Ignoring Amazon's Affiliate program for a moment, there's already enough incentive for manufactured, astro-turfed reviews. And even when there's real, legitimate reviews left by purchasers of a product, the store page owner could change the quality of the product being sold - silently start shipping knock-off versions as opposed to the real thing - or even reuse a product for a wildly different product. (I know this has happened plenty in the past, I wonder if Amazon has cracked down on that behaviour? Even so, that it has happened so frequently in the past doesn't help since we're talking about 'losing trust'.) These practices have hurt much more than their affiliate program has, in my view.

My grandparents (in England) were longtime subscribers to a magazine named Which (which.co.uk). I have no idea if it's the same thing anymore, but at least 15 years ago it was a (very middle-class, quite expensive) magazine that would review family cars, vacuum cleaners, televisions and so on. The whole selling point of that magazine was 50 years of built-up trust, they'd lay out in detail how they'd do their blind testing and their rigor in testing, and very publicly owning when they made mistakes or got things wrong. Are there any online equivalents that have this sort of cache and trust associated with them? If you were to buy, say, a laptop, or a new washing machine... where would you go?