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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews.

Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more and more Chinese products flooding Amazon (Germany) with products that have hundreds of well-written positive reviews. I have to assume that most of them are fake because there's no way that some niche product can have more reviews than let's say a PS4 or Nintendo Switch, which is sold millions of times.

Really a shame that Amazon does not seem to care much about this, maybe a chance for the smaller shops to take back some lost business though. I find that I buy more in smaller e-commerce shops, because I find they're much less affected by the review fraud and often ship things just as fast as Amazon.

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Unfortunate, brand loyalty doesn't mean anything anymore:

- a lot of companies don't manufacture the product themself

- they don't even manufacture two products from the same subcontractor

- sometime, the same product, between two batches, is not produce by the same sub-contractor

- big players just don't care. Cisco is not going to lose business because you chose to not buy, and most people won't follow you to allow the boycott to have enough wait

- PR firms are so powerful now they can make any brand great again. See Microsoft. I guaranty there will be people that will want to answer this comment stating how they really are a good firm now. And cite great things they do. Yet I bet in 10 years, we will learn about some other horrible things they did. Again. It's been like that for decades. PR works extremely well now, people genuinely live the feeling they've been lead to by those amazing consent manufacturer.

- a brand is dead ? Don't worry, it will be renamed into another one. Or subcontract for another one. You will buy its product again, you will just don't know you do.

I think brand matters more than ever. It’s anecdotal, but let me give you a few examples of how my purchasing habits have become, and I assume that I used to buy things pretty much like everyone else.

Pants, one of my co-workers recommended a brand of pants from a Danish store called shaping new tomorrow, they have two real stores and their own internet business. They are the only pants I buy now, because they fit my needs. I used to buy pants at various places, but these guys really hit the nail on what I need, and as such their brand is immensely important to my pants buying.

Blood Bowl, I play it and I buy 3rd party miniatures. In the blood bowl community there is a lot of talk on who build the best 3rd party miniatures. I prefer willys miniatures and Greebo Games myself, and typically only buy their stuff. Again these are small mom and pop companies with their own little web shops that have become successful through their brands being associated with high quality.

T-shirts, I used to be a shirt guy. But a couple of years ago I started wearing t-shirts with prints. These are perhaps the best example because you can buy from so many places. And I did, I’ve bought t-shirts from about twenty different shops, but these days I mainly buy from qwertee because their fit suits my body best. Again their brand and the product I associate with it is important.

I used to buy things of amazon, and stores like it here in Denmark. But because it’s almost impossible, or at least takes a lot of time to associate sellers and quality on those platforms I almost never use them now. This was all anecdotal, but if I’m not alone in this, then brand matters quite a bit these days.

> I think brand matters more than ever.

I'd go further and say that branding is now often the product itself.

Nike can sell a hat for 20X more than a generic hat when it has their swoosh on it. Perfume is basically a generic chemical wrapped in a huge amount of marketing. Apple makes excellent products, but there's no question that at least part of the premium you pay is not for better quality, but for the brand itself.

While the value of a brand often revolves around vanity and advertising, there are often other factors that are also not directly linked to product quality: such as "fair trade" coffee, buy-one-donate-one shoes, or humanely raised animals for food.

We're moving from a pure "consumer society" into something a bit different (but definitely still consumption based), where consumption is not just for the direct benefit of the consumer, but is also used to signal deeply held values.

A acquaintance of mine recently told me he was going to start his own rock climbing clothes brand.

Naively, I though he was trying to make well designed clothes for rock climbers. As a geek, I though he was trying to solve a problem.

No. He just bought Chinese low quality t-shirts, and sticked logos on that and spent all his energy developing the brand itself: communication, aesthetic, mentality, target, etc.

I couldn't see the value of doing such thing, since we have enough of this crap. But it worked: friends around me started to wear the damn thing.

It makes me so uneasy, but it's a good lesson on how humans work.

It works both ways. If I know that a company is basically selling Chinese t-shirts with their logo and their markup price, might as well just buy directly from China and skip the middleman.

If.

> It makes me so uneasy, but it's a good lesson on how humans work.

It's an even better lesson on how business is "taught" vs. how business is done. Everyone on HN, at business school, or wherever will tell you that you should start a business to "solve problems" or "fill a gap in the market".

The majority of the people actually starting businesses are doing so to make a buck. That's it. if you're starting out, you'll learn more about selling from starting a business providing a me-too substitute good in a crowded market than you will trying to build a completely new product segment with no market validation and no established price points.

“Moving from”? That happened decades ago, before e-commerce became significant. This sounds like the kind of thing discussed in No Logo, which was published in 1999.

> “Moving from”? That happened decades ago, before e-commerce became significant.

Yes, absolutely, since the invention of brands, at least some brands were the product rather than a signifier of quality.

However, in the last 10-20 years, largely due to globalization, high quality goods have become widely available. Before, that Nike hat may well have been much higher quality than the generic, but now they are indistinguishable. As overall product quality has improved, the only thing left to sell is the brand itself.

PR firms are so powerful now they can make any brand great again. See Microsoft. I guaranty there will be people that will want to answer this comment stating how they really are a good firm now. And cite great things they do. Yet I bet in 10 years, we will learn about some other horrible things they did. Again.

In rhetoric this is what's known as "inoculating the argument", or "inoculation theory". You take a reasonable criticism of what you've said and present a weakened version of what someone might respond with in order to suggest that means that response is invalid.

The thing is though, in this case, you've not really presented a solid argument. All you've said is "Microsoft might be doing terrible things!", which is potentially true, but it's a bad reason to ignore the obviously good things that we can see. What your argument boils down to is that once a company loses your trust they can never get it back regardless of what they do. In which case you're removing yourself from the conversation because you're only ever going to be negative.

Indeed, this is an opinion based on observations I made, not a scientific claim.

And as you noted, I designed it specifically so that my comment would not be inundated with answers from the accounts of PR firms paid to say MS is great.

You can now state that those could be real accounts, and that MS is really a great company and that it's just being defended by people that like it for real and I have no proof of what I advance.

And I have no way to contradict you.

I appreciate your logic. However, MS continues to do wrong, forced telemetry and upgrades, ads in the OS, are but a few examples. Only now drowned out.

>MS continues to do wrong, forced telemetry and upgrades, ads in the OS

These things might be unpreferable to you, but none of them are "wrong".

Something is only wrong from a business perspective if you lose customers (either from trust or legal means (probably in the EU))

"forced telemetry" is very wrong.

Let's see how long it takes until that is illegal in your country.

There are some people that think if something isn't illegal, then it isn't wrong. It's really weird.

Most people never get past Kohlberg Stage 4.

I had never heard of this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_o...

From the wiki page, there are three levels that include 6 stages (two each):

        Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)

            1. Obedience and punishment orientation

                    (How can I avoid punishment?)

            2. Self-interest orientation

                    (What's in it for me?)
                    (Paying for a benefit)

        Level 2 (Conventional)

            3. Interpersonal accord and conformity

                    (Social norms)
                    (The good boy/girl attitude)

            4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation

                    (Law and order morality)

        Level 3 (Post-Conventional)

            5. Social contract orientation
            6. Universal ethical principles

                    (Principled conscience)

It's substantially more common a viewpoint on here, at least anecdotally compared to my real life experience.

Microsoft continue to produce proprietary software, i.e. software which infringes on its users' freedoms to use, examine, modify & share software; that is wrong.

Are you suggesting that those users have no choice but to use that software?

Most users have no idea they have a choice, so... effectively, yes.

That's not my experience at all. A few years ago I would have been looking for the unknown chinese brands that could provide me with a gear that was "good enough". Now I will not even consider buying anything that is not from the top 5 brands for each thing. I have been burned too many time by products that were _almost_ as good, but not quite, and broke quickly. My branded gear is usually lasting forever (lenovo laptop, bose headset, roomba cleaner, instapot) as long as I buy on the medium/high-end end of the spectrum.

The thing is that as it is said over and over in this thread, you cannot trust reviews, and I would add that you cannot trust most of the smaller blogs/review websites because most would say anything about a product as long as they are paid.

If I buy the new Sony noise cancelling headsets, I know I will not get disappointed: it is a reputable brand, and it is the high-end of the range. This strategy is not perfect, far from it, and some brand are taking advantage of it. In that case, vote with your wallet. You can't really do that with no-name brands.

I'm not saying brands are not an indicator. Indeed, if I'm going to buy a USB-C cable, I'm going to use it as a filter.

I'm saying brand loyalty has lost its power now.

Sony is a good example. You say it's a reputable brand, yet sometimes they just lose it do something absolutely terrible. The first one that comes to mind is infecting willingly their customers with a rootkit in 2005 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...), but it's just because I don't follow up on those things as much. I'm sure there are ones in the last 5 years, although with PR firms doing their job as well as they do now, a quick google search will seldom return anything.

Companies don't have a customer first mentality anymore.

Loyalty doesn't mean anything for them, and so you being loyal to them makes no sense.

And it does mean a more complicated world, because you constantly have to reassess where to buy from.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sony-stoldendata-idUSTRE7...

>Sony is a good example.

The fact that you're bringing up a 15 year old incident proves that doing bad things can sting, perhaps scar permanently.

It's foolish to think there's a company that will always "do right". They are run by humans.

I've found a lot of value in niche brands. For instance the Finnish outdoor/military/surplus store Varusteleka have some quite good own-brand products.

Their Särmä-brand "common jeans" are just that; classic straight cut jeans with a medium waist, no stone-washing or other artificial wear, and a little bit of stretch for comfort. For someone like me who has large thighs from lifting weights, there are many otherwise nice pants I just can't wear, but these are perfect. Most brands these days have 5 different kinds of slim/skinny fit, and 1 straight fit if you're lucky.

Their "tactical jeans" are even better, with roughly the same cut and the addition of a crotch gusset for mobility and discreet extra pockets. There's a bit of polyester in the fabric for durability and a bit more stretch too. They're literally as comfortable as sweat pants, it's uncanny. If they last as long as promised, I doubt I will ever buy other jeans again.

Overall, I would say don't trust brands, trust quality, and don't trust reviews on big sites like Amazon.

> - a lot of companies don't manufacture the product themself

But the brand is responsible for the quality as perceived by the customer. They retain any good brand image by properly managing supply/subcontractor chain with quality control.

For the end user expiernce, it is not important who manufactures what but what assurances about the quality are made.

> Unfortunate, brand loyalty doesn't mean anything anymore

> sometimes, the same product, between two batches, is not produce by the same sub-contractor

This is how branding has always been. Gomorrah details the manufacturing process for high-end fashion brands: any number of clothing factories simultaneously accept a contract to deliver X items of clothing in Y time at Z unit price, the brand gives free materials to everyone who accepts, and the first factory to deliver the X items gets paid. Every other factory who accepted is stuck with a bunch of clothing rejected not for quality reasons, but because they turned it in slower than the first factory.

A lot of that clothing is then sold by organized crime using unauthorized brand labels. But is a shirt with a fake Calvin Klein label -- manufactured for Calvin Klein exactly to their specifications -- really "counterfeit"?

One of the best choices I've made is to simply avoid any product which features conspicuous logos that are obviously meant to be seen.

There is no value for me in having a big Superdry or whatever logo blazoned across my chest. Instead I choose clothing with no logos, aside from what's on the tags inside. I make a small exception for polo shirts, because it just seems like it's integral part of the design to have a small logo on the left chest. I do try to choose high-quality shirts with small unobtrusive logos.

This has served me quite well for a while now.

These are two different arguments, though. Yes, everything you listed is true, and it's largely what led to brand cynicism in the first place. However, this new Amazon problem (at least within the ecosystem of Amazon) is markedly worse. There are 1000 brands, and most of them are terrible, and the reviews are worthless, and you can't even see or hold the product in your hand. In this situation, a trusted brand has more internal consistency (despite all the issues you correctly noted) than the very inconsistent fly-by-night brands you can find on Amazon.

Of course, my argument falls apart if we can't spot counterfeits on Amazon.

> - sometime, the same product, between two batches, is not produce by the same sub-contractor

Case example: I have two pairs of a specific model of cycling gloves, both are subtly different in materials and have different labeling styles, as well as different "made in" statements (one European, one Asian). Had I bought them from Amazon I might wonder which one is fake and it wouldn't be clear at all. But I got both pairs directly from company HQ stocks, the closest thing to a definition of "authentic" we have in today's inscrutable networks of subcontracting.

>- PR firms are so powerful now they can make any brand great again. See Microsoft.....

Well, yes in an era where any kid in their early 20s can be CTO of a startup, and get their 5 min of fame for saying Webkit is the new IE, thinks IE era meant IE 7 and never developed a thing during Pre IE6. Of coz they get moved by PR and Marketing. For those of us "old enough" who have been burnt, or at least old enough to be a little less idealistic. I am not really seeing the power of PR.

On the subject of Microsoft, it isn't really a powerful PR I mean you have to give them credit Satya's Microsoft is a lot different to Mid 90s Microsoft. There are lots of signs they are moving in right direction ( even though it is still bumpy ). From Xbox, Gaming, Windows, Azure, Open Source. While the quality still isn't there yet, but at least they know their quality is not good enough. And that is much better than old Microsoft where nothing is a problem as long as the sales are moving.

Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy

I do the same. I wish I didn't, but I don't know what the practical alternative is. I guess it's the whole reason that brands were created in the first place.

I do source some of my stuff from smaller brands and shops, whenever I can. But that's not always an option.

When it comes to software, I'm not entirely satisfied with Apple's "walled garden." But for hardware, I know that if I get something at the Apple Store, or from apple.com, I generally don't have to worry.

It's because of this that I wish Apple† would go back into some of the product lines it has abandoned. Wifi routers. Servers. Printers and scanners. Even AA batteries and blank DVD's (I still have some of both). I'm at the point where I'll pay extra for confidence in the product.

† Or some other tech company that cares about its brand.

It’s confidence-inspiring that Apple hasn’t stopped software updates for AirPort routers (I have a 5th gen). There’s even an unofficial Python script that enables SSH, giving you root access to the NetBSD system underneath. So even when Apple finally does abandon it, it might still be possible to customize the Unix underpinnings.

Oh, that’s neat. What is this script called? How do you run it?

I just found https://github.com/x56/airpyrt-tools and https://jcs.org/2018/06/12/airport_ssh -- fascinating!

Duck found this, but I haven't tried it yet:

"To enable SSH on an AirPort base station you just need to set the dbug property to 0x3000, like this:

python -m acp -t {ipv4-address} -p {password} --setprop dbug 0x3000

python -m acp -t {ipv4-address} -p {password} --reboot

Then connect to the device with the username root and whatever password you use to manage the device."

https://github.com/x56/airpyrt-tools/issues/1

Nice. Thanks!

Yup. That’s what I did.

Apple's machines are great. Apple's accessories not so much (see reviews on Apple's site). The 3rd party products Apple carries in their stores and on their site can be downright trash. I once made the false assumption that being sold by Apple was a kind of stamp of approval but I've since realized it's just which ever sales person managed to negotiate to get in the store. As a very concrete example, Apple used to carry Morphie battery cases which at the time were not actually Apple certified (lightning connector certification) as compatible with iPhone and yet other 3rd parties cases were but were not in the store. Also Belkin (not a fan)

> ... I generally don't have to worry.

Emphasis on generally. Apple still sells many (most?) of its iMacs with spinning rust drives. Just picking up something from Apple Store and paying tons for it does not guarantee it meets minimum quality standards one might expect.

At least you know what you're getting. I don't understand why Apple still sells those devices but I'm not going to be surprised by what I receive.

What do you mean by that? That the quality is not good or that the stock is old?

Classic hard-drives with platters that physically spin rather than a solid state SSD hard-drive. Nothing necessarily wrong with the older HDD technology, though most people have come to expect the better performance characteristics that come with newer SSD technology.

> It's because of this that I wish Apple† would go back into some of the product lines it has abandoned.

Related: I try to buy Amazon Basics for a lot of items.

I bought an Amazon Basics USB hub. First I was generally happy, but after some time it would regularly just stop working for several hours. It's not that I was drawing too much power, typically just a security key or USB flash drive (and the hub had an external adapter).

Isn’t Amazon Basics just paid product placement?

No.

That's "Amazon's Choice", which is a label you pay for that gets plopped on random bullshit. Amazon Basics is a brand that Amazon itself has had people design and manufacture for them. Not the same thing at all.

Aha, thanks! You’re right, I was getting those confused.

I don't have the same experience with Apple. My MacBook had to get replaced multiple times due to a bad graphics card. My subsequent one had to get replaced multiple times because of the butterfly keyboards breaking.

So far so good on the latest one but it's annoying to deal with so many replacements

Right, it's really "generally works, and if it doesn't, and not too much time has elapsed since purchase or it's a widespread issue, you'll get the issue fixed relatively quickly, as many times as needed, until the issue is fixed or they give up and replace the device".

Not profitable enough, Cook and co’s primary goal.

The web feels like a huge fine grained stress test to reassess all the reasons why most of the world was the way it was.

We had to steamroller all of Chesterton's fences to figure out which ones we'd miss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

thanks for the reference as it's often seen in many places of society and culture

Wow. First time reading this as well, and there is such wisdom in it.

It is doubly apt considering what is going on in the political realm currently as well. Not a lot of understanding or willingness to fix things within the constraints of a system, just promises to tear it all down and replace it with utopian versions.

One of the important lessons of the internet is that unless there's very deliberate suppression, noise will drown out signal if there's the slightest incentive to spam.

Anything that can be faked will be faked in bulk.

Well put. It's definitely a signal vs noise type issue, all other aspects of the problem are secondary.

They can make a dent in the problem short term with more manual review but as the spammers evolve better automation, if all Amazon has in the race are humans, they'll keep losing.

As more and more of these types of stories come out, over the course of years now, I keep expecting to hear about a big push from Amazon to clear out the noise. And it keeps failing to happen.

The knee jerk interpretation is that Amazon doesn't care about fake products because they still get paid. But, historically at least, Amazon is smarter than that. Part of their dominance comes from understanding that, long term, there is more profit in happy customers even if it that means accepting otherwise avoidable costs.

I wonder if this is the result of a changing culture or of it's an indication they've become too large and inefficient to respond to problems and iterate at modern tech company speed.

It's in the nature of the technology. If you can figure out how to do it once, doing it 1000x or 1000000x isn't going to cost you that much more. Quantity is easy, quality is hard. So we've created a selection force for "business" models that benefit from the nearly free ability to scale in quantity while ignoring quality. Ie, all sorts of spamming.

One of the reasons ML worries me is because it can sprinkle just enough of something that vaguely resembles quality into the pot to take the quantity (spam) scaling to a whole new level.

This issue isn't reviews vs. brands. The biggest problem with Amazon is that the reviews and brands are disconnected from the actual supplier. Who knows what you'll get?

> I find that I buy more in smaller e-commerce shops, because I find they're much less affected by the review fraud

I've had to start doing this with violin strings. The sort of strings I like are pretty damn expensive (~$120 list price), so originally, any chance I could get to save say 10% I would take. But I heard way too much about fakes being shipped from Amazon 3rd party sellers, so I've started just buying everything from Shar (which, it turns out, provides steep discounts fairly regularly; you just have to wait for them).

i think from the director of engineering at amazon charged with making sure reviews are not fake, they would say "we can only make it so difficult to create a new account and prove you are human before it literally becomes impossible for new people to make real accounts." You say amazon has to police this more. I say amazon has tried and there is so much money to be made in jumping through the hoops to prove you are a human, that there is no way to win this war.

I thought fake reviews were typically from humans? Bot protection / human verification seems like the wrong front to be tackling.

yeah, real humans blast past captcha and enter real heart warming text about how great the product is but don't mention they are being paid to write this review and pretend the product is good. Let's tackle the real issue and like connect wires from the human to the computer and like lie detector style measure their blood pressure, heart rate, sweat, or...

From my experience in Germany, it's 50/50. There are fake human reviews (Vine Club being a large part of it...), but there are also clearly auto-translated reviews (though they might be posted by humans). It's mostly on low-price items that are FBA'd or shipped directly from China.

Only allow reviews from verified purchasers

Doesn’t stop fake reviews.

Technically true, but it would stop bulk fake reviews.

I am afraid verified purchases are being gamed too. Sometimes I feel like scammers might be going to the extreme of coordinating clustered purchases (I am guessing the merchandise ends up in the owners hand/warehouse anyways somehow?) and posting the reviews.

This is not even mentioning incentivized reviwers who may be posting exaggerated (if not fake) reviews for promos, discounts, etc.

One way in which Amazon has restricted this type of gaming is by restricting the ability of sellers to apply extreme discounting. Even legitimate attempts to do this such as liquidation can result in a warning from Amazon about rank/review manipulation.

However, real crooks just compensate verified buyers by paying them via Paypal, Payoneer, etc. You can't protect against that except through court order or by private sting investigation. Amazon does sue organizers of these schemes and has untangled some in that way, but that is challenging to scale.

> Sometimes I feel like scammers might be going to the extreme of coordinating clustered purchases (I am guessing the merchandise ends up in the owners hand/warehouse anyways somehow?) and posting the reviews.

This is called brushing and there have been several articles written about it. Scammers create fake accounts for real addresses and then ship fake merchandise to those addresses to get the "verified purchase" for their review.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-brushing-scam-couple-rec...

Here’s how people still game verified purchases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22399781

I got requests to do reviews for some of the products I received out of nowhere on amazon and other places. They told me they would send me the money if I can order more myself and leave a review. So I guess, no that won't help as much as you think it would.

I bought a $25 product recently on Amazon. In the box there was a “coupon” that I’d get $20 back if I left a 5-star review for the product on Amazon. Instead I left a 1-star review saying that they were trying to game the system, and my review got REMOVED! I give up.

Would it have upset you if they were asking for any review at all, instead of requiring a 5 star one?

"Asking for a friend," right?

> Would it have upset you if they were asking for any review at all, instead of requiring a 5 star one?

That has largely the same result. Most satisfied customers don't bother to leave a review, so real reviews tend to skew towards people who have had issues.

If you bribe satisfied customers into leaving a review then your reviews are no longer from the same sampling population as your competitors' reviews and you end up looking better than you really are by comparison. Plus, if the incentive isn't offered to everyone then people who get it (and then are disproportionately likely to leave a review) will tend to like the seller more because they liked receiving the incentive.

It would only be fair if the same incentive was provided to all buyers for leaving reviews of all sellers.

I've had people refund entire purchases and let me keep the item after I complain about a real defect, all just to avoid a low review. The most surreal instance was when I just asked a completely innocuous question and was offered a refund--clearly misunderstand my curiosity as a complaint.

I love imagining the surreal consequences of a world where reputation is far more valuable than the products themselves... but that must be unsustainable.

If you sell a $1 product for $10 you can refund 8 of them and still double your money. Yes, for cheap Chinese made stuff the reputation is far more valuable than the products themselves

This exact same thing happened to me.

Don’t give up. Leave a 5-star review, get an out-of-band refund (if they do that). Then change your review to 1 and demand an in-band refund. Tell your friends.

Verified purchases on Amazon aren't trustworthy, either.

I live downstairs from someone who gives 5 star, raving reviews in return for "free samples". I'm not sure if it's for profit or for fun or what, but the rate at which Amazon delivery people deliver packages to our building is truly staggering.

I have a friend in Germany that is in a Facebook group for "testing" products from Amazon. They need to purchase all kind of weird and low quality stuff from unknown Chinese brands, they keep the product, get a refund through Paypal and leave a 5 star review. I told him it's kind of a bad thing to do, but hey, free 29 Euro earbuds. :)

I knew this was a problem mostly in the US, but just like one of the initial commenters noted, it's starting to happen even in Germany, and Amazon is now filled with all kind of weird cheap brands that have 4,5+ stars and 500+ reviews, you can't get any proper stuff like a humidifier or some small kitchen accessories without being flooded with spam. Well, back to local shops and retailers.

The stuff they get from doing this is basically junk, a complete waste of resources. But the allure of "free stuff!" is just to great, even if they just end up throwing it in the trash.

It's sickening.

If we really want to look at it from a money point of view... I would say Amazon has more money to make in keeping people from leaving their marketplace. It seems like that’s the point it’s either at or getting close to.

There are standard ways in industry of dealing with this problem. You verify your suppliers. Amazon doesn’t do this, and so kids eat lead and we get shitty stuff. The real makers get pissed. The scammers and amazon profit.

They do very frequently ask sellers to provide supplier documents. Amazon does very frequently do their own independent investigations into suppliers. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of Amazon employees and contractors requesting supplier documents and following up with investigations all day every day.

However, Amazon also permits sellers to operate from countries that ignore US court orders. It is also possible to run 100s or even 1000s of Amazon seller accounts at the same time in contravention of Amazon's rules on this. It is also possible through fictitious entities for citizens of countries under US sanctions to operate Amazon businesses.

There is no way to enforce a judgment beyond grabbing any US based assets. You cannot, for example, extradite, prosecute, and imprison a Chinese citizen for poisoning US kids by selling Tas-T-Lead counterfeit Pbikachus.

This general type of problem is just more acute with Amazon and other ecommerce platforms than it is for other things like web media. If a Belorussian bot network embezzles $2 million from a US ad network, no one dies. When you sell dangerous physical products, people can and do die. Problems of addressing hackers and the like who are hiding in judgment-and-extradition-proof countries become more obvious and serious in the eyes of the public when the harms go beyond just businesses suffering abstract financial harms.

> However, Amazon also permits sellers to operate from countries that ignore US court orders.

Something that would help here is if Amazon would display the seller's country more prominently (or at all). It's a lot more problematic if you're not even aware that you're buying something from a seller in country without a functioning legal system.

Sure. The tricky thing about this is that there isn't much stopping anyone from starting a US shell or paying an associate to do it and then logging in to the account from anywhere. There are plenty of super functional countries that disobey court orders.

China for example does have a functioning court system. Like many countries, they don't cooperate with US court orders as a matter of sovereignty. Not even when Nike is trying to collect a couple billion dollars from counterfeiters: https://www.thefashionlaw.com/home/in-18-billion-case-over-c...

As you note though it's actually an important distinction about the retailer, because the retailer carries most of the product liability. Amazon makes people fill in a check box stating that they have liability insurance once the seller gets to a certain size, but they do not really check this at least to my knowledge. I encounter a lot of people who should have liability insurance, certified to Amazon that they did, but do not. There's not much wrong with a seller located in a country that cooperates with the US selling into the US because they can be held liable for any bad stuff that they do. They at least have a stake and can be held accountable. Not so when they are retailing from a safe haven.

> The tricky thing about this is that there isn't much stopping anyone from starting a US shell or paying an associate to do it and then logging in to the account from anywhere.

But then if they commit fraud the US associate gets arrested, and it's hard to find volunteers to do that.

They create a Delaware C corp, and if the product is found bad, the company just goes bankrupt. Replace with a new one.

not. at. amazon's. scale.

Amazon's prices are too low to do this verifications per product.

> The scammers and amazon profit.

Is short term thinking and Amazon would never think like that.

The problem is harder than you give it credit for. It's a constant arms race.

> Amazon's prices are too low to do this verifications per product.

Have you price compared when buying basic household goods recently? I haven't found Amazon to be significantly cheaper than local big box stores, who also happen to actually care even a little bit about their supply chain.

If Amazon has found themselves too large to operate as a marketplace that customers can trust then perhaps they made a poor decision in prioritizing short-term growth over everything else.

Of course you can do that at Amazon's scale. Also $1 items can be verified economically, considering you're going to sell more than one of it. It will make life harder for very small sellers with low value items. But I doubt that those make up a big share of sold items.

Good points, I agree that it seems unlikely that Amazon has lost sight of the long term thinking that is largely responsible for making them Amazon.

And it is indeed an arms race, like everything that happens on the internet at scale where money is involved.

But I disagree that the problem is prohibitively hard to solve. In my experience you can always stay just ahead of the black hat players. They're rarely smarter or more talented than competent software engineers and data scientists.

Amazon's failure to stay ahead in this area is, to me, an indication that they're using the wrong strategies, probably because people with the wrong skillsets are being assigned the job of figuring out how to solve the problem.

Maybe we should make it illegal for Amazon et al to externalise this cost to society.

It would be if they couldn't pretend to be a platform..

> Amazon's prices are too low to do this verifications per product.

So Amazon are undercutting by skipping supplier verification. How is this a "hard problem"? If I make my restaurant cheaper by not checking food refrigeration, that's not a "hard problem to solve"

eh, but if this problem gets bad enough, it will kill amazon. If I order a certain brand of stuff off of amazon and I get something I can't use often enough, I'm going to order from another store.

Right now, I'm paying a premium for the convenience of amazon. I'm willing to pay a reasonably large premium for convenience; taking that premium is a sustainable business, but if I'm paying a premium, I expect the product I ordered.

But you know what? safeway is just down the way, and they do deliveries, too. CVS does deliveries, and doesn't seem to have this issue.

I mean, sure, an everything store is great, but if you have enough quality issues, I'm going to go back to maintaining accounts at each vendor.

(all that said, the problem is below my threshold right now. I have been sent the wrong product, but... it doesn't happen often.)

I won’t buy anything I would ingest on Amazon anymore outside of Wholefoods. I’ll go to Target for things like Advil or toothpaste.

I personally trust all of amazon fresh enough to feed me? but yeah, it's probably good advice to not put things that come from the rest of amazon in your mouth.

It's so weird to me, though 'cause here I am, totally willing to pay extra for convenience, and amazon seems to be throwing that premium away.

Clearly, it's not an impossible problem to solve, 'cause basically every other major retailer (and for that matter, nearly all minor retailers) has solved it. It's only the places where they try to both sell their own stuff and be a marketplace of shady third party sellers where I have problems, and even then, most places that try to do both do a better job of segregating the real business from the 'let's compete with ebay' business than amazon does.

I mean, it seems to me like this would be costing amazon money both in the short and long term. If I were an amazon shareholder, I'd demand they drop the third-party garbage until they figured out how to solve the problem as well as target does.

I definitely agree that this could potentially cause long-term damage. Amazon could be one bad counterfeit away from destroying its brand. Brand trust ultimately matters for consumers making a default choice of what to buy or where to shop.

To take an extreme example, as fears surrounding the Coronavirus spike, people are trying to buy 3M masks from Home Depot, not Amazon. It tells me consumers already have a trust issue building with Amazon when they are buying a product that needs to work.

If you cannot get everyone to review for all purchases, then the next best thing is to do random sampling by randomly choose buyers and purchases to get reviewed, and possibly pay them so that selected reviews are collected. I have fond memory of winning the moderation lottery at Slashdot [1]. The current system of free for all will only amplify the voice of the abusers.

[1] https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml

This is true, sometime I wonder about global economies exposing folks to the widespread corruption we hear about in so many other places in the world but haven't dealt with much first hand. I have to wonder if folks in corrupt environments just see these shady behaviors as the norm and so long as they're not axe murderers they're considered more or less decent people. Low standards and ethics eat systems based on honesty for breakfast.

If Amazon had direct liability for selling counterfeit products, for example, if the Ove Glove company (first in the original article) could sue Amazon and recover all the revenue that went to the counterfeiters plus a penalty - I believe in this case Amazon would find a solution to ensure supplier verification.

The problem is that currently it's profitable for Amazon to host goods from fraudsters; if (when) any get discovered, they kick them off but keep the proceeds. Society and law should ensure that Amazon loses money when hosting goods from fraudsters, so that the motivation is properly aligned.

I think Amazon should employ a hundreds of everyday people to review products full time.

When you list a product on Amazon, you have to pay 10-20 of those Amazon Employees to review the product at arms length.

Say each reviewer is given 2 hours for each product, before you can list a product on Amazon you have to pay $2 x 20 x hourly rate.

These should be the only reviews.

Or you can sell your product with no reviews.

This would work for maybe 5% of products. This is no way to review the durability of a product, or review how it performs for specific tasks, e.g. swimming shampoo, internal computer component, sleeping mask, etc.

I think even a lay person would be able to make some good observations about any product. Then across hundreds of employees you could start to build specialized teams.

But also, you don't want people to be too close to a range of products so they can be somewhat objective. For example is swimming shampoo a real thing? or is it just normal shampoo that costs more?

Here is Australia there is a range of over the counter pain killers, all the same brand, all with the same active ingredients, but marketed at different kinds of pain, and at different price points.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-36167011

And yet, there is a point to marketing pain killers for different pains: placebo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_SwD7RveNE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeadOn

Too expensive for most products.

Simply limit "review rights" to users who have made a certain amount of purchases, are already subscribed for a certain amount of time, etc.

Also limit review to be written X time after the product arrives. So many useless reviews that just said they received it and they are going to try it later...

Those reviews always amaze me.

And the people who answer one of the questions with "I don't know", too. Why did they bother typing anything at all?

My theory is that some people can't imagine that people aren't talking specifically to them. You see them in chat rooms answering every question as if it was posed them to directly, even when it was obviously directed at someone else.

In the case of amazon questions, this is a lot to do with how amazon handles them. If a new question is asked, amazon will sometimes send emails to people who have bought the product with the question. It's quite easy to see how someone could think this is directly addressed at them.

Why do you feel the process would be too expensive for most products? That is, let's say the review process might cost the merchant $5,000 on a one-time or biannual basis or whatever--does that seem like an unreasonable charge to take reasonable care that the products offered on the marketplace are authentic, of good quality, etc.?

I'll bite: Honest reviewer says that product works fine...for the first week or month. Wait for a year before allowing them to sell? Not doable especially on millions of new products.

Maybe reviews should be limited only to certified buyers or only those should be added to stars /rank.

Who is waiting a year? Just sell right away. The professional reviewer only has a few hours per product anyhow. That's enough the tell if the product is fake or deceptive. (Or if obviously fake, the quality of the fake :))

If you want to test longevity Amazon could track warranty repair / replacement claims.

They do, but it's not a job nor is it compensated except by delivery of the products. It's called the Amazon Vine program. There is also something called the Early Reviewer Program which is different. Sellers opt in to the ERP for new products. People who participate in the reviews sometimes get a tiny incentive from Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/help https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

... and for some reason, Vine pretty much means "all the stars, all the time", so that's not "testing", that's just buying a 5 star review from a "verified" account.

It's essentially an ad, not a review.

I don't think most people who aren't Vine reviewers are happy with how it works ('cause they get free stuff). I have seen Vine reviewers leave bad reviews, and I know because I've been yelled at over it.

Yeah, it's not 100%, but it's far north of 95%. When I see Vine reviews, they are pretty much always 5 stars, even on products that have very mixed reviews from verified purchases. When I view the Vine-member profiles from those reviews, it's 20-30 five star reviews for every 1 star review. I can't remember ever having seen them give 2, 3 or 4 stars.

My impression is: you pay, you get 5 stars. They buy a product themselves and didn't like it, you get 1 star.

That's rather how a lot of Amazon reviewers are. Vine-rs are also now the only group of reviewers that can officially review products for free. Naturally when you are getting something for free, it's hard to really take value into account. A lot of 2-star $100 products might be "5-star" if you pay $0. That's something Amazon recognizes in its own policies towards normie non-Vine reviewers.

Absolutely, but it makes Vine-reviews useless to me. I'd take the product for $0 and be happy, but they aren't offering it to me for $0, so some review that's essentially "it was free, it's fantastic for something that was free" isn't relevant.

Maybe it's just not an issue for most people because they don't know that reviews could be bought, so any and all reviews are great for making the sale from Amazon's perspective. If the minority that chooses to shop elsewhere grows too large, they can always make a dramatic gesture, punish a dozen people with fake reviews and donate to a children's hospital.

> Really a shame that Amazon does not seem to care much about this, maybe a chance for the smaller shops to take back some lost business though. I find that I buy more in smaller e-commerce shops, because I find they're much less affected by the review fraud and often ship things just as fast as Amazon.

And this will effectively be Amazon's undoing. Given how much central power and authority they control over global retail, this is a good thing. Competition is good for the consumer.

Personally I would phrase it more cynically - the brand is fundamentally a lie even in a magical no counterfeiting world. It had a purpose once as an "index" once but it hasn't been that way for a while.

Essentially all a Brand says is that they got money for it. It how it was made or that they won't decide to cut corners for their next quarterly earnings no matter how many years it was good.

In practice given how often the "counterfeits" are made in the same factory by the same workers with materials from the same supplier the money going there is no guarantee of either product quality or righteousness.

Trying to use brand for delegating quality control is doomed to failure in the real world.

I suspect the better approach towards product identification would be going by verifiable specifications like manufacturers and doing both shopping and any enforcement based upon that. It would be hard as hell to transition society towards that as a norm though with marketer saturation, time investment, and every manufacturer having a financial incentive to try to decommoditize themselves to improve yields and protect themselves from competition.

Also funny, my result of this is that I now order basically everything directly via aliexpress. If all i get is chinese crap anyway, I can at least get it cheaper.

Then I noticed that aliexpress actually made some pretty good page design choices. Since you can see how long a seller is registered and how many they have sold (both directly on the product information site), it is pretty easy to find a at lest decent trader there

> I now order basically everything directly via aliexpress

I would argue that in some ways, AliExpress is better than Amazon. Vendors seem really responsive, even for tiny purchases, and they are eager to avoid negative reviews.

I’ve been happy with the “ReviewMeta” chrome extension, which evaluates the product reviews on any amazon site, and displays a score indicating how likely it is the ratings have been manipulated. It shows examples of flagged reviews which can be pretty funny. Chrome lets you limit extension permissions by domain, so I don’t worry about it snooping on the rest of my browsing.

But you’re right about brands. When it comes to certain products like phone chargers, the manipulation is so rampant I stick with the same supplier.

Reminder to always be very cautious about installing Chrome extensions. Especially ones being touted by new accounts.

Very wise words,but in this case you can just go to the website (https://reviewmeta.com/)

> Really a shame that Amazon does not seem to care much about this

Amazon cares, but Chinese sellers are paying Amazon customers to write fake reviews for them. There's an article about it here:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/her-amazon...

This practice basically makes it impossible to tell fake reviews from real ones.

> Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases.

The other day I came across something interesting: two comments, for two different but related products (dynamos). One comment was in German, the other in Italian, but they both had the same non-sequitur in them.

Apparently scammers reuse comments across products (not surprising) and languages (more surprising).

I think we are going in the expected direction, but we’re not at the end yet.

About brands, we’ve seen the rise of comparison sites and review videos that allows unknown products to raise to the top. I’d say that’s pretty in line with your expectations towards user reviews. We just have more experienced, less influencable/buyable reviewers (in general). For instance the top vacuum cleaner on wirecutter doesn’t need to be a Dyson to get recognized.

The main issue here is really Amazon messing with the supply chain and injecting fakes where they could be guaranteeing genuine products instead. In a sense, looking at a wirecutter like site and buying directly from the maker is the best of both worlds.

After reading about the Wirecutter's attempts to extract a commission from a maker of standing desks[0] and observing their general high churn in product picks, it seems hard to argue that WC isn't buyable.

[0] https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...

I was curious if this had been discussed on hacker news, and found that it has: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22141719

Chinese manufacturers themselves seem to follow this model. When they sell cheap junk, you see those one-shot noname brands. But once some market niche is flooded at the bottom, and the only way to get more of that market is to expand into higher-quality offerings, you start seeing established brands that care about their reputation, to the point where they sometimes outdo Western brands. One example that I know through my hobby is Holosun - not only they compete directly, and quite successfully, against Western market leaders on features and quality, but, in US at least, they have live support based in the country - not the usual call center somewhere in India.

That is exactly what I feel.

More and more I find Amazon to be closer and closer to a Chinese Bazar of cheap quality items (kind of an AliExpress or dx but with a different perceived quality).

I believe they will gain a lot of customers among people who just want cheap stuff (or don't care if it is original as long as the brand is clearly visible and is cheaper) but definitely they will lose customers that use Amazon for convenience (more or less the same price, better refund policies, availability of products...)

It's a pity. Hopefully others will fill that space.

In Spain, El Corte Inglés with its new on-line platform is getting closer and closer.

> It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews.

Totally agree. I think a lot of people feel this way, which is why it's so lucrative for Amazon and sellers to cheat on reviews.

Maybe this is what will save bricks and mortar? Guess where I buy any product I am going to ingest, put on my skin or plug into a wall?

A real store with some special online exceptions, but those exceptions are never going to be Amazon or Ebay.

There are some shady real stores selling shit too of course, so I have to be choosy, but I'm feeling pretty safe at a national supermarket chain, or Kmart.

I really believe these shady operations are ripe for satire and jabs in advertising. Much in the spirit of this one, just with teeth: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5c_Br-mO7Po

And also there are docos on netflix about the fake products problem, and they do scare you away from using certain large online marketplaces.

So if I were the big retailers and cosmetic manufacturers (etc.). I'd be banding together to help fund more docos like that on netflix and elsewhere.

That'll scare people over to physical retail without mucking the image of any specific brands.

Another advantage of physical is the great advice you get and being able to act straight away (tale the thing home.). For example for a DIY project you often realise you don't have something mid job, just go and get it, get some advice on how to install it, and finish the job off on the same day.

I’d recommend using https://reviewmeta.com. It filters out suspicious reviewers and makes it much easier to avoid products with bought reviews on Amazon. Wouldn’t make purchases there without it.

I wish Amazon would just let you select which countries you wanted to include/exclude (both for made in and sold by). It wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least allow me to filter out fly by night Chinese manufacturers.

> because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews

Well one of the things big brands - especially in the consumer products industry like the one I work in - do quite religiously is product testing during research and a lot of q/a during manufacturing to eliminate as far as possible risk of safety issues.

We sometimes take competitive products through the same tests and while what some of the small producers sometimes produce wouldn't be illegal, we'd never run with those standards. Bigger competitors tend to be largely fine.

>>Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy,

Amazon used to be that brand for me, I trusted that I'd get a real product vetted by real reviewers and by Amazon. Adios

I had the same issue with not being able to tell what is from a 3rd party or Amazon.

I assume that sold and shipped Amazon has a greater chance of being real. For example, my wife was looking to buy some masks (I know, give into the fear) but I refused to buy from 3rd parties since I have a low level of trust.

So I built an app to help me and friends quickly tell if from a 3rd party or Amazon. Welcome to try and let me know how it can be better. https://www.trueseller.co

I’ve bought a few things that offered an Amazon gift card after a 5-star review. In some cases, the product was genuinely good and while I’d not have bothered to write a review, the gift card is enough to get me to write the review. I’m not going to write a good review for a crap product, but I bet plenty of people do.

> Really a shame that Amazon does not seem to care much about this

No, no, no! They do care, and a lot!

Amazon has been busy catching up to, and undercutting Alibaba on China-US direction for the last 5 years.

Amazon has managers whose full time job is to poach vendors from Alibaba.

I'm getting spammed by their salespeople non-stop

Both eBay and Amazon have abandoned their own core business models and are trying to become second-rate clones of Alibaba.

The snag is that they aren't headquartered in mainland China.

I saw a documentation a while ago on yt where a German family bought a smartphone over Amazon, which was from China (not sure anymore if they knew at that moment). It exploded then some time later while charging.. they said that Amazon also did not much care and it took a while until it was removed.

I can also say that the company where I work at, had already multiple times problems with Amazon. True they are maybe a bit of a different kind but I think that dollars is the most important thing for them. Even if you have to fk with customers or third party sellers in one or the other way. That's also why I only buy at Amazon if it's really necessary and it's from a big company, like Nintendo or so.

There's also now the law in Germany (or soon) which prohibits the destroying of brand new stuff just because it did not sell. That happened mainly (I'd say) because of Amazon where it went public that 2 trucks left a single warehouse on average per day, filled with only that kind of products

> platforms like Amazon

You can't use the word "platform" at Amazon, nor the word "marketplace", it's in violation of the mandatory legal training for FTEs.

Interesting. What words do they suggest instead?

Just got scammed on one of those smaller sites, f it, I'll buy on amazon so I atleast get anything shipped to me.

But what do brands matter if the issue is counterfeits/knockoffs?

This was one of the early theories about how Facebook would monetize -- that your real-life friends would value their relationship with you too highly to recommend anything but truly great products to you. That hit the reality that people would squander most of their friends for their stupid MLM scheme.

You're right user reviews on Amazon are manipulated. Bought a bluetooth earphone on Amazon DE, was contacted by vendor to exchange a five star for a half refund.

Also came across Facebook ads that asks you to buy random crap and leave positive review in exchange for a full refund, and they call this "free samplimg".

> was contacted by vendor to exchange a five star for a half refund

And the way you can tell Amazon doesn't care is because they have no way to report this to them.

I've tried. They just don't care if someone offers you something off platform in exchange for a good review.

Maybe that's why Amazon beat eBay. When I worked at eBay 17 years ago we had systems in place to combat this exact type of fraud (off platform exchange for a good review).

> Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy

It's interesting that you say this, since Amazon itself is a brand--but not the kind of brand you're looking for. You are looking for reliable quality, and Amazon's brand is quick and cheap.

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