wanted to buy a vacuum cleaner, none of the brands they tested were on the radar (it was just stuff you could buy at wal-mart, nothing high quality). Same with flat-screen TVs. And to some extent, you can never know what the reader of your review really wants. If I were buying a TV, I want it to accept HDMI and Displayport and copy the pixels out of the digital stream directly to the display panel. A pixel value of (0, 0, 0) should emit no light. A pixel value of (255, 255, 255) should blind me. When I press the power button, the TV should begin displaying the input signal the instant the button makes a clicking noise. Not 100ms later, not 500ms later, and certainly not 10 seconds later like my Samsung.
Such a product does not exist, so there is no product that would ever make me happy or get a 5 star review. After that, it's just a list of compromises you can accept. (Does anyone even make a non-smart TV? I watch TV so infrequently that I have a new firmware update available every time I turn the thing on. It annoys me greatly.)
3D printers have all3dp.com, which among other things prints standardized benchmark tests that have objective measures for a lot of the things that determine print quality, like overhand and stringing. Their reviews also go over things like manufacturer history and market segment, and their top overall recommendation is in fact the Prusa i3.
There are quite a few of these niche, in-depth review sites still out there (computer power supplies is another that comes to mind), you just have to go look. If there isn't one, the next step is to check for a subreddit or community forum. Failing that, in my experience even trying to critically read Amazon reviews is better than Wirecutter. Buying the first product on the search page is better than Wirecutter. Their "measurements" are useless and they don't bother learning even a ten-minute google exploration of their product categories. Why people like them so much is beyond me. Presentation, I guess.
I think it stems from a lack of competition. Since Amazon captures so much of the market, they don't have to be that good anymore.
Recently they added a return option where you can drop off items at Kohls or a UPS store without repacking them. The store scans a QR code from an email and they handle packing and shipping the item back. Amazon then sends them off in bulk to a processing warehouse. According to my UPS store, most returns aren't even resold on Amazon. They just auction off lots blindly like a storage unit sale.
Those guys acted as gate keepers that determined which products got shelf space. It's harder to game that because if you're a buying agent taking kickbacks you tend to go to jail.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/video-review-testimonial-ma...
I don't know how to handle this from Amazon's angle... how about limiting how many items a buyer can review from a certain seller? Or force them to contribute a 3- or 4-star review every so often, instead of all 5's? (this one's too easy to game - you just buy a 30¢ irrelevant item every now and then and review it poorly.)
It's a hard problem to solve for Amazon, and I don't trust them to care enough to fix it. In the meantime, I stick with volume as my indicator for quality. It's very unlikely a company paid for nearly 2,000 5-star reviews, so products with LOTS of reviews are the ones I usually end up purchasing.
How am I expected to believe that these metareview sites, or others like them, are providing any better information than the original Amazon reviews?
Age old scam that works because of people like Jessica who lack any moral compass and will help to screw over anyone for a buck.
the question is: who has the right incentives to stop this kind of behavior?
it’s true that good people are not resolving to this crappy behavior. it’s also true that are a lot of people that do cheat the system.
bottom line, this is a systematic issue and until the right incentives are in place this problem is not going to just fix itself.
This is far from a "stealing bread to eat" situation. Jessica isn't scamming people for basic needs, she's conning people for luxury items.
If it were about simply putting food on the table, she'd be reselling everything after she reviewed them, instead of leaving them in a pile in some corner.
As opposed to buying food with the money which OP is implying by saying her stomach is empty.
> “I’m pretty sure I’m at a 10% loss. But I’m okay with it, because I’ve gotten a whole bunch of new stuff.”
The cheap crap is the payment. She's not making much on reselling them, either:
> Jessica gives away many of the items she reviews, and she has made about $150 by selling products on Facebook Marketplace. She’s donated clothes that don’t fit and handed off the rest to family members or friends.
However, she should probably be paying income tax on the value of the items she receives because they are payment for her labor in writing fake reviews. If she’s actually paying taxes on the income, then she could easily be losing money.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/model-estimates/impact-itemi...
She could probably resell some of the stuff for money, even at a fraction of the price she's make a little since she got it for free, but it doesn't sound like she's doing that.
She is not doing this because she's starving. Anyone who can front-load $2800 (as she gets paid several weeks, to months, afterward from the sellers) can certainly afford to feed herself. Besides, you can't eat an outdoor plastic bird bath.
To her this is most likely a game... I get it, it's fun, and you get a bunch of random stuff that you don't pay for! As mentioned in the article, "it's Christmas every day". Who doesn't like getting packages?
> “I really don’t think I’m making money on it at all. I’m pretty sure I’m losing money,” Jessica said while looking over her spreadsheet. “I’m pretty sure I’m at a 10% loss. But I’m okay with it, because I’ve gotten a whole bunch of new stuff.”
If she worked 15 hours/week part-time for minimum wage, she'd have more spendable income (about $6500), than the benefits she gets from $15,000/year worth of merchandise. Of course, if she turns around and ebays this for, say $5,000, she won't have to report the income and can still collect maximum food stamp and housing aid benefits, which no doubt she does.
The intent is to deceive other shoppers. Sure she's not some evil scourge upon the world, but that doesn't make it right.
Keep in mind that this current scam has only become the norm because of the outcry over incentivized reviews, which resulted in their subsequent ban.
I used to do incentivized reviews, and I followed the rules with disclosures (most incentivized reviewers did that, but not all). After the ban, all those companies using incentivized reviews switched to the backchannel reviews with reimbursement via Paypal, just like the lady in the article.
With incentivized reviews, you could easily dismiss them at your discretion, because the disclosure had to be in the review text. But everything now is a "verified purchase", and most "normals" don't know what to believe or ignore.
I tend to think a good portion of incentivized reviews were pretty honest (fwiw, the vast majority of products I received were quite good for their selling price). When looking at what other people wrote about the same products, however, I could tell that a small percentage of people were writing reviews without even trying the products. The unfortunate part was that those people tended to have the highest rankings in the review leader board.
Looks to me like "Jessica" might be a co-conspirator to racketeering. If I were a prosecutor, perhaps I would think that's something for a jury to sort out?
I bet she doesn’t leave a note when she backs into another car in the parking lot either. The parking spaces are too narrow...
You'd think that would be a pretty good indication that you shouldn't be doing something...
This tells me that Amazon is never going to fix the gamed reviews, or the counterfeit items, because doing so will impact their profits.
What's important for platforms? GMV.
Faking reviews is just the first step of gaming the platforms, next vendors will pay people to fake-buying, as what's happening on JD and Alibaba on an industrial scale. They already need the GMV and commissions generated, now that PinDuoDuo is popular for selling dirt-cheap things, they need to retain vendors now too, so they don't even pretend to punish these fakings.
Alibaba's 11.11 shopping festival is a good example, it goes out of its way to make the GMV of that single day as big as possible, tactics including forbidding buyers to pay before that day(make them to delay weeks' purchase to that day), disabling refunding on 11.11, sales tagets for vendors.
'Write a review for this product, rate 5 stars in all categories, send us an email at <qqq@qqq.com> with the review ID, and receive a free product.'
Well I learned something new today. I didn't realize it was so easy to game that Amazon's Choice label.
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/6/14/18679637/amazon-choi...
How she justifies it to herself is pretty irrelevant.
But I recently asked a question about an item that I have bought before (a small appliance that I have been forced to find to be more a consumable than a durable). I asked if the vendor had fixed the flaw that made me throw out three prior ones. Within minutes there were three answers, assuring me that there was in fact no such flaw. These items were great. Perfect!
Silly of me, I guess.
How about just ignoring the question then and let someone else provide a useful answer.
... Oh.
But then she plays herself off as this cute, innocent girl who just does this for fun. She knows she's doing something immoral and unethical, she just doesn't care because she likes feeling "like its Christmas every day".
Sometime in the future, Amazon will be held responsible for the lies and that is when the whole company will die. It will not happen today, tomorrow or next year but in a few years time either the copyright holders (Brands) will get them or other regulation.
It will be charged under RICO, it does millions of wire frauds every day.
Well, it's not only happen on Amazon, but on another sites too. As long as there's a seller, buyer, and medium, there's always a chance to do it.
“That’s what makes spending money on free products worth it for these blackhat sellers,”
Not only on online markets, even offline store does that. But, I apreciate for the long posts made by buzzfeeds
Maybe all the big data collection could come in handy. Amazon could probably pay Facebook to find out all the people who are in these paid reviewer groups and ban them all, buyers and sellers.
Bad reviews usually give a lot more detail that actually describes the experience in concrete detail.
I didn't realize they banned this practice considering they themselves operate the Vine program. I know someone who receives upwards of a dozen products a week for free to review by Amazon. Everything from robot vacuums to cutlery sets.
I'm sick of seeing news pieces where they focus on some mommy blogger who made $15k (which they play up like it's a tone of money) by providing conflict of interest reviews, while Amazon does that at 1,000,000x the scale with no one bating an eye.
I'd say it's lazy if not biased and single sided bad journalism to not even mention the Vine program.
Does this end of the business have to be so frictionless? This seems like a "simple" reputation problem (†) and they turn a blind eye to Sybil attacks?
(†) no, not really simple, but if anyone were up to the challenge it would seem Amazon is.
Who puts up with that for long?
She needs to get help before this wrecks her life.
So not only is she getting lots of cheap crap, and having to fake reviews for it... she's paying over $2,000 to do so?
“I really don’t think I’m making money on it at all. I’m pretty sure I’m losing money,” Jessica said while looking over her spreadsheet. “I’m pretty sure I’m at a 10% loss. But I’m okay with it, because I’ve gotten a whole bunch of new stuff.”
And I don't think they collaborate on shill management.