Comment by throwaway2786 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2786 | Hacker News Reader

So here's some perspective from an Amazon seller doing 7 figures+ annually.

- On average, only 1-3% of customers review products.

- Each review is worth a lot of money, often times multiples of the product itself, and especially if you're just starting out.

- Each category in Amazon has it's own Average rating, for example, electronics typically have lower ratings because more things can go wrong and there are more usability issues vs something like kitchenware, where less things fail outright.

- If you play in a category with a certain failure rate, it is absolutely essential that you do everything you can to mitigate bad reviews as enough of them will sink your business, even if you have a great product.

- It takes 8+ 5 star reviews to counteract a 1 star review if you want to maintain a 4.5 star average which is the bar for a good product. This is extremely hard to do without manipulation.

- People who complain about fake reviews are only seeing half the problem, the other half is that legit businesses who do it the fair way can't compete. How do you launch a great product on Amazon with 0 reviews? Hope that 500 people buy it to maybe get 5 reviews? Alternatively you spend thousands on product ads hoping that enough people buy... or just succumb to the dark side and pay for reviews which is WAY cheaper.

- If you hate Amazon reviews, do your part and start reviewing the good products on Amazon. It is worth more to the seller than you think!

Here's my problem with leaving reviews:

To me, a five star review means that a product went above and beyond my expectations in some extraordinary way. I have bought products that fit that description, but not many.

Everything else, I'd give either 4 stars or a still-very-satisfactory 3 stars.

The problem is, I know these 4-and-3 star reviews actually hurt sellers, which isn't my intention at all. So I just don't leave feedback.

This is also why I don't rate Uber drivers.

I totally agree. For five stars it would have to be exceptionally good. Something I'm very satisfied I might give four stars, which ironically drags the score down.

I recently purchased an alarm clock. When I put the clock in my bedroom, the light from the display was so bright it kept me awake. I went back to the item on Amazon and read all the reviews. One person mentioned the same issue yet still gave it four stars!

> This is also why I don't rate Uber drivers.

It was here on HN a number of months ago that I learned that in the Uber world, 3 stars does not, in fact, mean "acceptable". That knowledge altered my view of all reviews, including Amazon's, in two ways:

1) Like you, it means that I'm no longer willing to give reviews/ratings. If there is no consensus on what the different numbers of stars mean, then I can't be at all comfortable that my rating will indicate to others what I intended to indicate.

2) It means that I no longer put any weight whatsoever on ratings I see from others, for the exact same reason: I can't know that what I think the rating means is at all what the rater intended it to mean.

That 3 and 4 star ratings hurt Amazon sellers underlines this problem.

Thats why I turn my rating into a 1(lowest) or 5(highest).

I binary-ize any score that isn't already a yes/no, because thats what every score turns into.

This reminds me that Youtube used to have a star rating system, but as you say, it was effectively treated as thumbs up/thumbs down, so they eventually made that official.

Interestingly though it wasn't quite a simple five stars/one star dichotomy: the original blog post[0] has a dead image, but this one[1] shows that while five stars was overwhelmingly the most common rating, one star and four stars were about equal in second place.

[0] https://youtube.googleblog.com/2009/09/five-stars-dominate-r... [1] https://www.geek.com/news/google-realizes-youtube-star-ratin...

I totally should do that. I just can't.

It's wrong god damnit! Five stars should mean five stars.

Do you buy products with 3-star reviews?

Before I started ignoring the ratings, I absolutely bought products with 3 star reviews, since my view was that "3 stars" means "it's fine".

And you know what? They were. I never really noticed a huge quality difference between things rated 3 stars and things rated 5. And, since I started ignoring the ratings, I've purchased things with 1 and 2 star ratings on Amazon (that were well-reviewed in other places). Those have generally been as good as the 4 and 5 star things as well -- and a couple of them were actually excellent, deserving of 5 stars rather than 2.

I usually ignore the star ratings completely and read the text of a few reviews. This isn't a personal policy, just something I've done unconsciously. The stars don't tell me anything useful.

(Reading the reviews is by no means a good system—it's time consuming, the reviews are poorly written, and I never know what to believe. But if I ignored everything I'd feel blind.)

The score inflation has been plaguing many areas. this helpful chart is many years old already. It's probably a consequence of goodhart's law.

https://imgur.com/A1umWh2

Knowing how the system works and how 5 stars are expected, the way I look at Uber rating is all drivers start with 5 stars. A good enough journey gets that. But stars will be taken off if things like the car is dirty or they drive dangerously etc. It starts at 5 starts, not has to earn them.

I get why this is, but’s it’s really never been this way. Even on early eBay, if a transaction simply occurred without errors it was pure etiquette to rate them a full 5 with a comment along the lines of “A++++ SELLER! SHIPPED ON TIME, GOT EXACTLY WHAT WAS LISTED!”

Really, same thing goes for Amazon and Uber, etc. the etiquette is to start at a full rating by default and deduct based on what goes wrong. You can’t “earn” extra stars... if I order a box of batteries, and they arrive on time and the box is full, that’s a perfect transaction. 5/5, no problem. You can’t realistically expect extra batteries, or for the batteries to perfect above their rating. They’re batteries.

Did eBay ever have star ratings? As far as I can remember it's always been just "positive", "negative", and "neutral".

(However, I've never understood why so many eBay reviews will literally type "A++++++++++", we're not in school and that's just a weird thing to say.)

You can give stars for different aspects like delivery, price etc.

Not sure I understand your problem. What prevents you from simply changing your interpretation of review scores so that it will better fit the expectations of others, instead of avoiding leaving helpful reviews altogether?

i believe that's the reasoning for why many systems have devolved to boolean choices rather than multi-tier (distortions in voting cause mispresentations of the customer population's sentiments).

but boolean choices are really 3-tier systems where it's assumed that only the extremely statisfied or dissatisfied customer will vote (up or down), and the lukewarm/indifferent customer is assumed not to vote. however, that assumption very likely misrepresents the sentiments of the (majority) non-voters and thus the population as a whole.

you might address this by moving to a 3-tier system: (1) unsatisfied/bad, (2) acceptable/fine, (3) exceeded expectations/great to more accurately differentiate the non-voting/indifferent customers, but non-voters would have no incentive to suddenly voice their opinions and make the system more accurate.

you might be able to counteract that impulse by incentivizing customers to vote on every product/service delivery event (like earning points for future discounts) to lower response bias. you could also do a separate study to see how the voter/non-voter population differ, and adjust the boolean ratings accordingly.

in any case, rating systems are tricky.

or just succumb to the dark side and pay for reviews which is WAY cheaper.

I thought this was what the Amazon Vine program was for -- a legitimate way for retailers to provide free products to reviewers in return for a review, and those reviews are clearly labeled as such.

Seems to work pretty well - I've bought some products that only had Vine reviews, and I've agreed with the reviewer.

Crap companies don't want Vine reviews, they want "real" fake reviews without the "I received this for free" marker.

Legitimate ones go for Vine that would have probably kinda earned it anyway.

Reviews are worth a lot to sellers.

So much so that if you leave a 1-star review, there's a good chance you'll eventually get an email asking you to remove the 1-star review in exchange for a refund, a giftcard worth the price of the product, etc.

It encourages bad behavior though; You can basically gamble on what sellers will send you that email and thus give you the product for free.

> there's a good chance you'll eventually get an email asking you to remove the 1-star review in exchange

Wow. I've never given an Amazon product a 1 star review, but if I did, and I got such an email, I would absolutely update my review to warn everyone that this is happening, and that the real average review for the product is likely to be lower than is shown.

I assume many people take the bait. I recently updated my review to warn people what the seller was up to after I gave a 1 star review on a defective third party Apple Watch charger. The seller had contacted me three times to get me to remove my 1 star review.

I once bought an O-ring for my blender. It's literally a 1cm-wide circle of rubber with a diameter of about 2 inches. It has 1 job - keep liquid from leaking out the bottom of the blender.

The day after I received it, the company sent me an email asking me to please please please rate my new product!

Fine! I gave it 3 stars and wrote, "It's an O-ring. It does exactly what I expected it to and nothing more."

The next day I get an email saying, "We see you gave our product a 3-star review. What can we do to improve our product? What didn't you like about our product?"

WTF? It's a goddamn O-ring! There's nothing to review beyond "it works" or "it doesn't." What the heck do you want me to say about it? No O-ring is ever going to be 5 stars. Sorry! That's just the nature of the product.

At this point, it's just harassment. Stop begging for my approval, and especially when I give you my opinion, please don't question me about why. I explained it in the review.

With the way I look at the review system, an O-Ring certainly could be worthy of 5 stars. By rating something like an O-Ring less than 5 you are implicitly saying that there are better o-rings out there, and that this one could be better. I don't see a rating for a given product as a comparison against all possible other products.

Yeah, this sort of discrepancy in the way that people think of ratings is why I no longer give or pay attention to ratings.

If I saw an O-ring with less than 4.5 stars on Amazon, I would assume it's due to piles of 1-star ratings due to it leaking, being the wrong size, etc.

If there is no conceivable way a product could be improved, it's worth 5 stars.

An O ring, just took a few minutes from your life when it malfunctioned. It took a few more mins when you had to search and place the order.

It took some more when you received it and fitted in your blender.

If it did not do its job well enough then you will have to go through this cycle all over again. I have gone through that hassle enough times to hate it, even though amazon tries to be as helpful as possible.

That there itself is worth 5 stars or atleast 4.

Beyond that not all manufacturers care about our satisfaction. If some one does and wants to improve, it should be appreciated

Isn’t it more of business problem that someone is hoping to stand out and become successful by selling on Amazon or any of the big platforms without creating an “unfair advantage”?

I don’t mean by gaming the system or doing something unethical, I mean in the classic business sense of creating a differentiator or in MBA speak thinking about Porter’s Five Forces.

> If you hate Amazon reviews, do your part and start reviewing the good products on Amazon. It is worth more to the seller than you think!

And who will own my reviews? I'd rather put my reviews on a more open review system.

I don't think there's anything stopping you from putting the same review in multiple systems.

Is there a system in widespread use which allows a user to accumulate reviews they have made across multiple platforms?

I may be able to trust a reviewer on product A if their opinions on B,C and D were like my own.

It seems that Amazon stores (or some franchise) could act as a good proxy for launching / improving these products - imagine running a store, and lining up products to be "test driven" in store, with all the drivers licenses and check ups one might want. I can happily imagine trying out a fairly wide range of electronics - others may prefer shoes on Thursday or Fly traps on Friday.

TBH, retail is supposed to becoming "experience" based so this might be a runner. If someone tells me Jeff's mobile number I will persuade him.

They sort of do that with their launchpad program.

https://www.amazon.com/launchpad/startups/benefits

That looks ... meh at best.

Let's say I make a Dad Bag, shoulder straps and large zips, plenty of space for nappies and milk bottles books and wipes.

I want that on blogs, instagram cool-dad accounts, so that's finding 2-300 accounts and giving them free samples, but before that I want 4.5+ stars for the darn thing on Amazon (FBA) - so how do I do that ?

Or is that the wrong way?

Where do people find paid reviewers for amazon? Seems like something they could target to close pretty easily

Facebook groups

is this Facebook that people keep talking about just some cesspool of the worst people on the internet?

Yes.

And I'm saying that as someone who considers 4chan a pretty welcoming (if loudmouthed and staunchly irrational) place.

Upwork, fiverr, freelancer also have jobs posted which are for fake reviews, even though the job description is cleverly disguised as a a blog post or some other innocent thing.

I don't find that surprising at all. When I looked through Upwork job postings during a period of unemployment, I saw a post from a restaurant asking for a coder. The job was to create a script to cheat in an online poll from a local magazine. The poll would be used to determine which restaurant would get an award and be highlighted by the magazine, so the restaurant had an incentive to cheat. Naturally, Upwork refused to remove the post.

The exception to the rule is books.

Yes, the exception is books are even worse:

https://thehustle.co/underground-world-of-kindle-ebooks

https://thehustle.co/part-2-confessions-from-the-scammy-unde...

https://thehustle.co/part-3-confessions-from-the-scammy-unde...

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