Amazon Review Scam | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Review Scam

twitter.com

579 pointsStreamBright317 comments

There is a whole network of fake reviewers, agents and sellers that pump up products on Amazon. It is extremely easy to find those people. A simple search for "Amazon Reviews" on Facebook will take you to a few open Facebook Groups. Here are a few examples:

https://www.facebook.com/amazonrrc/ https://www.facebook.com/AmReSe/

I was curious and contacted one of them. They sent proof screenshots that they indeed refund you if you buy a products and leave a good review. They instructed me to search for specific term to find the product instead of giving me a link to click on.

For Amazon, this is easy to prevent because it is so easy to find sellers that are engaging in that sort of activity.

As always, if you follow the money, Amazon has little interest in doing so...

> I have the manufacturer of a product (a @wirecutter pick, no less) that I reviewed 3 stars, who has been emailing me offers of increasing amounts of money to take it down. The most recent offer is well over what I spent on the product. I revised my review down to 1 star.

Meta-scam: Buy cheap items that are review-scammed and write a thorough, plausible 1-star review, hold out for profit. Rinse, repeat.

Your 1 star review will get auto deleted.

I've been an Amazon customer for 15 years. Have literally bought $50,000+ worth of stuff from them. In other words: rock solid reputation.

Amazon has deleted even my critical reviews. Go figure.

Same with me - I'm over $80K in purchases based on my data request to them (excluding business where I admin a business account with multiple purchasers).

Critical reviews do get taken down (I've no idea why). My reviews are legit - I don't have time or interest in anything other than providing feedback. Most stuff is fine, but some is obviously fake or junk. I'm always specific, they could literally buy the product and test it themselves.

What if friends of these fake review circles get themselves hired into Amazon to be on the teams that validate the reviews? It is possible that Amazon is so big, they would not detect this problem.

You could be a good corporate drone and do your job for 97% of the time, and in 3% of the cases delete bad reviews for your friends. Unless someone is doing really great statistical analysis, this could fly under the radar for a very long time.

I think it's possible. There was a case back in September [1] where six "third-party sellers consultant" were charged with allegedly bribing up to ten Amazon employees to restore deleted items.

Of course, those people were caught and that goes against the "not detect this problem" part. But if you were to scale down this operation from 16 people down to just one or two, it seems like it could work.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-marketplace-fraud-scheme...

The question seems to be: what can we do to limit Amazon?

Buy from alternatives and give them feedback. Shopify has made it pretty easy for anyone to start a e-commerce site and then there are other places like etsy.

One little thing left: notify users about the existence of these sites.

While I understand that people find any reason to believe they hold status higher than others but they shouldn't believe that when they are faced with a company with billions of customers worldwide. If you continued to buy from Amazon (racked up $50K in spending for 15 years), it's clear that removing your review didn't matter to their bottom line so no reason to care.

Your missing the point. It has nothing to do with their identity, it's the fact that telling apart fake reviews from ones written by real people is a hard problem, but generally you won't find a bot account with 15 years of history. The implication here is that if Amazon truly cared about surfacing legitimate reviews only, they would've kept the one from that account since there's very low probability of it being fake.

Don't bother; if this person was serious about making a point (instead of just ranting) they would've used their real account.

> Your missing the point.

I am not. You should re-read my point. Whether their review was rejected or not didn't stop them from spending $50k on amazon. They are as replaceable as warehouse workers.

Leave a 5 star review, but in the comments, make it clear extremely clear it's a 1-star product.

I've actually seen this- I didn't know why they did it.

Unfortunately when your review is lost in a sea of fake 5-star reviews, no one is likely to see it.

Make it a 4 star reviews. I bet people who read reviews will skip the 5 stars and check the rest. I know I do that.

there are lots of current one star reviews that prove otherwise. If anything I surf one star and two star reviews of products I am buying and factor in the date of the review to see if a product improved or got worse.

Now what I do find inexcusable are reviews that are obviously not for the product I am looking at. I will report abuse on those but I do admit that I do not go back and check if they removed

I have in the past independently bought something on amazon and later found out the reviews were fake (because every single person leaving a review had left reviews on the same few products - it was only 7 reviews total or so, so it was easy to check) - I reported this and I also left a 1 star review on the product I had bought. It got taken down. The fake reviews stayed up

Yeah, I look more at the 1-3 star reviews and see what they are complaining about. A lot are bogus (they got what they ordered, not what they expected) or not related to the product (shipping errors etc) but once you weed out the junk they provide a much better picture of the product than the highly rated ones do.

Just adding information, I have had this happen

There is a different reason as well, most of these stores highlights reviews of 1 and 5 star. Some people (well I guess all people that leave reviews) like to be highlighted, so they only leave 5 or 1 star reviews. This was a pain when I was managing a Google app and part of the performance review was the average rating. This was a small app with few reviews so the jokers that liked the app but left 1 star review to be highlighted really made a negative difference.

Just to be clear, I was OK with users leaving 1 star if they didn't like it or even better had some constructive feedback. But many were like "great app": 1 star, or "Hi single guy here, and ladies around?": 1 star.

If you force users to provide feedback, even if optional, expect many invalid results

In my experience, users won’t go out of their way to leave a worthless review. So if your app doesn’t nag, you have less spam. But that also means you miss a lot of legitimate people who don’t have the time or knowledge to leave good reviews.

Gift and curse etc

> If you force users to provide feedback, even if optional, expect many invalid results

I understand what you mean, but the phrasing of "forcing" someone to optionally do something is odd.

There was no nagging, never asked the user to leave a review. They really used it as a dating service all on their own.

Yep, I got offered $50 to change my one star review on a ~$20 product.

Last cable I ordered I was offered $20 for a review on a $12 item.

We need a google spreadsheet shared with everybody. If I know of Amazon items I can buy, leave 1 star review and they will contact me to offer more than I paid, and keep an item - I need to know as many of these products as possible :)

I went to find the SKU for ya and was happy to find the seller is no longer on the Amazon marketplace! Maybe forwarding the emails they sent to jeff@amazon actually worked?

Where is that quote from?

Whoops, sorry I should have linked it: https://twitter.com/sharding/status/1325914278596112384

> As always, if you follow the money, Amazon has little interest in doing so...

They had little short-term interest in doing so. Now people know the reviews are fake, and Amazon's reputation WRT finding good products and believing you'll get an authentic product is edging towards the gutter. I know I'm very careful of what I'm buying from whom on Amazon now. Combined with them not always being the cheapest for a long time now, and there's less and less reason for me to give them first consideration.

Interestingly I've found Amazon shipping has gone to the dump too, which was one of the final things they had going for them. At first it was completely understandable with the pandemic, but they seem to have taken that as an excuse to just give up on the Prime shipping promise period indefinitely. I was starting to order everything sensitive, from electronics to health, elsewhere anyway over counterfeit and fraud worries. But now I find other places ship massively faster than Amazon, "Prime" shipping on Amazon routinely takes a week or even weeks, plural, even when it says "in stock". Other places ship right away and have it my rural area in days.

So for me at least Amazon has finally exited default territory, because it doesn't even have the "well it's more risky, but it's fast and reliable" rush argument anymore. Of course I don't expect the general population to move instantly, and it's not like I've dumped them entirely either. There are even some manufacturers I like who use them for fulfillment pretty exclusively (at least for small orders). But I do wonder in cases like this whether we'll see a non-linear curve: everything seems to be going swell for a business, right until some tipping point is reached and suddenly things go backwards fairly quickly. And that can be hard to recover from. Of course Amazon does have some moats overall, I don't expect them as a going concern to have any real trouble particularly on the service side, AWS and all that. But the moats actually seem weakest for Amazon-as-a-B2C-market, there isn't really anything inherently sticky there beyond habit.

Amazon Prime shipping transit times have been rock solid for me throughout. There was a period when their estimated delivery dates were pushed way out, but the actual delivery was never late.

The delivery issues may be regional, or maybe it's just certain product categories. Where I live, Prime shipping from March-May was about a week to 10 days, but now it's back up to 1-2 days for almost everything. I'm in the North East though where there's a warehouse about 15 miles away, and at least half a dozen major national shipping hubs within ~100 miles.

Same in terms of delivery. It was bad for awhile, but got better a few months back. I'm in the southwest; local warehouse is about 30-40 miles out but not everything is in the local warehouse so I often get stuff from other states' warehouses. Still getting the 2-3 day thing in general for those, 1-2 if local.

The north has been waaay more affected by lockdown restrictions than the south. We have not seen a single slow down in prime deliveries

Same here. Recently, if it's anything that's health related, I absolutely avoid Amazon because of the mass of fake products out there. I needed some vitamins recently and my first thought was that I'm better off paying CVS or Walgreens prices and being practically guaranteed that the product is legit, versus trying to weed through the fake reviews and counterfeit products on Amazon.

That thought has occurred with increasing frequency over the past few years as Amazon continues to completely ignore the issue.

Do be aware that CVS and Walgreens stock homeopathic garbage for any symptom that doesn't have a good OTC remedy, and aside from a little fine print and weird units on the "active ingredients" the packaging is identical to real medicine.

Their reputation is shot. I wanted to buy a NAS, and look at the prices in Canada. I stopped myself from going to Amazon because I was too wary of weird reviews and long discontinued products with completely strange prices.

I went to Canada Computers instead.

I know what you mean. There’s some category of purchases for which I still look at Amazon—basically <30$ and doesn’t-matter-if-it’s-fake type items. Anything that doesn’t fit those criteria, and especially brand name electronic items, I’m buying elsewhere. Knowing it’s genuine is worth a higher price.

This has basically meant that I went from a Prime member making 5-10k$ worth of purchase per year a few years ago, to a non-prime member spending only a few hundred $ per year at Amazon. I suspect I’m not unique in the HN crowd, but I’m shocked at how often I see friends, family, and coworkers continue to trust this company with large, important purchases.

> Now people know the reviews are fake

I am not 100% sure about this, I wish it were so. Maybe it's just that we get this feeling because of the people we usually talk to, the people in our close circle of connections who are likely to be like us in terms of this kind of rasoning/thinking. I think most people may not be aware of it.

> They had little short-term interest in doing so

I just want to add a possible scenario here and I would like to hear opinions about it:

As we all know, people really tend to buy products with 4.5+ stars and we think twice if the product has 3 or even 4 stars. On the other hand, let's suppose that since everyone is selling on Amazon now, worse products are likely to be put on sale, so the average scores start to decrease.

Having said the above, if I, as a user, periodically look for products on Amazon, I will probably start seeing/finding bad products, so it may be that in a long period of time, I will start looking for alternatives other than Amazon and may attribute the image of "not high quality products" to Amazon as an e-commerce.

[Edit]: So if my two previous scenarios are correct, if you follow the money, they actually have some long-term interest in allowing some fake(good) reviews and eliminating some real bad ones. In the end, most people will not be aware of these fake reviews and the quality of the products will be perceived as higher, resulting in more sales and in a better reputation of Amazon products, thus avoiding the scenario discussed in the second answer.

> I am not 100% sure about this, I wish it were so.

Well, not everyone, but there's growing knowledge about it, and popular media podcasts that do whole episodes on it, etc.

> I will probably start seeing/finding bad products, so it may be that in a long period of time, I will start looking for alternatives other than Amazon and may attribute the image of "not high quality products" to Amazon as an e-commerce.

I think that depends on whether the ratings are for product quality or product accuracy/authenticness/amazon fulfillment issues.

> they actually have some long-term interest in allowing some fake(good) reviews and eliminating some real bad ones.

I think the important part of that is some. While it may be in Amazon's interest to manipulate the reviews to some degree, it's definitely not in their best interest to let people know or assume they or anyone else is doing so.

Not just that, but the last 3 things I bought (workout stuff) last week from Amazon each had a little notecard inside with a bait for a review and a hinted at alternative dispute resolution system; and none of the items was particularly expensive which suggests the customer acquisition cost of having a high ranking Amazon item must be so low it makes sense to defend it aggressively with gift cards and such.

Jokes on them, I never look at 5 or 1 star reviews. By convention I think rating systems are fundamentally flawed in that they are anything but a ubiquitous concept. The people struggling to piece together how they feel about something in a binary construct generally have the most insightful comments. There's no way to stop someone from gaming the system though. If the economic incentive is to cheat, cheaters gonna cheat. Eventually plugins like FakeSpot will become as common as ad blockers, imo.

That's my approach as well, the 4 star reviews are usually the most informative.

I try to take 1, 4, and 5 into account with mine. I mostly discount 5s but it's still good to see what people are saying. 4 will let you know what issues the product really has, and 1 will give you an idea of how frequently the product breaks or arrives broken.

Well, if Amazon were to crack down on this sort of thing, it would incentivize unscrupulous sellers to solicit fake 5-star reviews (through a 3rd party) for their competitors so that they would be punished. The only reason we have to doubt this is happening now is that there's no incentive to do it, since Amazon seems to be turning a blind eye.

It's a hard problem. The solutions most likely to work are also expensive. Amazon could create internal product review teams staffed by employees instead of letting users do it all for free, but it's hard to make that scale. It's also less transparent; one of the big appeals of Amazon early on was the novelty that you could go to a retailer and if you don't like one of their products you can say so for the world to see. Now most other retailers do the same thing and we sort of take it for granted now.

It's not that hard - look at systems like Fakespot that could automatically verify reviewer credibility (without even access to the internal data that Amazon holds).

Or just offer systems for buyers to report suppliers doing exactly this - buying reviews.

Or honeypot it, and just put some fake addresses on sites that sell reviews and then ban companies that send you stuff.

I mean there are loads of solutions, but all of them involve Amazon taking down 5 star reviews that help them sell crap, so the incentives are obviously conflicting here.

He's talking about getting your competition banned by false-flagging them. It's much harder to figure out who is placing the fake reviews than that they are fake.

By that logic Amazon (or any other site) can never crack down on unscrupulous behavior committed by a 3rd party.

I don't know, they are doing something, just not anything useful I think. Over the past few weeks, I had found a group that posts 'deals'...on crap I don't need, but usually promo codes to buy things for a dollar or two. I've become a bit prolific reviewer since my wife and I compete for reviews/helpful/ranks(stupid, I know).

What do you know...Amazon started deleting my reviews. 20 or so deleted so far, and a lot of helpful votes gone as well. If I try to re-review any of those, it tells me I'm not allowed to review this item from my account. So great, I'm a scammer now.

Between fake reviews, and now this - Amazon effectively having wasted my time it took writing reviews, I've been ordering more from Walmart. Sure they aren't great, but they aren't Amazon.

I've been contacted several times after leaving negative reviews by sellers that they would refund me 50% or more (and even 100% in one case) if I changed the review to be positive.

Same here. They used a multitude of email addresses so every time I blocked them they eventually used another one and got through. Refunding me 100% of the cost of the USB cable doesn’t replace the port it broke so no thank you. I’d rather people be warned.

I've made a habit of reading the 2* & 3* reviews first. They are almost always helpful and never paid reviews.

And look for patterns of bad product traits being reported. Most people complain about one thing they didn't like, or one thing they wish the product had (even when the description said it didn't, go figure). If everyone is complaining about the same thing, then I know I should probably be wary.

Jokes on them, I never look at 5 or 1 star reviews. By convention I think rating systems are fundamentally flawed in that they are anything but a ubiquitous concept from person to person. Shit, I bet half of the hacker news crowd thinks anything less than an A is a failing grade. The people struggling to piece together how they feel about something in a binary construct generally have the most insightful comments. Kinda like the students who got a couple bad grades in college probably had more interesting lives. ;)

Yeah - just go to vipon.com. They run an entire platform for this.

Every negative review i have tried to leave on Amazon has been denied for similarly vague reasons. This is not a new trend and goes back at least a decade. Receiving damaged products, wrong products, overtly used (skin buildup on "new" keyboards, etc).

While this should represent a long-term concern for Amazon but it is not a short-term one. For now they are benefited by potential buyers viewing their products as superior.

Incidentally, Amazon's real failure for me as a consumer is their delivery service. In spite of spending hours on the phone with their logistics departments, Amazon's delivery people have a roughly 33% success rate getting a package to my door, compared to nearly 100% for USPS, UPS and Fedex. This has diverted thousands of dollars in the last year alone to other vendors or in-person stores, as i preemptively avoid the frustration associated with waiting for a package that never comes and then having to chase down a refund or another shipment.

Why would you leave a negative review on a product that you didn't receive?

It's really annoying to sift through comments like "Amazon gave me the wrong product" or "the UPS driver kicked the box through my window" as if that has anything to do with the product I'm looking at. Those comments should absolutely get deleted.

0/5 stars : "delivery was late." are the reviews that really annoys me.

Or the equally useful:

> 4/5 stars : Price was good, hope it arrives soon!

Which I've seen a few times.

I’m not completely familiar with Amazon reviews, but if I remember correctly it’s not super clear that you’re reviewing the product and not the seller, and how to review the seller specifically.

This difference is irrelevant when the seller is Amazon, but very relevant when it’s not. We all know how Amazon blurs this line, so the confusion is understandable.

That said, I hate it too, and it’s Amazon’s fault.

Those are as useful as Yelp reviews for how <dish> in <city A> isn't as good as the one in <city B>.

My favorite 1-star Yelp review was for a restaurant with outdoor seating. Paraphrasing, it went something like this:

> Burger was good, but it was 100 degrees out and windy! I can't enjoy a meal in that kind of weather.

I'm sure the manager stepped up their weather control after getting that scathing critique.

If I'm being charitable, I suppose that would be useful for an out-of-towner who was unaware that the area is hot and often windy. But to mark it 1 star as a result is useless.

This is how I evaluate restaurants on Yelp. I go to the 1 and 2 star reviews. If they are things like the weather was bad, the prices are too high or the waiter was rude to me, I assume the place is pretty good. People without much taste love places with cheap food and extremely polite and fast service. I like good food.

Because reviews are sometimes fake, and often from people who don't know much or have a lot to compare to, the most useful thing is to filter for when people complain about what you don't care about.

Another thing I do for restaurants on Tripadvisor is look at reviews by language (works better abroad than in the US). While it's a bit stereotyping, I find that if a place is well reviewed by reviewers who write in Italian, French or Japanese, it's generally more likely to be to my taste. I'll add other languages depending on context , so if I'm looking for a Mexican, filtering by Spanish reviews is definitely helpful.

And helpfully when filtering by language, Tripadvisor will show the spread of reviews for that language making it easy.

This seems to be the only approach that works anymore. Are all the negative reviews petty or entitled? Then probably the thing in question is fine.

I wonder if part of the blame here comes to the apps pushing people to write reviews. I have a hard time thinking that person would go out of their way to leave a negative review like that, but if Yelp pings and encourages them to describe what they thought of their meal, I could see someone just typing whatever came to their mind.

This reminds me of the Amazon product Q&A section. Someone will respond to a question with "I'm not sure" likely because Amazon notifies purchasers when someone asks a question.

I think this is a valid point, especially if the review count is gameified so you are rewarded when leaving more reviews. I see plenty of Google maps reviews from people tagged as "Local Guides" that respond to questions about a location with something like "I don't know, call them".

As an aside, favorite negative review I have heard of is one for the Taj Mahal complaining that it is too far from the airport.

Or my personal favorites about the wait staff...

Story time: I once read a one star review on a restaurant in Boston which boiled down to "waiter was black". I flagged the review and yelp got back to me that "they tried to include all relevant opinions." This was about a decade ago, but the experience has always left me with the opinion that review sites could do more to keep reviews topical by promoting ratings of the separate parts of an item. Also, they should allow you to flag racism.

Yelp doesn't care at all. I contacted them about a scam online car "dealership" that was just stealing money from people for fake cars, and despite ample evidence they wouldn't do anything about it, and wouldn't even allow me to leave a warning review since I had admitted to them that I hadn't bought anything from or personally visited this business. (Which obviously I couldn't, since it was fake.)

My (perhaps too) honest answer: Because I'm reviewing the purchasing experience, not just the product. Same as when I review a restaurant, I'm reviewing the service and food, not just the food. Even now that I've learned there's a separate area to review the seller, I can barely be bothered to leave one review, so I'm likely not going to take the time to leave two. Honestly, they're lucky I'm even leaving one honest review, since I'm under no obligation to do so. And like others, I've had my critical reviews get deleted, and I've even received emails from Amazon with vague threats about them, so they really don't encourage me to care much.

Imagine leaving a bad review for a restaurant because it was raining outside or your Uber took you to the wrong restaurant. That's basically what you're doing when you're giving a review on "the purchasing experience" on Amazon.

Everyone on earth knows that it might rain during your dinner, just like everyone on earth knows that packages get lost sometimes or the UPS driver might drop your TV. It's not useful or fair to the product's company or restaurant to leave these kind of reviews.

> That's basically what you're doing when you're giving a review on "the purchasing experience" on Amazon.

No, it's not.

> that packages get lost sometimes or the UPS driver might drop your TV.

I would never leave a bad review for those types of things, since they're not in the sellers control. I'd knock a star off if delivery was delayed because it didn't ship on time though, which has happened on more than one occasion.

> I'd knock a star off if delivery was delayed because it didn't ship on time though, which has happened on more than one occasion.

That's the point! You don't knock a star off a product because they didn't ship the product in time. You knock stars off the SELLER. There's literally a whole system in place to review the seller.

And if the seller is Amazon, it's even worse. Why would I care about whether or not Amazon was able to ship your product in time 3 months ago?

> There's literally a whole system in place to review the seller.

> Why would I care about

As I said, the world (Amazon, manufacturer, potential buyers, etc.) is lucky that I took the time to provide them with the opportunity to consider my opinion in the first place, so I'm certainly not going to take additional time out of my day to leave a secondary review, and I'm certainly not going to concern myself with what others care about my honest reviews.

It didn’t sound like that’s what the commenter is actually doing.

Precisely. S/he wrote about reviewing related to "damaged products, wrong products, overtly used ..." but not missing deliveries, that was an "incidentally... " other paragraph.

If its a third party seller and they dont ship the product, this seems appropriate.

There is a separate review/feedback system (that's admittedly much less visible) for this though. I don't care about your delivery experience when I'm looking at a product (sorry) because we might be buying from different sellers, and almost certainly have somebody different delivering it, but are in theory receiving the same product.

I get that, but I believe amazon's third party listings have segregated reviews.

> Why would you leave a negative review on a product that you didn't receive?

Because Amazon doesn't give you the option to rate the delivery experience separately from the product?

They do now. I get emails asking me to rate the delivery experience.

Is the outcome of these emails publicly available for potential buyers?

If it's an Amazon Marketplace listing, yes, in the form of a seller review. If it's sold and shipped by Amazon, then no.

there are product reviews and seller reviews. but people get these mixed up a lot, or don't even know about it.

Because delivery is part of the experience. If you make a great widget but you build it to order 6 months latter, I'm fine with that only if I know up front how long until I get my widget (this is a common thing to happen with just in time manufacturing - but everyone knows when the delivery is expected).

Unless ACME Corp. is hand delivering your product, you should be lodging these complaints with the logistics company. If you think it's ACME's problem, you can leave a negative review on the seller's page, but leaving a 0/5 on a product because it was late isn't really helping anyone, especially considering products can come from multiple sellers.

If it never shipped though...

Delivery tracking can be extremely misleading.

For instance, a sender can “create a shipping label”, and suddenly it has a tracking number and looks ready to ship soon. In reality, it may literally not even be in a box yet, much less anywhere near a shipping warehouse! Things can stay in these limbo states for weeks and claim to be “shipping” or whatever else. Not to name names but ReserveBar did this to me and I’m still bitter about it (ended up cancelling an order after being lied to about its true state of shipment for over a month).

I used to ship ups back in the day. They gave us software that was connected to them. We could request a shipping label and provide an address. This makes it trackable. We print out the label and put it on the box of the computer we were to build before shipping. Sometimes we had to wait on hard drives or CPU’s because we were out. Then we would qa it for 24 hours before putting the sticker on the box and giving it to ups at 5:15. A week your label was traceable but in reality it wasn’t going anywhere. Once ups picked it up you had regular updates.

I recently went to work for a drop ship company and ups and fedex labels still have a preship phase. This company we had labels printed while we waited for merch to arrive 3 weeks later!

If the company is upfront about that, then I'm fine with it. When I get a shipping number and then no activity and no communication for a week I assume I got defrauded.

I recently did two orders where this type of thing happens. One (an ebay order) the company sent me a notice a few hours latter that my product was damaged and no more stock would arrive for a month could they cancel the order. The other (new egg third party) there was no communication for a week despite a shipping label, so I contacted newegg and demanded a refund. I might order from the first company again, the second put a bad taste in my mouth and I probably won't use newegg at all anymore just because they are not policing their sellers.

Ok but you weren’t. It clearly says “shipping information received”. Not “product has been picked up by ups”

Also ups does not notify you so don’t expect communication from them they will tell you to call your shipper. If the shipper doesn’t respond to you well... that has nothing to do with the UPS shipping process now does it.

I just realized the drop ship company printed labels early so it didn’t look like they were the slow ones. The idea is someone looks at the label sees “shipping something received” and then hounds ups for status updates and not the seller.

Conversely, I once ordered an item that never cleared the initial "shipping" status even though I received it a few days later. I forgot about it, and a few months later Amazon refunded the purchase on their own.

I think there's a reasonable expectation that product reviewers account for which parts of the experience can be controlled by the seller. You presumably wouldn't leave a negative review on a digital music purchase because your internet access is extremely slow.

Granted, this can be a little fuzzy, since it might not even be clear which parts of the experience are controlled by Amazon, the product manufacturer, and other third parties. Receiving a counterfeit SanDisk SD card from Amazon is almost certainly not the fault of SanDisk, yet a lot of people might leave negative reviews on an Amazon listing if they receive a counterfeit product. That's understandable despite it not exactly being "fair" to SanDisk.

I'm sorry, but if they're shipping by the three major carriers (plus amazon itself), barely anybody cares about the review. We all know problems in shipping occur. We don't need to filter the less than 1 percent of problem reviews because you were too impatient or too upset with life to wait 2 more days for a reshipment.

Why are you assuming they shipped anything?

> Why would you leave a negative review on a product that you didn't receive?

Is this a serious question? If a seller fails to get my package to me then of course I'm going to leave a bad review - that's literally what I'm paying for! If they have problems with their shipping vendor it's their problem, not mine.

Suppose I want to order a Logitech C930c webcam, there are currently 18 different offers on Amazon for that. The reviews on the product page should be reviews of the webcam, not of any individual seller experience (should be in the sense of "Amazon wants it this way" and "because that's what makes sense for Amazon shoppers"). If I'm on that product page reading reviews, I'm researching that webcam, not the seller who happened to sell it to you.

You're more than welcome to review the seller shipping experience (which shows up on the seller detail page that probably gets little traffic), but anything you post about a seller-specific incident on the general product review set isn't helping anyone.

Amazon product listings are shared across all vendors. The review is for the item itself.

Say you buy a product listed as "Cool WebCam HD". You might deal with "xXCoolSellerXx" while I would deal with "GadgetSeller51". By leaving a bad review unrelated to the item, you are drowning the actual bad reviews and hurting quality sellers.

Upon purchasing a product on Amazon you will receive a link to review the seller. That is where you are to put your review about the way the seller dealt with you.

It's on Amazon.com and I'm charged by Amazon. Therefore, as far as I'm concerned, I bought it from Amazon. I don't really care who Amazon's suppliers are.

And you tell them which suppliers are good or bad by reviewing your seller.

You’re doing the equivalent of leaving DoorDash a bad review on the App Store because you didn’t like the takeout you ordered.

I mean it’s on DoorDash and you’re charged by DoorDash. As far as you’re concerned DoorDash is responsible for your McNuggets.

That's not even remotely my problem. If I pay for something and don't receive it then I'm leaving a bad review.

How is it remotely useful for the next person if you leave a 1 star review on a product on Amazon because it got lost in the mail? That has nothing to do with the product.

It's extremely useful. The next person should know that they might get scammed.

Sure, leave a bad review on the seller NOT THE PRODUCT. You can leave feedback about sellers separate from the product.

> If I pay for something and don't receive it then I'm leaving a bad review.

Exactly, leave a bad review. But leave it at the right place so that this review will have an impact.

Say you buy a new car at Honda and the salesperson scams you. You would not go on a car review website and review the Civic with "1 star, the salesperson was corrupt". You would call the dealership and tell them "this salesperson is crap" or you would call Honda headquarter and tell them "this dealership is ruining your name".

Why would this be different on Amazon? When a marketplace gives you a bad experience, you review the marketplace itself or the seller. Not the product, the company who makes the product has no control over the marketplace.

Yeah, no. Amazon is selling me a product. I don't care through how many intermediaries they're trying to deflect responsibility.

My money goes to Amazon, in exchange for the working product in my household. Anything goes wrong, goes to Amazon. They could always pay somebody to read the reviews and talk to their resellers if they don't adhere to shipment standards.

If I hurt quality sellers, I'm terribly sorry - maybe they shouldn't sell on a disreputable platform.

If the shipping problem isn't product specific, a review on a product just isn't helpful. I get that you're unhappy about your purchase, but buying a different widget wouldn't have helped if someone was stealing packages on delivery day.

If it was a item specific shipping problem, like Amazon packed it in such a way that it arrived broken and could be expected to arrive broken, that's somewhat useful, although it probably applies to the whole product category (btw, don't buy hard drives from amazon if you don't want them to be packed in a big box with like 3 air pillows and banging back and forth for the whole drive).

If a fork lift smashed into the package at the warehouse, that's just bad luck, not a product issue; contact customer service.

> Anything goes wrong, goes to Amazon.

Exactly, which is why you should review your seller negatively so that Amazon can take steps in removing that seller from the marketplace. Amazon reads the reviews you put on a seller and take almost immediate action. When you review the item, they don't. So not only are you wasting your own time, you are wasting everyone else's.

But Amazon doesn't care about your 1 star review. Asking customer support to comp you because your order was late does a lot more to their bottom line than a bad review on a product they don't even make or ship.

For in-stock, Prime-eligible, fulfilled-by-Amazon products the delivery has nothing to do with the seller. The shipping vendor (to me) is Amazon, the warehousing vendor is also Amazon, and they're using the typical UPS, USPS, and sometimes FedEx suppliers.

I'm choosing between pictures, descriptions, and reviews of products on Amazon. In that context, the individual seller (and there might be a dozen for an individual product, though typically only one marked Prime) has nothing to do with the delivery, and it's a question of the quality of the actual product.

For what it's worth, I have Prime, live on the end of a private cul-de-sac and have zero problems with package theft, typically filter by Prime-eligible products, and have bought thousands of dollars of stuff on Amazon. I can think of two instances where the products didn't get to me, and one of those was an exception to my Prime-eligible filter. The other time, I waited a week for my 2-day shipping, contacted Amazon, and they shipped a second unit. A couple days after the second unit arrived, the original also made its way to me at the end of a long, tortured journey through the wrong state, no idea what happened there (I contacted Amazon when it arrived and they said I could keep it...good service!)

The product page is for Acme Widget, and you bought the product from Bob Loblaw Electronics on Amazon Marketplace. The Acme Widget you bought arrives three weeks late and looks like someone put it through a wood chipper. It makes complete sense to leave a seller review, but in what world does it make sense to leave a negative review on the PRODUCT page when they have nothing to do with the seller?

That's why Amazon has seller reviews, where you can review that X didn't send you the product, and product reviews where you can tell people if the product is good or not, regardless from which seller they buy it.

> Receiving damaged products, wrong products, overly used (skin buildup on "new" keyboards, etc).

I think Amazon considers these issues with the vendor, not issues with the product proper. So they would want you to report those things in a vendor review rather than in a product review.

I've definitely submitted negative product reviews and had them go live. And obviously there are lots of negative reviews out there on lots of products.

I think Amazon considers these issues with the vendor...

When it's mostly mixed inventory, and one of the vendors is inserting garbage into the mix, why wouldn't a future buyer want to know that the whole mix is corrupt?

It's not about what future buyers want. _Amazon_ would like their buyers to forget that their entire inventory has been corrupted by counterfeits and open-box/used products sold as new.

I've got to say, something like "was used" is not a useful review to me as an Amazon user.

It sucks that it happens, but it's not specific to the product. Same with damaged to a certain degree. "It was damaged" isn't useful, but "it comes woefully under packaged", for example, is useful if the item is fragile.

Personal experience... I ordered a car roof rack, but received a pile of random plastic chunks. I returned it for a refund. My fear is Amazon just put those plastic chunks back in the mix for some other unsuspecting buyer. So, I left a review to the effect of "one of the sellers is inserting garbage into the stream, caveat emptor". Amazon rejected the review. As a buyer, I would have found that useful, as it would allow me to go elsewhere. Obviously bad for Amazon, but so is shipping be a pile of garbage - I won't be buying roof racks from them any time soon.

Because it probably wasn't a seller, but a fake return.

Something that Amazon is at fault for and can happen to any item, so while it is an issue, it's not really on any particular seller or item

Fwiw I've never had a negative review removed after hundreds of reviews. But I'm very strict about framing issues in terms of them item.

For example, I recently got a shattered ceramic cup.Amazon had padded the contents of the outer box, but the inner box the actual cup came in had no padding whatsoever... paper thin with no clearances.

There was never a hope that thing would ever have reached me in one piece, regardless of what Amazon did to package it and so I framed the negative review like that.

It's something that a prototypical instance of the item would share as a shortcoming. Amazon can't fix it, only the manufacturer boxing it can

I posted a 1 star review for a dell monitor with pictures because bands appeared in the middle of the screen after a month. Dell gave a refurbished unit as replacement. Amazon deleted my review after two months and blocked me from posting any further reviews for that monitor. I used to post regular reviews both positive and negative on Amazon. After this I just stopped posting any reviews to Amazon.

A friend receives free products for five star reviews. This has been going on for awhile now.

All my negative reviews are still up.

I had a similar experience, for an "Amazon's Choice" recommended popular camera knock-off. The camera came with an insert saying they would give you a "free gift" if you left a four or five star review. I contacted Amazon support with images and they said they would address it. They didn't and the product still stands as "Amazon's Choice." I tried to leave a review saying the reviews were fake and got a warning (obviously seller initiated) that those types of reviews violated Amazon's policies.

Amazon clearly enables review scams.

I'm convinced that "Amazon's Choice" means that it is Amazon's choicest item for high margins [0], and most certainly does not mean that their staff of highly discriminating reviewers decided that this is the best of the bunch.

Which is why the item to which you refer is still "Amazon's Choice": everyone's making money except the end consumer.

[0] In fact, I seem to recall an article that did an analysis of some sort and came to that conclusion. Hell if I can find it, though.

When amazon's choice changes for slightly different keywords, it's clear a machine is picking. Amazon is pretty good at optimizing, but their targets aren't my targets (this is why sort by price sorts by something other than price)

Every time I see "Amazon's Choice", in my head I hear the tagline from The Outer Worlds:

" It's not the best choice, it's Spacer's Choice "

I doubt there's anyone that doesn't think this

Probably not many and probably nobody here but I reckon there are at least a few non-technical people that think Amazon employees have actually chosen them.

I mean, the very first time you come across it there's no reason to think otherwise really. Search for a padlock, and one is "Amazon's choice"? Ok sure they could easily have had someone try all the padlocks and pick a decent one.

It's only when you find "Amazon's choice" of "3mm hand reamer" or whatever that it becomes obvious it's a scam.

Elzar: You gotta try the pasta, it's got a real nice profit margin. Bam!

It may not even be official policy, but corruption. If you know the right guys at Amazon HQ, maybe you can get inside „assistance“ for certain arrangements.

Amazon really do have a problem. Often I see people reviewing different products to the one on the page. Sellers are swapping out listings to pump the reviews and this is in plain sight.[1]

Worst still, I've seen Amazon produce a banner with the phrase "Dispatched and Sold by Amazon" - gives you the guarantee to receive original and genuine[2]

This means they know that other listings may not be original or genuine. So to solve this, they promote their own items as genuine, despite them owning the whole platform.

1. https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/1169905424612507649?...

2. https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/1305398394274414593?...

Amazon really do have a problem.

No, they don't. This is simple - Amazon have optimized their product to maximize their profit. Amazon have a shop that people continue to use despite the fact that it's full of scams and knock off goods. Amazon make huge profits from that, so they have no problem with it at all. It only becomes a problem if the customers stop shopping there, and that's not looking very likely.

It's Amazon's customers who have a problem. Don't expect Amazon to fix it.

> No, they don't.

That’s stupidly pedantic. Of course they do, they just aren’t optimizing to solve it.

If someone says, “United has a legroom problem”, they most certainly mean the legroom is uncomfortable for passengers and everyone knows exactly what they mean. The fact that United has optimized for maximum capacity is not relevant. They still have the problem.

That's a good example of the same thing. When people say a feature of a business is a problem for the business they are just wrong. It's not. In the case of United if they "fixed" it they'd make much less profit, maybe make a loss, or even fail entirely.

It's a problem for the customers of the business, but that isn't the same thing at all. If you don't recognize that you will never understand why companies happily go for years without fixing some problems that make customers complain a lot.

> It's Amazon's customers who have a problem. Don't expect Amazon to fix it.

The only "fix" is competition. Companies rarely improve without competition. The moment a competitor starts eating their lunch, things will get fixed pronto.

Reminds me of that apocryphal Henry Ford story, that he sent his engineers to the local junk yards to see which parts of his car hadn't failed, and wanted to know why they were making something that was outlasting the car. Amazon would rather spend money on conquering new markets than fixing the one they dominate by a wide margin.

You could say the same thing about Sears 50 years ago.

In 50 years I suspect Bezos thinks he’ll be fighting robot wars against Musk on Mars. I seriously doubt he cares.

> Amazon really do have a problem.

You keep buying from them. So, no not really.

Often I see people reviewing different products to the one on the page.

This is common. Some products are considered a version of others. Sometimes it's OK like different colour or different size. But sometimes it's not.

Worst case is same product sold by different vendors that isn't the same product at all because one of them is fake.

Vendors will often swap out a successful product with a completely different one because the listing has a lot of good reviews. This is incredibly common on Amazon. Just change the name, description, photos and everything else and continue getting the search boost.

That shouldn't even be possible, in my opinion. Imagine taking a popular tweet and changing out all the wording, leaving the likes and retweets now supporting a very different message.

Yes, that is exactly what it is. Actually what you mentioned happens on forums like Reddit all the time. Getting a top comment in a thread is very valuable, and later on you can edit it to say anything. With internet groupthink being what it is, people will open a discussion, see the top few most-upvoted comments and assume they are true and those are the views they should take on the topic.

> Worst still, I've seen Amazon produce a banner with the phrase "Dispatched and Sold by Amazon" - gives you the guarantee to receive original and genuine[2] This means they know that other listings may not be original or genuine

I don't think that's the intent there; at least, that's not what it means to me. To me that means:

> you get this today or tomorrow

as opposed to:

> you get this some time in the next several weeks depending on when the next boat from China docks, or if there's already some buffer; also returns are going to be marginally more of a hassle, but still better than most other websites

Same thing happened to me in September after purchasing a $35 webcam for my high school sophomore from Amazon. The box contained a $20 "gift card" if I emailed proof of my 5-star review.

I documented everything including photos, my exchange with Amazon customer service, and the confirmation from the seller that they would pay me $20 for a 5-star review (I did not do this ... I was appalled at the situation and more than a little angry that I had been tricked by bogus reviews). Here's what happened when I reported the seller:

Me: Hi. The box for this product contained a card that says “Amazon $20 gift card” and looks like a gift card, but the back says I have to give a 5 star review and send my order information to an outlook email address. Is this legitimate? Is it really a $20 Amazon gift card?

Amazon: Thank you so much for your information on this, I will certainly pass it along here so that we can check this promotion or offer directly with the seller. Because I am not seeing that advertised on the item at all And would not be capable of confirming if that is a legit Amazon gift card because, I do not see that offer on the item

Me: So what should I do?

Amazon: My best suggestion would be to contact the seller directly for this through this link [redacted] So that you can confirm directly with them if this is legit or not Certainly giving away gift cards for good reviews is not professional And I have to report the seller for that

Me: I thought this type of offer was forbidden by Amazon’s own policies for sellers. But I will contact them using the link you sent to ask them if that’s what you recommend.

Even though the CSR reported the seller, and I confirmed with the seller through Amazon's own communication system that they were paying $20 per 5 star review, nothing happened to the seller. The item (a webcam) is still for sale on Amazon, with thousands of additional 5-star reviews - more than 8,000 now, compared to 3,266 when I let Amazon know how they were gaming the reviews in September.

Once again, the good guys (in the case, customers and honest sellers) lose out while the bad guys win, with no repurcussions.

http://leanmedia.org/amazon-is-broken/

I had a similar experience with Amazon support. I posted a review of a power strip that caught fire, with a picture of the scorch marks.

The seller reached out repeatedly to me via email asking what they could do to get it taken down, including monetary offers and (after I rejected their approaches several times) thinly veiled "looks like you're having fun at the beach this weekend" references to my social media feeds in what I presume was an attempt to creep me out.

I reported them to Amazon. Seller and listing (with my review, so far) are still there.

This sort of gaming is rampant on Amazon. My own experience:

A friend of my wife introduced her to a woman who was a representative of a well known brand for home goods/kitchen gadgets. If you bought an item off Amazon of their brand, the woman would Venmo you for the value of the item provided you left a review. It went unsaid but understood anything less than five stars would mean the relationship was over. They also had a few other rules about your Amazon account to "qualify" (had to be personal, you had to review a certain number of other products, etc) to try to bypass any flags getting raised.

That's the Internet today. All important review sites have these problems. Most businesses today live and die on customer reviews, so they do everything they can in order to maintain high rating. There's obv a lot Amazon and others can do to fight it. But it's a very hard problem, as your example suggests. The worse part is doctor reviews. Some people pick their doctor based on fake reviews.

That's why when I buy things I usually look into the negative reviews first, then the time period of the positive reviews (many reviews too close is usually a red flag), the total number of reviews a product has (e.g., some items have too many reviews), and also search the product on other sites to see maybe there's something I missed. I also rarely order something from a seller with < 90% rating on Amazon. For something like picking a doctor, I always go with recommendations from people I know. I also check online reviews, but only read the negative ones.

The frustrating thing is, Amazon could do this kind of analysis themselves. I mean, it's a similar problem to what Google faces with people trying to game search results, or get spam through filters. And while they obviously struggle and it takes serious resources, they are mostly successful. Really seems like Amazon just doesn't care since they don't have enough competition to give them sufficient motive.

Yeah, I find 2-4 star reviews to be the most illuminating.

Perhaps that'll get gamed next. Sigh.

Agreed. Went on the search for knife sharpening tools on Amazon, and quickly discovered that some looked like copies of others. The copies would look identical in the pictures, and have a huge amount of 5 star reviews. Then as I drilled into it I saw a large amount of problem reports.

Decided to just not buy anything from Amazon that day.

(Have found them really useful for other things though. And Prime Shipping in Australia is great.)

I had the same experience with an acquaintance. Their reasoning is that given how Amazon's algorithms work (and how much they favor review count), it is impossible for any new product to get noticed at all unless you spend money to get those first set of 5-star reviews. It's basically an advertising budget.

I wonder if Amazon could fight this by expiring old reviews? Don't delete them, but weight them at zero.

Products change over time and I'm usually more interested in recent reviews.

What kind of product changes over time without changing SKU? Apart from software.

Products made by companies that are cutting costs.

This is why you should prioritize 4-star reviews if you want an honest positive opinion on the product.

For negative reviews, I look at 1-stars, but these are often "arrived broken" etc. types of reviews. Unless that's a large portion, I ignore them. I look at 2-star reviews when I want a good review on the flaws of a product.

I've started to read only one star reviews and look for patterns and dates. If a bunch of people 2 years ago had a bad batch of broken product that's fine, but not last month.

> This is why you should prioritize 4-star reviews if you want an honest positive opinion on the product.

I think you mean de-prioritize

No, I de-prioritize reading 5-star reviews. I rarely more than glance at them. I prioritize reading 4-star reviews, figuring they're much less likely to be paid/fake.

I've also heard speculation that for cheap products, competitors will buy it & trash it in the review, not sure if it's true or not though.

so its the range 2-4?

I think GP had it stated correctly: if you want honest opinions, look at four star reviews. Five/one star extremes tend to read overly emphatic and aren't as likely to include both positives and negatives, so as a consumer (and perhaps as a platform hoping to show "good" reviews), these more moderate reviews will likely give a more accurate picture of the product, and thus could get priority for display. That said... as soon as you do that, obviously you're going to see four stars getting gamed as well.

as for the above comment, surely this is a normal distribution problem and both sides of the tail have to be looked at? you need to look at 2 and 4, or the range 2-4, not 1-5

I wrote a thorough description a how a seller was manipulating their reviews and put that into my own review.

I got an official warning from Amazon and my review was removed. They said that my account could be closed if I repeated my violations.

Amazon reviews used to be great (~10 years ago). You could sort by review score and feel pretty confident that the top items fairly safe. These days Amazon has so many counterfeit items that it's a chore to even browse. The most recent counterfeit items I've received are clothing which were labeled as Adidas and Hanes.

Every year I order over $50-100k worth of products for myself and my clients (servers, electronics etc.)

Every single 1 star review I've ever left was deleted. I have amazon prime american express card too. It is not like I am not a new customer. Last year alone I have 400 orders alone with 1000+ products. I don't bother leaving reviews.

I found nearly all cleaning supplies 1/3 of the price at Home Depot. Dog food also cheaper at PetSmart. To me, amazon is no longer the #1 option and I no longer buy unknown brands from it.

> I no longer buy unknown brands from it.

I'm nearly doing the opposite. I try not to buy known brands from Amazon unless the ability to identify a counterfeit is really easy. This has been especially problematic with clothing, and I just don't buy clothing from them anymore unless it's from a cheap unknown brand where I don't care about the quality/brand.

I only buy unknown brands from Amazon. It's a great discovery platform for low-cost Chinese versions of stuff (such as electronics). Name-brand I exclusively buy in stores

This is super common, I know multiple people who do this.

Even crazier, a few people I know who do this worry their account will be flagged for only giving 5 star reviews. So, to prevent suspicion, when they ACTUALLY buy something they give it 1 or 2 stars just to balance things out. Thus, any merchants who don't buy reviews get additionally penalized.

There is an insidious and perhaps even more blatant pay-for-review industry in B2B software: Capterra, G2Crowd, TrustPilot, etc.

They all promise "unbiased reviews" but aggressively offer a company's "confirmed users" a variety of small fiduciary benefits to leave a review (gift card here and there).

Then, they upsell the B2B vendor on the ability to manipulate those reviews; e.g., you pay an extra fee to triage negative reviews by telling customer support "nope, not a confirmed user - please remove."

For whatever reason (probably sheer traffic), these B2B review sites have high domain authority scores. So even where marketing teams agree that paying for reviews is BS — there can arise an incentive to pay for reviews from an SEO perspective.

Realizing that this idea is fraught with challenges for B2B customers and vendors: is there an open source protocol that could anonymously verify that a user is _actually_ a current or former user of a given service?

Chickens and eggs...

I love how all the highest rated “Amazon’s Choice” items for a USB-C Hub all have Q&A feedback saying the HDMI port doesn’t work, but the reviews saying the same thing get scrubbed

How do we even find reliable dongles/hubs these days

Buy them from the manufacturer themselves. Anker, Monoprice etc. Or places like B&H, Adorama, Best Buy, at least you get good customer service if it doesn't work.

Is there a resource / someone’s Medium who will break down all of the legit manufacturers? I’m aware of some for RPi like Jeff Geerling has great microSD card reviews

Btw I went with Anker because it had the least reported issues from Amazon (after extensive filtering on my part)

Don't use Amazon? Or pre/post-pandemic, go to a store and try the product or talk to a human about it?

I haven't had any issues buying from web shops anywhere in the EU and with physical stores the owner is (if nothing else) invested in the property and will probably sell you decent stuff. Never had a used product sold as new, untrustworthy reviews (beyond that most individual reviews are not representative of the true population), or other such problems that I read about Amazon on HN. Of course, you need to know what features or specs you're looking for or you'll still get, say, painfully slow sd cards for nearly the same price as the faster ones, but that's not necessarily a quality issue: the product doesn't falsely advertise being fast.

Living in Germany now, Amazon is a very dominant player here and, not speaking German that well yet, it's a bit harder to find other shops that sell a random item. Amazon is an easy first stop but they make it super hard to do comparative research (sort by price does not sort by price, no useful filters, inconsistent or missing product info, etc.) and so I usually do end up putting it in google/ddg instead and finding an alternative store to buy from, or get something second-hand (within reason). Or just go over to one of three computer stores that are within walking distance from home or work. That's how I'd find reliable dongles/hubs these days...

> Amazon is an easy first stop but they make it super hard to do comparative research (sort by price does not sort by price, no useful filters, inconsistent or missing product info, etc.) and so I usually do end up putting it in google/ddg instead and finding an alternative store to buy from, or get something second-hand (within reason).

Since you're in Germany you might want to take a look at aggregators like Geizhals or Idealo. Geizhals in particular enables the user to narrow down product searches by a very complete property/attribute filter. Once you found some products that meet your requirements, both services will show you were they are sold. You will notice that Amazon rarely has the best price and the quality/accuracy of their product listings, descriptions, etc. is downright terrible.

Amazon still features fast, reliable fulfilling, but so do some other shops. Bottom line is that you have lots of choices in Germany.

The problem in America was RadioShack (before went out of business) as a brick and mortar store was also rebranding crappy wired products that would go out too.

I find it strange that a braided-cable charger from places like Target will go out before the Apple manufactured one

There are probably a few regional stores like Fry’s that have good electronics though, but their numbers are dwindling

> sort by price does not sort by price

This drives me crazy. How do they get away with this?

People keep buying I guess? `\_(:))_/`

I receive at least one email per day to the address displayed on my Amazon profile for products to review, with a promise of full reimbursement via Paypal after proof of 5-star review.

It would be extremely easy for Amazon to go after those sellers. The reason they don't do it is because reviews move products.

Amazon's business is moving products -- not pleasing customers, or providing the world with honest reviews, or being a force of good, etc.

That said, it's probably normal that cperciva's review was denied, as reviews should describe the product and only the product, not the virtue of the seller or the validity of other reviews:

> I figured I should leave a product review mentioning this and warning other customers to not trust the 5 reviews of this product*

Not the place. Product reviews are not about a specific seller; a product can be sold by many sellers; the fact that one or even many sellers are bad doesn't mean the product itself is bad.

(And that's true even if the product is sold only by the manufacturer. In theory it's always possible that other sellers will come along, if only to sell used versions of the same product.)

I have been increasingly suspicious of the review quality on Amazon as well. Coupled with the poor search functionality and the increasing amount of "sponsored" stuff that's inundated every page, I don't have much confidence in my ability to find products that meet my search criteria anymore. I feel increasingly like I'm at Best Buy--as soon as I enter, I'm accosted by sales pitches that are uninterested in actually helping me find what I want. For a company that prides itself as "customer obsessed", it seems like lip service these days.

That said, I don't find this post very convincing at all.

> I made a purchase...

> So Amazon lets sellers pay for fake reviews...

Sorry this is an incoherent argument (generalizing from a single data point). I've heard plenty of anecdotes of this stuff (maybe a couple dozen?) but even that's not nearly enough for me to feel confidently say "this is a widespread problem". I realize the data may be hard to obtain, but until we have it, I don't really think we can confidently make such a conclusion.

> Sorry this is an incoherent argument (generalizing from a single data point). I've heard plenty of anecdotes of this stuff (maybe a couple dozen?) but even that's not nearly enough for me to feel confidently say "this is a widespread problem".

I had the opposite reaction. I was a bit surprised that OP was surprised this was happening. Roughly 20% of my amazon purchases have had some kind of card in them with an offer of money for a good review. I guess I just figured it was widespread thing. I only ever get cards with cheap mass manufactured items under $30, mostly electronics like cables or adapters along with a few cat toys.

I'm not surprised that paying for fake reviews happens.

I am surprised that Amazon is complicit in the practice. I expected this would be a cat-and-mouse game with Amazon blacklisting vendors upon seeing evidence of them committing fraud.

I'm pretty sure that you or I can identify some products on Amazon that very likely have paid reviews in under 5 minutes. If we had access to sales data, we could be essentially certain of it.

Type "Bluetooth" into the search bar. Find the product linked below. Does it seem likely that 45,403 people have given a review for a random Bluetooth FM transmitter?

https://www.amazon.com/Nulaxy-Wireless-Bluetooth-Transmitter... (not an affiliate link)

Type in "phone mount". Do people really feel so strongly about their $12 phone mount that 55K+ of them would write a review of that particular phone mount? What's the matter with those apparently higher-quality phone mounts that have only 500 or so reviews? Do the cheaper rando-brand-name pad-printed ones really out-sell and get out-reviewed by a factor of over 100x?

Do 14K people in just over 4 months feel strongly enough about a pack of straws to write a review? https://www.amazon.com/StrawExpert-Reusable-Silicone-Cleanin... (also not affiliate) "Wow, they totally made my drink colder!" "These are amazing, not boring regular straws; I'll be buying more to give as gifts!" "I will DEFINITELY be buying more of these, not only for our house but as gifts because these are great!" "with plastic straws costing so much, I thought I'd give these a try. I bought this set specifically because I needed shorter and longer straws." That's a reviewer who really knows what they need in the straw department and has made a major dent in their budget by buying these! "the pouch is a lifesaver since this purchase came with many straws" I should go look for reviews on hip waders...

It strains credibility to think the company that can deliver speech-recognition can't spot incentivized reviews. If this is a cat and mouse game, the mice are dominating.

More anecdata: Roughly 30% of the technical products I've ordered in the past year have arrived with one of these cards. As with Colin (the author of the tweet), I'm also in Canada. It makes me wonder if the practice is more prevalent here?

Speculation: Maybe Amazon's efforts to combat this (if any) are not as strong in Canada?

Not just a CA thing, roughly half of my Amazon purchases in the US have included these cards as well; the first time I remember seeing one of these cards begging for a review was in mid 2017. Oddly, that was also one of the first clearly counterfeit products I received from Amazon. Order was for some Nalgene lab solvent wash bottles, but the product I received had extremely poor printing for the warning diamond and were unvented. The reason I remember the card was that they offered $20 for a review, and IIRC I paid ~$15 for the product.

I’ve probably purchased 10 products this year from Amazon that have a card tucked in the packaging offering to give me something free in return for a 5 star review and sending them proof I left it.

Yep, I had purchased some earbuds for $10 plus tax. It had a similar card for a Gift card for $15, wherein I was supposed to place a review and send the proof to a gmail address.

They were junk, like really really bad, but if you check the reviews you will think that they were the best earbuds under the Sun. Some were simple review, some were from audiophiles with several paragraphs of details.

When I had purchased there were 0 review and the price as ~$10. After the reviews, all 5 star, accumulated, the price had jumped to about $15.

This is the reason I subscribed to Consumer Reports. I pay $10 a month to have access to unbiased scoring of products. It's $40 a year, they're relying on donations but I'm fine with paying more to help support them.

I work in the proxy business. Almost everything about reviews on the internet is fake and should not be trusted. I don't know how I would fix it but I think I would charge a fee small for leaving a review. Some of my clients have thousands of social media accounts boosting each other's postings.

I know there are tens of millions of products on Amazon, but I wonder how many reviews a dedicated team of in-house of reviewers could do per day. Amazon could even charge for the privilege of having their (ostensibly) unbiased team review the product, or prioritize them based on sales trends etc. It feels like shoppers are already indirectly doing this by buying the in-house Amazon brands.

Which.co.uk is basically this, it’s great but they can’t always keep up with every product category

Verified unreturned purchases only?

Exactly that is being addressed in this article. Sellers still trying to move the needle by any means - this case: offering a $10 reward

I haven’t ordered anything from Amazon in almost a year. It turns out you can live without it.

Yet when we buy from them, we’d like real product reviews. (I do buy there few times a year).

A possible explanation: it would be simple enough for someone to slag their competitors by leaving reviews saying “this person tried to bribe me with a gift card to leave a fake review.” For every person trying to buy their way to the top, there is someone else trying to knock down their competitors by falsely implicating them in rules violations ...

I would imagine it would be better to report this interaction to Amazon customer service, including forwarding a copy of the email, rather than addressing this through a product review.

This isn't limited to Amazon.

Stuff like this has been going on forever, even before the internet took off.

For example, most trade services in real life will offer you a gift in return for a referral.

A referral is in my opinion a lot stronger than a review because now you're personally vouching for something to a friend or family member.

Amazon reviews are basically a distributed version of that with less individual weight, but effective in the end due to volume.

I would never in a million years ever leave a positive review in return for a gift, but if there's a service that I enjoy using and really believe in it, I'll happily refer it to friend with or without compensation and if the company wants to compensate me, I'll accept it. Like a dentist giving you movie tickets or DigitalOcean giving you hosting credits, etc..

It's a fine line tho because that referral logic doesn't apply back to leaving reviews. It's an interesting topic because so much of it is based on "feel" rather than black and white rules.

I use unique emails for everything so when I started getting spam to my amazon email, I knew it was leaked via amazon. The spam however was requests for reviews in exchange for compensation.

I reported this to Amazon and their response was basically to threaten me if I participated.

Any website that has a ranking based on reviews or even votes has a fraud problem. This is Goodharts law in action. Glassdoor, Amazon, Yelp, Google, you name it. This is the "game". Heck, I am sure there are even some people who game HN votes.

I recently somehow ended up on a mailing list exchanging free products for reviews.

Decided I was curious and followed up. The process was incredibly effortless and quick. I haven't received the product yet (which I will review but I'm not going to lie about it if it sucks). They sent me slightly more than the cost of the item via paypal 30 minutes after I placed my order.

I was surprised how quick and easy it was. No wonder it's working. I've also gotten plenty of those cards or similar offers from stuff I've ordered on Amazon in the last six months. Never followed up on those.

I used to be all-in on Amazon shopping, that's where I started all my shopping searches.

Now Amazon is my site of last resort for everything but books. The rest of the net has gotten competitive. I do my research on wirecutter/reddit, and buy it from manufacturer/walmart/bestbuy, other niche trustworthy stores.

The cash back I get back from my Amazon card usually covers cost of most of what I still buy from Amazon, so Amazon has become my "free goodies" shop.

I think this is great. Having "an everything store" that everyone uses always felt like a monopoly ripe for customer abuse.

Just wanted to plug bookshop.org. It benefits local bookstores and my shopping experiences have been positive. There are other great sites out there, too, if you're willing to buy used or can tolerate slower shipping.

I get the appeal of amazon.com though because their prices are competitive and the shipping is usually consistently fast. I just like local bookstores.

bookshop.org is operated by Ingram, which is generally the wholesaler to bookstores but also has a large online order fulfillment business. The upside of this is that Ingram is a logistics specialist and has the ability to ship very quickly and reliably---and so bookshop.org is in a way the best of both worlds, as it pays the local bookstores via their Ingram contract while also leveraging Ingram's order fulfillment business to get things shipped quickly and reliably.

That's great information. Thank you for sharing. I wasn't aware it was operated by the wholesaler to local bookstores, but that makes sense. It seems to be a smooth platform with a massive selection.

I tried to leave a positive review for a product I liked, and Amazon blocked it as fraudulent seemingly at random. Then when I ordered a second one, the box came with one of these cards inside. I guess Amazon is making a token effort to fight these, but it's clearly not working in the slightest.

Many other scams are also alive and well there. The shipping and return policy are what keep me there; the store is crap.

I wonder if there's an opportunity to make an alternative storefront for Amazon with its own reviews and decent search. Probably would violate the ToS or some other lame thing.

I published my first book on Amazon in 2012. It's sold roughly 15,000 copies since then.

Along the way, I've learned that there are not only multiple ways to easily buy reviews (and in bulk), but that a significant portion of Amazon reviews are these 'bought' reviews--utterly fake.

Amazon does police reviews, but it's inconsistent and easily defeated.

More practically, I've come to realize that Amazon reviews have very little to do with sales now. Many authors I know feel the same way.

Products with bad reviews sell more than products with no reviews. No reviews is the worst.

Amazon used to allow asking for "honest" reviews if it was mentioned in the review that it had been solicited. They changed that policy a year or two ago and as a result the whole review business went underground.

That's a good point--the exception here is 'no reviews'.

Do any shops offer incentives like vouchers and perks to leave reviews and moderate other reviews? Would something like this drown out the fakes and balance out e.g. the bias that unhappy customers are much more likely to leave a review than any other? Seems an obvious thing to try but I've never seen it.

Sometimes I see people leaving reviews for the most mundane items like tin foil and vegetable oil, and wonder why they do it.

There is a big shop in Germany, Otto, that encourages you with a €1 bonus for every review that you leave for a purchased product. Surprisingly the reviews are quite ok and you can find a lot of products with 2-3 stars on average and anywhere from 10 to 500 reviews. The problem is they also started offering products through resellers (mostly the actual brands that make the products, but I'm afraid they will also turn into a marketplace soon enough).

As someone who both blogs and does freelance writing through a service, I have written articles describing Amazon products. I don't think I have ever written a "fake review." I think what I've done has fallen on the ethical side of that line, but I know there are writers who will write fake reviews because it pays and writing is a hard way to make a living.

If you object to this kind of thing going on, let me again remind people that there are creatives -- like me -- trying to fund their work with tips, Patreon and similar and not making enough money. Over the years when I have complained that I don't make enough money even though my articles have a track record of hitting the front page of HN, I have repeatedly been told "Get a real job, you whiner. Quit expecting writing to pay. It doesn't pay."

Sure it does. But most of what pays is stuff that routinely hits the front page of HN as "undesirable" in some fashion: Fake reviews, sketchy content marketing where the piece is intended to sell you something rather than actually inform you, etc.

If that's not the internet you want, let me suggest you make an effort to support independent creatives.

I'm too poor to give money via Patreon to other creatives, but I run r/ClothingStartups so indie clothing brands have a venue for advertising their stuff for free and trying to connect with others and figure out how to develop their business. So I do what I can to help small-time operators succeed online because the years I spent homeless while being told to STFU about my whiny crap of not having enough income while tens of thousands of people read my writing drilled it into me that "This is one of the things wrong with the world and this is something we desperately need to work on in earnest."

A similarly shady/slimy local SEO vendor here called iNET encourages their clients to do the same thing - for instance, a siding company they work with says to their customers, "we'll give you $200 off if you leave us good Google reviews." Unfortunately, this works exceedingly well, as evidenced by their disproportionate mountain of five star reviews.

I wonder what happens if you retort with "give me $200, and I don't leave a 1-star review explaining where the 5-star reviews came from".

There’s a very healthy community of people refunding purchases for reviews on WeChat, there’s even people who’s full time job is connecting people looking for free stuff with suppliers, acting as a middleman. It’s not quite as bad as fake reviews as they encourage returning the product if it’s not any good. I do not engage in this personally but I have several friends who have had their accounts locked out from leaving reviews, so I highly doubt that Amazon is letting this happen. I think it’s more likely that Amazon saw his negative review as another supplier trying to take down a listing which is also a problem. The market of Amazon listings is incredibly complex, fascinating and likely beyond any hope without fundamental structural changes.

For credibility, I am the founder & CEO of Zentail (YC12), we have supported billions of dollars of Amazon GMV and our software helps sellers create winning listings. TLDR: Review programs aren't downright evil, but this one is egregious.

Most people here are enraged by fake reviews, I think that's more than fair, but I also encourage everyone to think broader about the issues here.

In general, review programs are necessary to prime the pump and Amazon has even rolled out their own version. Reviews are a critical piece of a winning listing on Amazon and without a path to get your product in front of consumers, you have no path to get reviews and only the incumbent products win. That's pretty bad for everyone, especially the consumer, it's not how a free market should operate.

What's egregious here (outside of violating Amazon terms) is getting a refund only for a 5 star review. I strongly believe you should be able to give out a free product for a review, but that review should be honest. I understand that the incentives might make someone want to leave a positive review, but with proper guidance and even selection of quality reviewers you can mitigate that.

Here's the big truth: at some point an Amazon listing has to live on it's own. At some point, your product will start to sell organically and there will be so many organic reviews, it will sink a listing really fast.

The market opportunity to incentivize reviews (or even pay for fake reviews) with a bad product is actually pretty poor, good luck making enough profit to support all those free products you just shipped.

I got a product recently with a similar card inside, it was shipped prime from an Amazon facility. I know Amazon doesn't look inside things but pretty brazen if you ask me to use their facilities, shipping network and platform to run fraud.

A process like this is pretty much table stakes for anyone selling on Amazon.

You can’t post a new product and just expect it to organically get sales. You have to have a program to get those initial reviews and hint: they better be good ones.

Furthermore, you get penalized into oblivion if you get some bad reviews. So you are required to fix these problems with the customer directly. Either you are sending a free one, refunding, or something.

So the example in this post is extreme, but its absolutely not ridiculous given what I’ve seen from other sellers. Seems reasonable that they would take it to this logical conclusion. Instead of indirectly paying for a good review, directly pay for it.

I have seen worse than just review scams. I have been offered bribes to change reviews for products as a precursor to getting replacements sent out. I had to demand Amazon refund me that one as they didn't have an issue with it!

I have been exposed to it a lot over the past few months trying to buy a 3080 graphics card. Three sellers have been executing a scam I don't quite understand, beyond a data grab, but I am just not seeing how they benefit. They list the card, you buy it and then they cancel the order 5 minutes later. Then they put the cards up again the next day and the next and keep doing the same thing each time getting 5-10 peoples worth of data. They never actually sell the cards. So far Amazon has done nothing about those companies either. I have been receiving a feisty set of new spam on my amazon email address though so I think it may just be a GDPR breach thing to spam emails but I can't see it being valuable for so few people a day.

Then there is the "we have shipped your product and it will be with you at December 21st" on a new 5800x from launch day. The mail came along with a DPD delivery number that wasn't even the right length. I can't cancel it because its been shipped, except shipping within the EU even by donkey doesn't take 2 months. Amazon hasn't done anything about them either.

Clearly blatant fraud when reported to Amazon is not dealt with so it isn't a wonder the entire platform is now full of fraudsters everywhere. I have been a long time Amazon prime customer, their service was second to none. But the past year even before human malware kicked off has been an increasing problem and its time I stopped. In the instances where I have come across fraud Amazon didn't deal with it, that is my experience of it.

I had the bribe thing happen, over such low level items too!

I also had really blatent knockoffs of $500 headphones. Amazon sweapt that under the rug even though I had tons of proof and info.

Mine was the same, it was over a $50 item. But when they know Amazon isn't concerned about blatant bribes to buy good reviews they have nothing to worry about on that side and the bigger concern is being called out in reviews of their store and the item being slammed. I guess bad reviews hurt their business quite a bit. Amazon needs to take this threat to its business seriously and I am seeing no signs they intend to.

Amazon reviews are not trustworthy. I use https://fakespot.com to help me sort through the fake reviews. In my experience, it works pretty well.

That's why i pretty much ignore every review that doesn't provide solid criticism of the product. I look for 2-4 stars trying to avoid super negative as well as super positive reviews

Folks Jeff Bezos is well aware of this, ergo, his lack of action is tacit support.

It blows my mind to this day how confusing and ridiculous even the Amazon UI is, the titles don't make sense, the layout is inconsistent, some things have prices, some don't, you're not quite sure 'who' you're buying from, product details are all over the place. It's one of the most offensive UI's out there.

I believe that at least some parts of it are a mess 'on purpose' as a set of dark patterns.

This is Bezos.

For reviews it’s best to use Amazon Germany.

I don’t know what it is in the German psyche, but they tell it like it is and tend to leave more useful reviews than other localities. For now, at least.

Another reason to consume less stuff. It's not that often that I buy stuff that really needs to be high quality. But when I do, I make sure to look for honest reviews elsewhere, on multiple websites. Of course Google will try to feed you crappy referral websites, which just write as many low-quality articles as possible, and make money through the Amazon affiliate link to buy the item. It takes some skill to dodge this and find the real stuff.

Posting that reviews are fake in a review makes Amazon look bad and goes to somebody who can't penalize the merchant. That's why they removed it. Telling Amazon directly that a merchant is paying for fake reviews doesn't make Amazon look bad, could get routed to somebody who can penalize the merchant, and is more likely to get results.

I'm not justifying Amazon's actions here — just explaining the reality of the situation.

Wait until you hear about how some people get given free products to review them. Amazon has no incentive to police their reviews, because they just want volume.

> Amazon has no incentive to police their reviews, because they just want volume.

Amazon, the company, has plenty of incentive to police their reviews. Fake reviews deteriorate customer trust and drive customers away in the long run.

The problem is there are two parties who have large incentives to create fake reviews: 1) Merchants 2) Executives whose compensation is tied to short-term results .

Right now these two parties with adverse incentives seem to be winning the battle, but it wouldn't surprise me if this changed in the near future.

Yelp's battle against fake reviews and Google's battle against SEO spam both come to mind as examples where the company was largely able to get things under control and aligned with their best interests. There will always be an escalating cat and mouse game between the "company's police" and the "fakers", but Yelp and Google seem to stay one step ahead while Amazon is one step behind.

I wouldn't exclude the possibility that this is being done deliberately and not merely as an outcome of the problem you described. Maybe they have the data to support the decision to allow a measured amount of fake reviews in. If well-reviewed products sell better than under-reviewed products, and the number of under-reviewed products keeps growing month after month, slowing sales growth, Amazon might see more $$$ down the road if they do allow a few blemishes into their reviews on under-reviewed products.

> Fake reviews deteriorate customer trust and drive customers away in the long run.

When there's no equivalent alternative, this inverts. This is why it the tweet changes nothing.

To give them a bit of credit, Amazon did ban giving reviewers cheap or free products in exchange for reviews a few years ago. They also shut down 3rd party sites that were facilitating the buying and selling of reviews.

https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/amazon-bans-most...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32251698

I bet there is more they could be doing, but you can probably never totally solve the problem.

I don't think they follow up. I just received an item that offered me a free gift for a five star review last week (I didn't do it).

They use targed ads on Facebook to find new rectruits.

Wait until you hear about how some people get given free products to review them.

This has been the norm in many industries back when Amazon was still selling books (and reviewers would also get them from the publisher).

Much longer ago than that. It was normal in the 80s for computer companies to send out free review products, and I expect this has been going on long before that, even.

It's commonplace for book publishers going back to at least the 1960's. I know this because my dad had many review copies of books.

there difference is those reviewers said they got the copy for free. At least they do now, it may not have been the case in the past (you go back a lot of years).

I think disclouser is actually US law so if you are involved in these scams you might find yourself in legal trouble...

In this case they did police his review though. They removed his review that mentioned the five-star review bribe attempt.

I'm not surprised. I'm within the top 70k reviewers in the UK, I constantly get emails (I've no clue where they're getting my email address) from random sellers offering free products in return for reviews. They don't explicitly ask for positive, but its clear what's what they're wanting.

Typically they'll request you buy the product and then paypal you a refund once you've done the review.

How many products have you reviewed? Why do you do it?

I just review almost everything I buy, why would you not. According to my Amazon profile I've only reviewed 220 things.

I am not sure if that was rhetorical, but reviewing things a) takes time and b) builds up Amazons moat with no benefit to the reviewer

It doesn't take much time, no more than a minute or two, I don't buy much. No its true I get no value from it, but there's many things humans do they get no direct value from. I read Amazon reviews, I get value from them some of the time, I do use them to inform my purchasing decisions - I'm paying it forward.

Review the product, get $10, then delete the review!

Even better, change it to 1 star

I wonder if providing additional data would help people understand the review distribution more easily at a glance. Something like a Net Promoter Score, kind of like Steam's binary thumbs-up/thumbs-down, would add a useful additional vector of information. Not remove stars & reviews though, the nuance in 2,3,4 star reviews is still useful.

I had this happen to me recently, there was a scratch card in the box and upon scratching it, I was told that I won $20 and to contact them.

Then, when contacting them, they told me they'd send me the money but to please write a review on amazon.

The thing is, I'd have written a 5 star review for that product otherwise since it is very good, but that feels a bit too iffy.

Yup, I have to admit I do this myself. A good amount of things in my household have been acquired like this.

I'm on a few WeChat groups where the reps of different manufacturing firms constantly upload pictures of the newest products they sell on Amazon. For a 5 star review, I'll get a full refund either via Paypal or WeChat Pay.

See reviewmeta.com it analyzes Amazon reviews

There are public forums & facebook groups where tips & vendors are discussed for getting such freebies: It should be trivial for Amazon's fraud team to find the easy ones and ban them, make it a least a little more costly to conduct the scam.

Obviously they don't bother because it's really not in their interest.

Sellers offering 6~12 months extended warranty in exchange for a 5-star review is quite common on Amazon India!!

when the iphone 12 was released, there was some cases with a lot of reviews even though the phone wasn’t released yet. One was “amazon’s choice”. if you ordered it; they also came with a card for a 10 dollar gift card for a fake review. they said not to post the cards text in the review

I've gotten to the point where I can't even order from Amazon without strong likelihood of getting a counterfeit or just garbage. There is so much wrong with that site, it is the epitome of Buyer Beware and shame on them, and shame on all of us, that this is happening.

> So... @amazon lets sellers pay for fake reviews, but doesn't let other customers warn you about fake reviews.

I feel like the thing to do here is provide the actual review, with disclosures at the top and bottom saying "I was paid to write a 5 star review".

Same thing happened to me but they offered me another product of theirs. I ended up posting a 5 star review because the product was actually good. This was almost two years ago and I still use it to this day so I don't feel bad at all.

Another apparent Amazon scam, via @kane:

https://twitter.com/kane/status/1325940370841038848?s=21

This is not limited to Amazon. I once received an email asking me to review a Magento plugin (on the Magento Marketplace) after commenting positively on their forum. They promised a $75 Amazon gift card in exchange.

This happened to me on Google Maps.

I hired packers and movers and once everything was done, they asked me to post a Google Maps & Yelp review to get $50 off.

Platform abuse is there everywhere, but do they go unnoticed is the question.

There's a solution around this. Read only the negative reviews, especially the 3-star ones. I've been doing it for years, long before 5-star reviews became a business, and it never let me down.

Yeah, I got a similar card in an Amazon-delivered package once. I left no review at all, but it occurred to me that I should clearly have even less trust in Amazon review scores than I already did.

Hey, I got one of those too. Tried to report it, but Amazon won't even accept reports about sellers buying reviews. And then the product vanished from the store after a week or so.

This triggers my recent pet-peeve: why is everyone using Twitter as their de-facto customer service? I know the answer to my question, but it's frustrating and pathetic.

(preface: I rarely use twitter)

I guess it's because:

1. It's super simple to set up, and the short length forces you to be direct.

2. It's incredibly easy for sharing - so there's potential for things to go viral, fast. Good for customers, bad for companies. Hashtags are quite powerful, as anyone can use them - so if someone decides to block you or whatever, you can still reach through hashtags.

Likewise, I guess a lot of big companies are actively monitoring twitter for things related to them. Pretty easy to automate.

Amazon will never fix this problem unless mandated by the government to do so. Shifting the liability to Amazon for fake reviews would probably solve this problem.

I've seen such offers for future discounts or bonus gifts for reviews several times on products I received from Amazon. Increasingly, the low quality of products, the flea market like shopping experience, and concerns about Amazon getting too big/powerful have led me to reduce how much I shop there. I was thinking it would be a big challenge to wean myself off Amazon but it has actually been very easy since several competing retailers are reasonably convenient and many companies that manufacture the actual products have easy direct online purchasing options.

Amazon has become a dumping ground for re-labeled products and the reviews are nearly completely untrustworthy because of the gaming and scams.

It is my position that Amazon reviews are pointless. All I want to know is the number sold and the number of issues or returns and the reason.

EBay does the same thing. Leave a 1 star review for a fake product and it gets taken down, due to "unspecified reasons".

look at this from a slightly different angle: Amazon is entrenched infrastructure for a great part of internet sales, and the only way to get ahead is via soliciting reviews for money.

If this were true this would support claims of a monopoly position in the market, unfortunately antitrust laws as written today are unsuitable to address the problem adequately.

i left a comment here the other day telling this: bought a airdots (wireless earbuds), seller sent me fake ones, when questioned about it said the guy who posted the product got the real ones and sent fake ones instead. i left a review describing this purchase experience and my review weren't approved.

That's expected. Product reviews must be about the product in the listing, and you didn't actually receive it so you can't reasonably review it.

Product reviews are not seller-specific so fulfillment issues cannot be described there as they do not apply to all sellers. Seller issues can be posted in seller feedback, instead, which affects seller rating.

IOW, the product reviews must be something that the manufacturer did well/poorly and thus apply to all buyers, regardless of who is the seller.

what are you talking about? i bought a wireless earbuds and I received fake ones. How come a review warning other buyers about that seller is not relevant? Again, I received the product but it was knockoff. Probably a scam. If I hadn't open a dispute I would've paid full price for a cheap product.

The review you post against a product would apply to all sellers, not just the one you tried to buy one from.

That's why the separate seller-specific ratings exist for seller-specific issues.

I literally just got a postcard offering a $10 reward for a 5 star review for a phone case I paid $9 for.

Amazon became just a bazaar, no quality products, actually mostly chinese fakes. Same way for reviews

As soon as you start viewing amazon's core competency and competitive advantage as being a tax dodge everything else makes a lot more sense. They're not really much good at anything else but having that massive tax dodge advantage takes the whole industry on a competitive spree toward the gutter.

Remember when it became well known what a terrible employer amazon are? So they paid staff to fake twitter post positive things about working at amazon? The only thing that will improve amazon's behavior is if they percieive a threat of losing their tax dodges due to political unpopularity.

See now all this looks a lot more to me like vested interest socialism and cronyism than anything resembling capitalism but I'm sure my socialist friends will view it as the opposite. Everyone is holding their nose at the sheer stench of it.

Whatever your cause without cleaning up the endemic, pervasive corruption leading to massive regulatory capture, that cause is lost.

> See now all this looks a lot more to me like vested interest socialism and cronyism than anything resembling capitalism

What is “vested interest socialism?” Do you mean something like an uncompetitive firm propped up by the government?

I draw the distinction between what socialism is meant to be and what socialism usually, in my opinion becomes, which is an unchallengable power base for vested interests. The rules a rigged against you and me because we aren't on the inside, friends with the power, which is usually beurocrats in socialist states. You do something faster, better, cheaper and still fail. Notice this kind of thing is not Bernie Sanders who barely qualifies as anything remotely socialist outside of the USA. Having competition where companies and whole industries go broke and shut down with their assets sold off to those who can use them better has been thought of as a useful counter-measure to this. When there is regulatory capture destroying that competition you get the worst of all worlds.

It's not captitalism, it looks more to me like bad socialism. My socialist friends would say it's not remotely socialism it looks more like captialism and this is what always happens in captialism. Just about everyone says it stinks and needs fixing. Bezos doesn't. Murdoch doesn't. They say this is the best that can possibly be because everything else is worse, which is probably true with respect to their power and influence. I don't see it as true in any other dimension. It needs fixing. Someone will ride that desire to fix it to political power. I hope that person turns out to be a decent human being rather than a genuine facist which President Trump was not and is not, whatever else are his many faults.

I would usually call this “crony capitalism”[0] or just “cronyism,” and agree it stinks, and is a degenerate state away from functioning capitalism.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism

More pervasive than simply setting up and running a business. Can you get a license to drive a car? Can you get your children into school? Can you rent that property to live in? All these things tend to become insider-outsider models bound up in failed socialism where status and access to power get more important rather than less. Orwell's the Pigs running the farm kind of thing.

crony socialism, crony capitalism. These are just not really so meaningful. Just call it corruption because that is what it is. Whether or not laws have been broken it is still corrupt. Whether the ideology of the government is socialist, capitalist or otherwise it is corrupt.

I'm not sure the most corrupt capitalist states can match the soviet union for the sheer scale and pervasiveness of corruption, for example. The worst corrupt capitalist reigimes don't seem to be able to match the scale and pervasiveness of environmental degradation seen behind the iron curtain when that came down. I think there's something in that.

so many brands on amazon are just junk. the whole concept of branding is worthless because the same stuff is being sold by "different" brands. i rather stick to known names

Doesn't that support the thinking that brand names are actually worth something? I agree, if I'm shopping for something like a USB cable most of the brands are companies I absolutely don't give a damn about. However, if I'm shopping for a cable I don't want to have to figure out which one actually has enough copper to support the amperage demands, so I'm likely to just get one from a trusted brand like Anker or Monoprice and be done with it.

This is why I don't buy from Amazon at all anymore.

I’ve had tons of these offers. Idk why Amazon doesn’t search their incoming product for this type of stuff.

They would find similar cards in most electronic accessories.

had several items with that exact card, $10 "refund" on a $4 item

definitely legitimate

Sounds like he wrote a seller review and posted it as a product review.

How is "don't buy this product, it definitely has fake reviews" not a product review?

That is, quite plainly, not a statement about the product.

The product arrived with a card offering money in exchange for fake reviews.

This wasn't something the vendor sent me after the fact. It was inside the sealed box.

I have received similar offers before inside of my Amazon packages -- offers that mentioned a particular seller's name on them, for products that have multiple sellers listed on Amazon's website.

So you think it was the manufacturer?

I'm 100% certain of it, yes.

Let's face it, Amazon's review system is broken at the core. I have the perspective of a seller on Amazon and, as such, you simply don't exist without _positive_ reviews. For the story, it all begins when you start with Amazon as a channel. Ads would be an option to kick start a presence but you actually need some traffic (you actually need the "buy box" which is just Amazon's way to legitimate you as a seller) to be able to advertise (this is true at the very start on a given Amazon market). So you, or people you know, place _fake_ orders to get started and if possible add a first review which, naturally, is fake. Once you have that going, congrats, you are selling on Amazon. From there on it's a uphill battle to gain traction and it all comes down to better position for your products. This is not different from any market really but there are specific hurdles along the way. Amazon tracks the number of "defects" on your product which counts things like A-to-Z claims or... negative reviews (and more stuff I won't bother you with here). If you hit a threshold (1% of claims _or_ negative reviews) you start seeing a nice warning telling you that your account is at risk of deactivation. Additionally, a similar threshold or trend, unsure tbh, will result in a temporary loss of the buy box mentioned earlier (60 day look back window for the above-mentioned threshold). This means that you disappear! (no ads, remember?).

So, you can probably imagine how strong your incentives are to get any positive review juice out there. What is shown in the tweet is actually against Amazon's terms[1] but there are more (and less) subtle ways to get what you need including things mentioned in comments around here and you really don't have that much of a choice if you want to stand out in the noise.

With all that being said, whatever you think of delivery related reviews for instance (especially in covid times which has added a lot of uncertainty to the whole thing), they hurt businesses exactly where it hurts. And that can be extended to negative reviews in general even when these are legitimate warnings for other potential buyers. Imagine now for a second that you rely on low volumes of orders, the number of potential genuine reviews is also low and with the Amazon thresholds you are therefore literally at the mercy of a few bad reviews without a cushion of positive reviews to fall on. So yeah there is a market for fake reviews, duh...

[1] not the best link but there is a screenshot showing the terms in the thread where it says that you can't ask for positive reviews or give something in exchange for it.. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/new-asking-for-rev...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com