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Comment by nebulous1 | Hacker News Reader

Amazon has a counterfeiting problem alright, but I'm not sure why you think that other places can deal any better with this type of review fraud. It's a legitimate purchase followed by a review. Seems undetectable to me.

Biggest Amazon draw for me is price. I make a concerted effort to avoid them these days.

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The only additional thing I can think they they could do is start infiltrating these review faking networks, figuring out which products are having reviews bought for them, and penalize them. That kind of goes down a rabbit hole where what if a competitor buys fake reviews for your legitimate product in order to get it banned. There is no perfect solution. It seems like Amazon has tried to alleviate the lowered integrity of reviews by showing professional reviews when you search certain things (such as Wirecutter). It's a real problem, and not an easy one to solve.

I'd love to see a large e-commerce site that runs like Costco. Want a printer? Here's one, and it's probably top ranked by Consumer Reports. Want snow pants? Here are the available sizes and colors for the single set on offer.

Pay professionals to pick and vet reputable, high-quality vendors.

> a large e-commerce site that runs like Costco. Want a printer? Here's one, and it's probably top ranked by Consumer Reports.

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.

I actually think this is due to their liberal return policies and so other retailer's dont have to price-match.

I have not found it difficult to find reviews of products Costco sells - it's typically easy enough to find via the name and physical appearance of the product. I'll search "LaserJet M281cdw", not the individual SKU.

I used to work for a food company that Costco required to make special sizes in order to get into their stores. That made it impossible to price compare across stores, because the sizing was unique. Not all products are as easy to search for as printers.

Was it "we want these specific sizes", or was it "we want these specific sizes and you can't sell those sizes anywhere else"?

The latter.

But this is Amazon - pay people? Pay real live people? What are you trying to do, bankrupt them? /s

What? They are the one of the largest employers on the planet with over 600,000 employees.

costco.com? They may not list all the food items online, but they do have printers and snow pants.

Sure, but I want a middle ground between Costco and Amazon.

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.

Couldn't Amazon start reviewing things themselves - like actually curating the products they sell.

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.

I wouldn't trust Amazon to review products they sell. Not because I think they are dishonest but because there's a built-in confliyof interest.

Trusted reviews are better left to 3rd parties.

They kind of are the third party - the point is that if Amazon review it, ie certify it in any way, then one knows that if it's still terrible you can't trust _Amazon_. It puts skin in the game for Amazon that isn't currently there. At the moment if something on Amazon sucks people just say "oh that seller is awful" and buy something else from another Amazon seller.

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.

Really? Price? Don't get me wrong, I appreciate a competitive price, but Amazon's real value is being able to get things that are freaking hard to find unless you go to 2 dozen different specialty online stores, which means having to trust 2 dozen different sites with your credit card information.

> unless you go to 2 dozen different specialty online stores, which means having to trust 2 dozen different sites with your credit card information.

I'd kind of expect those two dozen sites to accept PayPal...

Some do, some don't, it's hit and miss and that's part of the problem.

privacy.com lets you create a unique credit card # for every retailer for free. You can put transaction limits on them too.

Back of America just killed of it's viral credit card feature, according to them because it's getting replaced across the board with intermediary services like PayPal, Google pay, Apple pay, and the like and will eventually disappear from Chase and the other virtual credit card providers. BoA said they liked it off now because it relied on flash and they were pushing to remove that risk (and likely were getting complaints by customers who couldn't get it to work because their default browser didn't support flash natively). So this virtual credit card route is probably short for this works.

PS, BoA did an awful join and totally bungled the sunset of their virtual card program.

Should be relatively easy to spot this pattern and flag for secondary analysis. Things like, frequency of purchase, rate of returns, five star rating pattern, consistency in rating reviews (always with a picture, always a certain length), amount of research done before purchase.

If someone consistently leaves five-star reviews, then they should be removed. Even if genuine, as in not paid for, they are still noise as this person is indiscriminate in their praise.

> I'm not sure why you think that other places can deal any better with this type of review fraud.

I'm not sure why you think that I think that.

This is a hard problem (in the CS sense). How do you filter a customer that reviews a product paid for w/ their own money, who then later gets reimbursed via PayPal?

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.

> Between these “authentic” fake reviews, the usual fake reviews and counterfeit products, Amazon seems open to serious competition.

To me, this implied you thought that competition could do better

Ah, good point!

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.

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