Comment by skept | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skept | Hacker News Reader

I had a very similar experience last month. I ordered this toaster[1]. When I received it I noticed that in their user manual they were offering a "gift" in return for an Amazon review. Although to be fair they didn't explicitly demand that the review had to be positive. I submitted this 4-star review [2] to Amazon:

I received the toaster not too long ago. It looks just like in the advertised pictures and works fine. But the language on the last page of the user manual (see picture) makes it clear that LOFTER is offering customers a "gift" in return for leaving a review. Perhaps they're within their right to do that but it makes me not trust the rest of the reviews on this product.

A few days later I got an email from Amazon identical to the one in the submitted blog post[3]. I've stopped trusting positive reviews on Amazon. These days I only look at the negative reviews to see if there's a consistent complaint about the product.

[1] www.amazon.com/dp/B07S3TXD9H/ [2] https://cutt.ly/lhLZQ5o [3] https://cutt.ly/JhLZTjZ

The thing you have to know about Amazon is that they combine all the reviews for all sellers of the same product (to the extent that Amazon thinks it is the same product). As such, reviews aren't an appropriate place to leave feedback about a seller, and leaving your review up would have been misleading. The reviews are only supposed to be about the product.

You can leave feedback for sellers by clicking on their name in the listing.

This has pros and cons. It does allow you to see more reviews about the product you are purchasing, making it easier to find the gem reviews that are most helpful. On the other hand I think Amazon is too aggressive about combining reviews for similar but different products - different translations of the same book, different DVD sets of the same movie, etc. And seller ratings are deliberately not shown on the listing page, so few people click through to check the seller rating before buying on Amazon, let alone provide seller feedback.

I think the bigger problem is that the employees that rightfully deleted these reviews aren't required to instead migrate them to seller feedback, and forward them to folks that enforce seller policies.

If the thing about reviews-for-vouchers was in the user manual though then it really is related to the product, not the seller...

Honestly, the product page is the appropriate place for a review of this nature. You are informing other consumers to discount the weight of the reviews to a greater extent than they might otherwise.

I've been burned by this previously and had the review removed. My review was even about how the product was subpar and I suspect it was the highest rated in category because of the offer.

>The thing you have to know about Amazon is that they combine all the reviews for all sellers of the same product (to the extent that Amazon thinks it is the same product).

Yeah and that's fucking terrible. They've gone from a store to a knockoff of eBay.

The thing you need to know about users is that they have no idea these seller reviews exist because they are outside of the product page for the product they are buying. Furthermore, most visitors to Amazon have no idea that their products are being fulfilled by different people and not by Amazon. They think that Amazon has a warehouse for 100% of the products they sell on their site, and these other sellers are non-obvious to the vast majority of users. When they see things related to "sellers" on a product page, they just think that means the manufacturer. They don't get that any scammer can "open a store" on Amazon because Amazon goes to great lengths to make the experience seem like it's all 1 big store. Sure there are weasel words all over the site that point out that Amazon is only an intermediary, but almost no non-technical user understands this. Thus, leaving bad seller feedback anywhere other than the product page allows Amazon to keep scamming users through these 3rd party sellers.

I agree. I (usually) find it less than helpful if the review talks about shipping problems or other non-product stuff. (most products can be sold by multiple vendors)

That said, there was one review I found helpful because the review said it (something physically large) was damaged in shipment even though they returned it twice.

Maybe there should be a workflow for "You are purchasing from <company x> 81% positive - would you like to see their reviews as a seller?"

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