Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online
bbc.com
bbc.com
I bought a replacement screen from Amazon and it wasn’t working properly. I thought I did something wrong so I contacted the seller/manufacturer and they told: oh yeah, it‘s defective, we‘ll just give you your money back. I agreed and then the person said „cool, now in order to process your request, please click these buttons on Amazon” and they sent me a screenshot showing how to leave a 5 star review. wtf.
I refused and asked them to process the refund. First they said they can’t process the refund technically without me pressing those buttons and then that their job depends on it.
I requested a refund through Amazon and tried leaving a 1-star review saying that the product was defective and the seller tried to condition me into giving them a 5 star review. This review was not accepted by Amazon, saying that seller feedback should be given on the seller page. This does make sense if you have multiple sellers selling the same product, but it was not the case here. These guys were the only ones producing and selling it and if the score of 5-star reviews is from people being coerced to leave a review, then it should be there, not on the seller page where it’s very easily buried.
In the end I also contacted Amazon support with screenshots and I had to explain the problem 3 times as the customer representative said they didn’t understand what more can they do since I already received my refund. I’m the end, they said “they forwarded the message to the proper department, have a nice day”
If your neighbor recommends you a crap lawnmower, he'll have to explain to you why he thought it was good. You can ask him questions and compare his motivations to yours. He'll also end up living next to a badly mowed lawn if he doesn't put some work into it.
The seller has every reason to pay people to write good reviews. He doesn't even need real people, it's the internet and you can invent people, complete with their own unique photos and profiles.
Basically, honesty is expensive and cheating is cheap. Why would we trust it?
My personal experience with Amazon is that it's the shop to go to for stuff that is ok if it is broken. If I buy a cable for £10, and there's a 10% chance it's faulty, it's not a huge problem for me. The other use case is where the guarantee comes from the brand. I'm not sure why but I tend to think if I buy an iPhone on Amazon, it will be the genuine thing from Apple, and I have history with Apple apart from Amazon reviews.
Brands were invented to enable a trust relationship between manufacturer and consumer. Brands are an anchor of trust. There is no such anchor for sellers.
As you wrote, your neighbor won't recommend you a bad lawnmower because they have an interest in a continued good relationship. If your neighbor is secretly exchanged for a almost, but not quite identical one, willy-nilly and all the time you would not be able to build a trusting relationship in real life too.
But that is exactly what happens on Amazon. What good are seller reviews if sellers change and disappear all the time. What good are they if I can't click "Buy again" and then rely on buying not only the same product but also from the same seller I already trust?
I wish seller brands were as prominent as manufacturer brands but I can understand why neither Amazon nor traditional brand have an interest in such a system.
We all know that Amazon has counterfeit goods and only cares the minimum.
We all know that Amazon has fake reviews and only cares the minimum.
We all know that Amazon "marketplace" is over-priced imports from AliExpress (if we're lucky!) or perhaps is refurbished goods, fake goods, or just scams.
The brand that sucks is Amazon. The seller that is ripping us off is Amazon.
This can't go on forever. They really are killing their brand. 10 years ago, Amazon had the reputation of a king. They were revolutionizing delivery and could do no wrong.
Today... you ask a group of people their opinion on Amazon and we're already up to half negative on average, at least where I am.
They are literally killing their own brand by doing this.
Well written reviews are a common good, and there is good reason to believe that leaving reviews encourages others to do the same, and that helps me, so I do it.
Yes, I know there'll be fake reviews, but most of the time they are pretty easy to spot.
Not least because the reviews that swing things for me -- both towards buying and away from it -- are the negative reviews.
Most of the obvious fake ones are good reviews, but I'm usually more concerned about what the worst thing someone has to say about a product. If someone posts about a printer that it doesn't work with Linux, I won't buy it (at least not without double-checking and verifying that said reviewers info is outdated) no matter how many positive reviews there are. Meanwhile, if I can't find any negative reviews complaining about things I care about it will often convince me to buy.
That is a lot harder to game than getting a bunch of people to write that they love the product.
Why do you think any of the reviews on Amazon are real? I think any random review you pull up is more likely than not to be fake. Of course, we can't know for sure, but Amazon has simply lost my trust.
I no longer believe any of the reviews on Amazon are real, and Amazon will have to prove to me they are before I ever trust a review on that site.
Worse, that way you would end up avoiding the "fair players" who don't leave fake negative reviews with the competition.
I'm rather surprised at that, from someone who claims to be an economic grad. First of all, you must realize that that 10% isn't stable: the "Market for Lemons" effect will guarantee that if nothing is done to stop it, that 10% will become 90%.
Secondly, you're not factoring in either your time or the opportunity cost of having to buy your second cable. If you order your cable and it arrives the next day but broken, you spend at least an hour figuring out that it's broken, and then have to order another one, and then wait at least another day for it to come.
Apple accessories in particular are heavily counterfeited, I'd bought some USB-Ethernet adapters for a meeting room with too much WiFi interference. They seemed to work fine then I got a new Mac and it refused to recognize the adapters, and they appeared with weird Chinese characters in System Profiler. On careful inspection, they turned out to be fakes, but highly convincing ones. Amazon refunded me, but the distinct impression I got was they don't care as long as they get the money from a sale, and refunds for the few customers who do complain are just a cost of doing business.
Are you sure? Is this ergodic? Does the ensemble average predict the time-series average?
Akerlöf doesn't seem to apply here, there's no hidden information that comes out later. With a car there's all sorts of dimensions to it that might annoy you.
Perhaps the idea is that all cables will go to crap eventually, but my detection cost is also fairly low on that. Additionally, and this is probably not a great dynamic, I can go to the website of a box-store, which will carry some of the same brands, presumeably vetted more than the junk shop.
Maybe, but in the UK I'd choose ten other suppliers before giving a penny of profit to a company like Amazon.
Tesco, Argos, the Apple store, Currys, any phone network, Carphone Warehouse, John Lewis...
Several of these have next-day delivery, same-day collection, or even the old fashioned walk-into-shop-and-pay thing.
Perhaps most of the reason they were honest early on was Amazon’s product selection early on was only books and media, and secondly there was a community where you could look at other people’s review history to determine if they were a shill and report it. That “community helpfulness” was common in early online communities. I’d say the majority of reviews were real through the mid-aughts.
It was only after the Amazon marketplace became indistinguishable from the main site that the scale of sellers flipped the incentive structure towards cheating.
Outside the realm of phones, I've also been burned on camera equipment. I ordered a Nikon 200-500mm telephoto lens a few years back, which was represented as sold by Nikon. It proved not to be - by its serial number, it was actually a gray-market item intended for the Chinese market. That wouldn't happen with a sale direct from the manufacturer, and it also totally invalidates the otherwise very good manufacturer's warranty. It's a great copy of the lens and of new enough manufacture to have got past the teething problems, so I kept it. But that was the last time I bought something that pricey on Amazon, too.
Nikon's policies are what they are, and have been that way for longer than I've been alive. They're not what I have a problem with here. Amazon is, and at this point I'd only even consider doing business with them on similar terms to what you describe - small-ticket stuff that I don't really care if it's not what the seller claims it is.
But then, on the other hand, that leaves Amazon with no point for me at all. In the months since I placed my last order there, I've found small business e-commerce to be alive and thriving, and you know what? It turns out that when you place an order with Spice Place or Betty Mills or B&H or Adorama or whoever, yeah it takes a little longer to show up, but also what's in the box will reliably be what you bought! Wild, right? Even books, now, I get from Indiebound, or Ebay for obscure out-of-print stuff that's hard to find from regular booksellers. And for the basic staples of living, there are plain old regular stores. You can just walk into buildings and buy food and tools and things! You don't have to wait for anyone.
At this point, I'm about two-thirds seriously convinced that the whole Prime experience with next-day delivery is as harmful to the customer as it is to the drivers and to the neighborhoods increasingly choked with navy-blue panel vans. I know it exerted an unhealthy hold over my thinking for a lot longer than I'd have preferred in retrospect. It remains wild to me that Amazon found a way to make small-business ecommerce and brick-and-mortar retail look more appealing than itself, but they've certainly done a solid job of it, and I hope they keep it up.
Most people are well meaning and as long as the site isn't flooded with fakes it can work ok.
When you combine the actually bad people with those people, isn't 30-40% of the population constantly fucking with the system?
See also: Democracy. App store reviews. The soundscape. Climate change. Etc.
We shouldn't. And indeed, if you look at a random legitimate review of something it's unlikely to be particularly helpful. More users does not make the data better beyond maybe "was it dead on arrival?".
Platforms should empower users to build rings of trust with users they do trust, while keeping it as private as they're comfortable being. People will build social capital because it's useful, it's fun and for the top 0.01% of users is something that can be a job.
I do write/have written reviews, incl. tear down pictures for some products as I'd be happy if I find similar approach/reviews.
Normally I read only 3 and 4 star reviews, or the ones that have disassembly pictures and seem to have been written by coherent people. It's a slow process, unfortunately but it does help with selection.
EU (and the UK) have 2y of mandatory warranty and 2weeks free returns, so the fake reviews are not so prominent.
This perhaps explains the rest of your comment :-) Often in economic theory it's assumed that people are totally rational, and often rationality is assumed to include sociopathic levels of self interest. Daniel Kahneman, the author of Thinking Fast and Slow, uses the word "econ" to describe the mythical creature that statisfies these properties. He makes the point that most people are not econs to some lesser or greater extent (either because they don't fully act in their own self interest or otherwise don't act fully "rationally" in the economic theory sense).
I often leave online reviews because I feel it's the right thing to do, even if I personally don't benefit from them. In part, I feel like they're payment for reviews others have left which I've used, even though an econ wouldn't bother because those other reviews would exist regardless of my "payment".
I do get your point towards the end of your comment that it's easy enough to come up with fake reviews, either by paying some econ-ish people or just using a machine. I'm talking more about the earlier point about recommendation from your neighbour only being reliable because of the consequences of a poor review.
Negative reviews are the only actual reviews.
"It is economically infeasible for people to be helpful!" - the last human on earth, probably.
You'll do well. Keep the blinders on, read your Ayn Rand, don't think about things too much. Greed is good.
People who are familiar with phone scam baiting will recognize this as a standard scam tactics. First go for the technical play and then emotional one. They can't scream on text so they don't jump to the angry one.
Four days in a row i was told by different customer support reps that the voucher will be cancelled in a few minutes (oddly enough i couldnt cancel it myself), and none actually did it all the while amazon tried charging my card and asking to update payment details. Since then, around 2 months ago, i stopped buying on amazon all together.
Oddly enough i usually get a notification when i login from a new device, but this time i didnt even tho the voucher was bought by someone in Panama (not sure if they used a real name or not but they sure weren't logging in from my device).
Unfortunately it seems you can no longer filter search results by "Sold and Shipped by Amazon", you have to filter by "Available from Amazon Prime/free shipping" and then filter manually which is a pain.
I've actually had better luck with 3rd Party sellers that ship on their own (not from an Amazon Warehouse). If they send you a counterfeit, their store reputation is going to take a hit. Though at this point, eBay might be a better option.
Lately, I've started buying direct from the manufacturer when possible, or shipped from B&M store. Their prices are the same, or better.
I didn't know they used to have that filter though. That would be super useful to make a comeback
The space heater in question had a very high rating. Now I know why.
- If somethings doesn't benefit Amazon, it's abuse.
Their double standards are disgusting.
The question is - what are you going to do with that information?
Gold.
Wire it into a neural net, don't make it a way to snipe competitors products.
ok, ok... probably not a realistic solution.
I've left a few reviews recently and one good thing I have noticed is they seem to be adding some checks (I think they're intentional).
Like you review a product and it says "overall rating 1-5" but below it will have subcategories like maybe "true to size 1-5" "value 1-5" or similar (can't recall the real ones).
Every once in a while they throw in a curveball like "warmth 1-5" which would make sense for a sweater but is nonsense for something like a plate or ssd. I just press [X] and figure it's a check for a fake reviewer. (either that or a fake reviewer added a nonsense category)
1. Add a way to report solicitations for fake reviews. Ban companies that pay for fake reviews for a year and all their reviews above 3 stars are removed. Customers who report requests for fake reviews are given a small bonus; maybe a $5 credit or something.
2. Amazon themselves pretend to be sellers and solicit fake reviews from customers. If a customer reports the request for a fake review, they're given the same bonus but told that they were part of a sting operation. If the customer gives the fake review, they're banned from Amazon for a year, and all their reviews are removed.
Obviously some details need to be worked out: need to make sure the system can't be abused, need to make sure the fake review solicitation doesn't make real sellers look bad. But if done properly, ti should make the whole fake-review solicitation completely impractical.
Amazon had 21$ billion income ( per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) ).
50 people is nothing for them, and it is basically ignoring problem.
Also, can you provide evidence that they have any people working on the problem?
it means
"Amazon considers that unimportant and refuses to pay competitive wages"
Amazon had 21$ billion income in 2020, it is not a tiny company struggling for resources. ( per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) )
Amazon could clean this up and then watch the average drop. From the removal of the fake fives but also it makes it look more "socially accpetable" to leave 4 and 3 star reviews. So it costs Amazon to do the right thing by the people parting with money for stuff so they don't.
Amazon are well aware of /their/ incentives and when their incentives align with what looks to me a lot like fraud they'll play the plausibly deny game.
Or perhaps I'm wrong they don't know and there's nothing they can do. Amazon employees will probably confirm that.
We definitely spend less at Amazon because of lack of trust and counterfeit concerns, and it seems directionally true for the HN crowd. That's got to be a worry for anyone at Amazon - if the people who were early adopters are starting to leave your platform, that's got to be concerning...
I was looking for some L plates for my car. A lot of reviews called them “beautiful”... it is a white square with a letter L that sticks to your car... trying to find one which didn’t fall off or damage the car was far from trivial. Fortunately newer reviews mentioned damage or falling off or does the job which gave some steer.
I have been purposefully shopping elsewhere recently. Other sites are usually cheaper and there is less doubt about what is actually going to get received.
So now it's not safe to buy SD cards and USB sticks directly from Amazon either now
amazon might be OK with people going to a different place for brand name goods but continue to buy low cost, no-brand goods from amazon if that market is much larger.
What I've been ALWAYS wondering when people say such things:
Did you seriously get them when buying from Amazon itself as vendor or are you conveniently leaving out the fact that you bought from some random company which uses the Amazon marketplace?
Because I really cannot believe that something as big as Amazon would be dumb enough to sell counterfeit goods under their own name, and people usually don't mention if they bought from Amazon or not when they say such things.
But things I won’t buy on Amazon are SD cards or water filters for my fridge. You end up paying full price for a cheap knockoff. I’m sure there are others, but these two stand out in my mind.
That way I don't have to go through the horrendous amazon interface, which I have the impression tries to actively prevent you from finding what you want. Similar to the strategy of large supermarkets that rearrange goods to maximize customer time at the shop.
I carefully check reviews, use fakespot, etc.
There is a point where the eroding of trust will be significant enough to affect the bottom line. Eventually most people know to not trust Amazon reviews, soon it will be.
I didn’t want to buy a toilet cleaner that would fall apart and make me fish it out of the toilet, so we went and got them from Target instead.
It's not always "Nike" or some big brand, often it's smaller brands who have built up a reputation but don't have the legal team to fight with Amazon and protect their product from pirates.
Pick out a few random words here: https://www.randomlists.com/random-words . Put those few random words into Amazon's search bar and then order the list from most to least expensive. Then scroll down a bit. This should give you a pretty good selection of a random set of 'real' items. Do this, say, 3-4 times to get ~10 random items not influenced by your search history (presumably). Open them up in new tabs for easier organization. Now, go into a few of those items and try to say that they are 100% not 'fraudulent'.
How many could you get through before you gave up in frustration? Personally I got to about 5 before I gave up trying to determine if they were junk or not.
I wonder if anyone is deliberately paying for bad reviews of their competitors' products?
It would be interesting to know how often this happens compared to buying the 5 star reviews. My guess would be that the fake negative reviews for competitors are less than 10% of the total fake reviews.
If they sorted this out and the average reviews started to drop, they could very easily adjust this algorithm and never tell anyone and they’d be fine. I don’t think this is the problem
Do they? It's not immediately clear that an Amazon where the average item has 4.7 stars would sell more stuff than an Amazon where the average is 4.2 stars. Consumers mostly compare items against others on the same site and it's possible that all grade inflation does is make the top performing items harder to separate out and makes buying harder.
As a counterpoint, Uber suffers from ridiculous grade inflation and it doesn't appear to have made riders love them any more. It's simply resulted in everyone adapting to 5 = slightly above average, 4.9 = average, 4.8 = run away screaming.
Just out of curiosity from someone who doesn't use Uber, is this an exaggeration or meant pretty much literally? (Not with regard to running away screaming... but is 4.8 genuinely a terrible score?)
from https://qz.com/1038285/uber-will-make-riders-explain-when-th...
(citation is dead - not sure where Uber keeps this info now and is it even public)
They deleted my negative review of the Kindle with no explanation or recourse.
Since maybe November, a couple of things I've ordered (shipped and sold by Amazon) were listed as new but were very clearly used. One of these items was a piece of safety-critical equipment that was dangerously damaged and could very likely have caused death or dismemberment if someone with less experience had received the item and tried to use it. I assume some clueless Amazon warehouse worker eyeballs returns and tries to figure out if they can plausibly trick the customer into thinking it's a new item, and if so they put it back up for sale as "new".
There. Problem solved.
High quality, curated, independent reviews is probably something that most people would enjoy and appreciate.
That said, the current system is fairly worthless, and what little worth it has is based on hacking it by looking at a specific subset of reviews.
That's what we have done at the marketplace I'm running in the UK. There are no seller ratings and users are encouraged to share feedback.
Should just be thumbs up, thumbs down. Maybe a "meh" in between.
Alternatively, ask for ratings as 5 star, treat 4 as a meh, and anything 3 or below as a thumbs down.
Over the last 5-10 years, Amazon's main shopping website seems to have gone from a reasonably reputable location to an internet cesspool to rival ebay or craigslist.
For example, looking for an item one is presented with a wide variety of almost identical products from a wide variety of almost identical, completely unknown brands, with no trust or confidence in any of them.
Now obviously, these brands/products are most likely nothing to do with Amazon, they're just using Amazon as their storefront, and sometimes fulfilment, but it still reflects upon Amazon, and ultimately taints their brand with the same brush.
Maybe Amazon makes more money in this way, by taking a cut of this flow through various service fees, but for me it makes Amazon less useful to go to when I don't know exactly what I want already, and more often pushes me to go direct to a more trusted source.
Half the time the manufacturer themselves are selling directly on ebay!
To list your product on Amazon as a seller, you pay $500 per year as a "review incentivization fee." The algorithm randomly selects buyers and emails them 1 month after their purchase. They are offered $10 to write a review. The chance of being randomly selected as a reviewer auto-adjusts to target a goal of 50 reviews per year, and no one except those people is allowed to post reviews. Also, reviewers can update their reviews later if their impression of the product changes.
If a seller wanted to keep farming reviews, they would now have to buy up the vast majority of their own inventory in the hopes of being selected. Also, my system prevents people who are experiencing one-in-a-million problems (or who are just habitually disgruntled) from dominating the conversation.
This method would just increase that. "We'll pay you $100 if you get chosen and write us a 5-star review" would be a reasonable offer for both buyer and seller.
But you're right, I think that's a legitimate issue. I'm not saying my plan is perfect, but I'm pretty sure it improves on the status quo.
Way too short time for almost anything that's not a direct consumable.
>They are offered $10 to write a review.
That's too low (or too low depending on the product), negative experience is a lot more likely to be vented.
The problem the star average is used as the only proxy for quality. Even without fake reviews it's completely meaningless since different people like different things (relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/937/).
When I buy things I look at what people complain about when they dislike the product. Is this electronic badly grounded and gave you an electric shock? I'll look somewhere else. Did you give this gay bar a 1-star review because they didn't let you in with the rest of your hen party? Awesome!
> If a seller wanted to keep farming reviews, they would now have to buy up the vast majority of their own inventory in the hopes of being selected.
They already have 100 people buy their product and fully pay for it for a review.
Sellers are currently paying people (in money and product) for 5 star reviews, which is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve.
Your system may have minor chance of success if there was no way for the sellers to contact customers.
It's not just store reviews that are broken - web search is also completely broken because of affiliate spam
I spent far too much time at the moment with each purchase researching and tracking down trusted reviews.
The real action is 3 star reviews. Those people have really given a lot of thought to the review.
Also the reviews with pictures tend to be useful.
That's presumably why they said "read" the negative reviews. Obviously you don't then base your decision off negative reviews that turn out to not matter.
Recent example, shredders all have great 5 star reviews but only the odd negative will point out the obvious problem that cheap shredders are made cheaply and will break in a short space of time.
EDIT: NextDesk scandal aside, when was the last time you saw WireCutter recommend a product that did NOT offer affiliate commissions (let’s just call a spade a spade: these are kickbacks).
I don’t use WC anymore so I can’t answer that myself. I stopped using them when I saw some companies completely ignored in 2 different industries with which I’m familiar. Those companies did not have kickbacks.
I guess the paid alternative is consumer reports, but I feel like they’re not noticeably better.
I am sure there are plenty of honest reviews on the internet, tucked into enthusiast sites or on personal blogs. It's hard to find them unless you're a member of their community. Unless they review a lot of products, you have no continued relationship with them. This means you can't evaluate your opinion of their reviews (as to trustworthiness, or even just taste).
Surely anyone who devotes a lot of time and money to reviewing products is going to want to be (and deserves to be) paid. That means direct payment has to come from the customer, or the business.
The "business pays" model has an incentive to exclude businesses that don't pay, to push you towards more expensive items, and in general to get you to buy shit you don't need. But at least the reviewer has some skin in the game, since you won't continue to buy through their referral links if they recommend too many products that are too bad.
The "customer pays" model seems to solve a lot of the incentive problems, but it's always hard to get people to pay for something that others are giving out for free (even if the free ones are occasionally subpar or even harmful!)
Ultimately, I'm not really sure I see "buyer pays" review sites as terribly unfair? Surely they'll just pass the cost on to customers. Some of the businesses, like NextDesk, seem to find the process unfair. I have some sympathy for them, but the reality is that the products I've bought based on Wirecutter recommendations tend to be better. I don't have the time, or even the ability these days, to pick through search results trying to figure it out for myself.
Maybe I will give Consumer Reports a try, but is the cost of the subscription (of which I don't know the utility), and the lock-in, worth the marginal cost of missing out on great products like NextDesk? Does Consumer Reports even give more complete surveys of options than Wirecutter? Hard to say. I think I would go insane if I spent any more time than I already do looking for "truth" on the internet.
The biggest flaw I see is their product selection process, it always involves looking at the amazon top sellers. Those are usually filled with astroturfed, paid and bribed reviews.
https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
There's a good chance that the items you're most ignorant about are also the items your friends are most ignorant about (or at least enough of them that it'll significantly reduce the quantity of the feedback).
Also, once this became a thing, once it became monetizable, my web of trust would shrink drastically. I mean, geez, I'm even suspicious of my doctors prescriptions.
Maybe we need professional reviewers with a transparent system in place to protect against manipulation (as much as possible). Something like Consumer Reports on a larger scale.
Since Amazon is not providing this, one example of a place to shop is Costco in person. Things sold by Costco are generally reliable enough. On top of that, Costco has a generous return policy so I can buy whatever I need. If it was truly unusable/broken, I can return it easily.
Anything over £100, I tend to default to John Lewis rather than amazon.
When I went to report it, the seller had been removed and the item was no longer available.
I contacted support and of course they refunded me the money without any issue.
My problem is that they knew they had shipped me a fake product, why didn't they contact me to to tell me it was fake and either send me a real copy or offer me a refund?
I signed up with a throwaway e-mail account. They sent a step-by-step guide to go to Amazon, enter a specific search term, scroll until I found their product, purchase it, and then send them the receipt for reimbursement.
They didn't ask me to write a review. They only wanted to generate the appearance of organic search traffic to their product.
So in order to even make the first few sales they need to generate a bunch of fake reviews.
This is extremely well known phenomenon especially in the Chinese market where it is also extremely standard to get a bunch of fake reviews to get the ball rolling on sales. Guess what, it happens in the US too.
I don't endorse it, but the sellers are just doing what the buyers incentivize them to do.
I've tried raising the issue repeatedly with Amazon, but I've now given up and look forward to the random crap I get sent almost on a monthly basis.
They could ship an empty box if they just needed a tracking number. If the customer isn't coming into the feedback loop, they don't need the product.
Anyone who has worked on planet scale anti-abuse systems knows this is a very tough and never ending problem.
You think there are obvious signals for good or bad - the 0.01% cases where this does not hold up turns to 20 million daily mistakes if your product has 2B DAUs. You think you built something that works, spammers need to figure out just one loophole to game the system. Sometimes they don't even have to look at a technical loophole, if the economics works out you can even pay normal users small sums of money and the bad activity is now masked by troves of genuine user activity.
It is a little painful to see how HN loves to vilify people working on these issues, but its a little like saying we have police but the crime is not 0 yet. And if the argument is it happens too often that is actually most likely not true - a 99.999% accurate system will make a mistake 600k times every month for 2B DAU activity assuming one user interaction a day for the product. Which is often a big underestimation for many large products.
I do think like any other area there is a lot we can do better and that we are already working on it. But man it sucks to have spent 6 months working 12 hour days just to see someone making grandiose statements on how something is an easy issue to fix when you know its absolutely false.
I guess its fine though, FANG pays well and I enjoy my work and think its a net positive to the society.
/rant
This is a straw man argument, because only relative terms matter. Nobody cares about the absolute numbers except your boss. The customers care about their percentage chance of encountering spam and fake reviews.
You're saying it's too hard to achieve 100% success (0% failure rate), and that we should settle for 99.999% success (0.001% failure rate). Multiplying these by big numbers is irrelevant. It could be a trillion. Who cares? The implication is that the system is nearly perfect.
Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template.
The same argument applies for Medicare: The citizens don't care about the absolute budget, they just care about their individual tax increase or decrease. Only a handful of people in the treasury care about the absolute numbers.
The equivalent in your example would be saying we have medicare for all but for some people the system does not work. Thats the state of the world we are in, we are making efforts but they will never be 100% perfect.
>> Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template.
See thats the thing, the only people who know this for certain is the ones who have access to Amazon data. You or I dont know the experience for "most online shoppers". If anything looking at data has repeatedly made me realize that we in tech have a very bad understanding of "generalized overall population" cohorts.
a) with 100% accuracy, and b) without involving humans at all
but I noticed the trend of fake Amazon reviews some time ago, and some patterns were very evident. I'd click on the profile of a five-star reviewer, more often than not every review they left was five stars. And every product I'd click through on also had a deluge of suspicious five star reviews. I even started scraping data into a graph database but then discovered that Amazon tries very hard to resist scraping attempts and gave up.
I think it would be very possible to set up some kind of basic pattern analysis along these lines. Clearly, merchants are buying positive reviews in bulk, so detecting sudden spikes in positive reviews and working out correlations with other product review dumps wouldn't be difficult. Once you've got a sense of it, you hand the data over to human investigators who take it the rest of the way. But despite its insane wealth, Amazon is clearly not interested in spending the money required to do that.
You might only show 80% of all user reviews - but if 10% of your reviews are fake - then you're only hiding 10% of real reviews.
Who cares? Amazon definitely doesn't have a problem of not having enough reviews. It does have a problem of having too many products with almost entirely fake reviews.
But if you look at e.g. seller forums at Amazon, there are a lot of large threads about the opposite problem - Amazon taking out lots of reviews the sellers consider legitimate.
So clearly they are doing something, and it might even be that only a small minority of fake reviews get through, but due to Amazon's scale there are still a lot of them.
However, why doesn't Amazon only allow those who have purchased to leave reviews?
And to ban any company offering monetary or equivalent incentives to leave reviews?
I suggest they are not even trying to tackle the problem.
Amazon used to be the place I went to learn about the quality of a product. If it looked good, well, here I was already on the product page...
Now, with the counterfeit product problem I will no longer consider amazing for anything health, safety or food related.
With the fake review problem, I no longer look at Amazon to figure out if a product is quality or not. Which leads to more purchases from physical stores or other websites.
Between the two of those issues, my use of Amazon has dropped pretty significantly (to the point that I cancelled Amazon Prime during the pandemic).
If there is a pattern of failure ,quality, or issues and its not worth dealing with I wont buy the product. Also if the issues are common among vendors or products then I go with the cheapest. Why pay more if they are all crap or just as risky to buy and it sets a more accurate expectation of the product.
I also typically ignore the negative reviews complaining about the package arriving damaged or late as that can happen with anything as long as I don't need it by a certain date.
I also look for customer pictures of the product if available.
What's interesting is the Chinese companies are actually getting better at this. It's usually multi-part.
* Post a meaningful deposit / security to list, more if you list more.
* Pretty involved complaint resolution process and tracking inventory by actual seller (no comingled inventory).
* Product spot checks by platform itself for stuff that sells a better
* Product spot checks let you also pick up the free product offers for good reviews game players this way.
* Real human support for review bombing situations and de-listings. If you can start untangling the knots a lot of the scam folks are all cross linked.
I've got plenty more, and no one is paying me $100K. So these platforms are mostly just lazy.
Eventually someone will build a knock-off amazon with more trust, and we'll all move there and just use amazon for AWS compute.
This is hilariously common.
How much of this racket on places like Amazon and Yelp would be killed if you had a unique generated ID assigned to you once you purchased a good or service and it was verified as delivered?
Right before Christmas this year, my dad got a package of some iWatch bands he didn't order, and some other small accessories. It was addressed to him, from some random name he didn't recognize. He asked around all of his friends and family to see if anyone ordered pseudononymously. Presumably this was done in order for someone to be able to generate a fake "verified review" at the peak of Christmas shopping.
Employ a group of people to go undercover with these firms, who are purposefully violating your platforms TOS, and enact draconian measures against the brands your employees encounter.
The risk would quickly not be worth the reward.
These “brands” are sometimes a few guys in a garage in China. Shut them down and they popup with a new name the next day, like whack-a-mole.
Most of the items are now people selling cheap tat from AliExpress and so many items have a suspiciously high number of reviews for such mundane items
Authoritative sources are considered reliable > newcomers undermine old sources > newcomers become authoritative sources, repeat ad infinitum.
When small shops sold most products, you could rely on the owner being connected enough to the community to not rip anyone off. As communities and local social connections broke down, the penalty for being dishonest evaporated. Amazon and other competitors took advantage and became trustworthy. Now they are slipping...
My guess: in both journalism and in e-commerce, the next step will be a return to “personable” sources of information that are perceived as reliable. Substack is on the right track here WRT journalism. Something that has real people (with good reputations) review products might be the e-commerce equivalent.
They make so much off of AWS now, the market operations are probably just a massive headache to leadership with comparatively lower margins. Unattractive to pay attention and devote resources to, when the same thrown at AWS yields far more profits per unit thrown.
The dynamics that emerge from commingling pushes more buyers to Amazon Basics, which undoubtedly yield much higher profits, so there isn't much incentive to fix it for impacted categories and brands.
I've read that there is a feature that allows Amazon sellers to lock down their SKU's so only specific, named ship-from's are allowed to stock Amazon warehouses. If this is true, then I'd like to hear how this works, and rationales on why more sellers aren't using it.
There might be a core assumption so deeply embedded into the data fabric of "one instance of an SKU is as good as any other instance" that changing the assumption would yield too little benefit to clear some internal IRR metric. I'd caution against that; ceding the market operations to eager competitors to take it away would deny Amazon extremely valuable data. Data whose value I assert far outstrips the decreased margins to fix the commingling problem. This goes far beyond any kind of shopping data. I further assert if Amazon actually unlocks the real value of that data, they'd evolve way beyond their current positioning as a software-driven logistics company.
Even for that current positioning as a software-driven logistics company, this is a curious issue to possess the hot potato upon for so long. Competitors would be well-advised to look and think deeply on what this means on whether they can/should use this to beat Amazon.
Amazon likely is not eager (to put it lightly) to enter into many traditional distributor-retailer relationships with manufacturers, which gives negotiating power back to the sellers. Very far from the commoditize the complements strategy they prefer. The current structure is a manufacturer's Panopticon, even more brutal than the Wal-Mart buyer-department-culture-driven model. Amazon wants to vertically integrate to the point they don't need a relationship, and ideally all the way back through into manufacturing, reaching as far back into the supply chain necessary to secure a welded-shut tight integration, thus capturing all available profits.
I just wish there was some sort of antiamazon coalition that would help move more e-commerce away and some standard messaging to make this movement known enough. The problem is that the point of sale and the seller credibility are comingled hence why even our shopify customers go to Amazon first. If you aren't on amazon, they wonder if you are a 'real' company. There must be a better way.
They've captured the market, now they can exert the lever as they please.
Did you authenticate everything you ever bought from Amazon?
I noticed my SanDisk SD Card was fake when I studied the printed logo closely with a real one I had bought before.
Surely, for the sake of brand protection, they should make it clear that you can't buy their products on amazon?
If it's not bullshit like that, then my credit card info gets published to the world. So, fake reviews or not, there is a certain appeal to Amazon in that after 20 years I've not had credit card info published nor have I caught them trying to charge me for package insurance. Though I might not trust Amazon reviews, I trust the rest of their process far more than I do some random vendor. Which is why, much as I might wish otherwise, I continue to shop at Amazon.
[0]https://route.com WTF? Track packages and charge money for it? Who funds this shit?
I can only guess that Shopify sold my email.
This appears to be the offending client-side code:
let {isUkCombined: t} = e;
const n = new URL(Object(c.a)())
, {protocol: a, host: r, pathname: o} = n;
if (Object(m.b)(),
t && r.includes(".com")) {
const e = r.replace(".com", ".co.uk");
window.location.assign("".concat(a,"//").concat(e).concat(o))
} else if (!t && n.host.includes(".co.uk")) {
const e = n.host.replace(".co.uk", ".com");
window.location.assign("".concat(a, "//").concat(e).concat(o))
}
Replacing "window.location.assign(...)", with "location.href = ..." should do it.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015T96KLO/
Many reviews say they received a knock off. I ordered from Home Depot instead. I don’t intend to use this right away and don’t want to be bitten later.
I reported this listing to Amazon, but it is still up. I assume this just isn’t a priority for them.
So Amazon not only doesn't care, they are encouraging it.
Let's imagine a universe where Amazon does away with the star rating system and replaces it with a pro/con "tag" list. (e.g. "high quality" "smells bad" "broke quickly"). They then only allow reviews from verified buyers of an item. Amazon then contacts some percentage of said buyers proportionate to the number of reviews the item has has/how recently it was listed (to establish a baseline) and offers a small account credit for a reviewer to clearly state at least one thing they didn't like about the item, requiring a response other than "nothing". This would identify trends or common failure points. The more negative reviews a product has, the higher the reward that Amazon hands out. Scammy sellers would have to consistently "beat Amazon's offer" to get fake positive reviews.
In this hypothetical universe... would sellers setup shell accounts to purchase their own inventory and tank their other products' reviews for Amazon credit? Or would they buy out their own inventory to increase the ratio of positive to negative reviews? Would the cut that Amazon takes for using their platform outweigh the cost of paying off buyers/purchasing their own inventory? Would the cost to Amazon be worth the increased customer engagement?
The incentives and payoffs are far, far greater than any type of consequences to the seller. Worst case, they can shut down and start another shill store.
If you buy something and it doesn't work, you can always just send it back. But most of the time it's fine. I found for more expensive items, I feel much safer shopping with Best buy. The prices are generally the same, and there's much more control over what you're actually purchasing. Buying a laptop off Amazon is like reading through a catalog of every laptop ever made in the Last 5 years.
Best Buy has a great selection, and I was able to get my laptop within a day or so.
To be fair to Amazon, they blunt a lot of the really negative experiences with store credit. For example once I purchased a table, didn't know how to put it together, and sort of broke it. I told Amazon I didn't really feel like sending it back because it was heavy, and I got a full refund.
Once you get your money back you're much less likely to complain, I don't have any real incentive to write a negative review about the product now
Don’t recommend - Do recommend
or
Don’t recommend - Neutral - Do recommend
It’s rather silly when you rate an app with four out of five stars only to get a “Why didn’t you like our app?” question. And, as an app maker, anything other than a five star review feels like a punch in the face.
Fake reviews will be the death of Amazon if Target/Walmart and others can get their act together.
With respect to charging cables, I can buy the same crappy ones at Ace Hardware that I buy on Amazon basically. Ace picks one crappy vendor but Amazon has 100+ of them. The only high quality ones I've found are anker, monoprice and Apple.
Amazon is Big Data. They could _easily_ identify generated reviews if they wanted.
They don't.
I myself stopped writing reviews as an emotionally abusive department at Amazon discourages critical reviews _albeit_ 5 star. Community Team is staffed by persons with reprehensibly poor English skills not fit to judge review compliance with vague rules.
Don't trust inarticulate reviews.
Don't trust articulate reviews without line breaks.
Don't trust products with more than 800 reviews.
But wait there's more...
Amazon will cancel your account for returning "too many" items. Catch 22.
In this case the idea would be to link accounts on Amazon with these services, so that users can filter only by reviews written by individuals that have gone through the necessary steps to verify their identity more concretely. Government should step in here, not necessarily as the only provider of these services, but as an alternative to the current insecure and inefficient model of doing this all ad hoc across any number of companies individually.
Amazon takes no actions when this behavior is reported. They really don't care.
"We want your honest reviews"
lies
they want lies
The next meta level would be competitors trying to make each other look bad by sending hordes of fake five stars at each other. Who knows, perhaps this is already happening in some markets?
Amazon reviews/Trustpilot/Google Reviews/Facebook Reviews etc are cheap as chips and ultimately they work.
I now remind myself that in order to take on board someone's review, I need to know the person otherwise we could be chalk and cheese in likes and dislikes and they are influencing my decision.
I wanted to buy turkish cotton bath towels the other day, and it's basically impossible to find (really, try it). Nearly every listing has misleading discriptions in spite of 5 star reviews.
I feel like unless I know the specific brand or product, I'm using Amazon less and less. I guess there's a niche for competitors - better search and a high quality filter.
After getting scammed a few times by products that seemed to have good reviews I decided to just keep shopping local instead where I can actually see the product and speak to human beings who used it.
Amazon will forever be the one stop shop for cheap counterfeit shit until they actually address these issues.
I also stopped buying anything health/body related after receiving some "organic bees wax" for some DIY candles that smelled like a chemical plant and melted at the wrong temperature (who knows what it was) and some vitamin D pills that were all melted.
I'd love to buy tyres and oil from the local shop but the 50 to 100 percent price difference is not worth it.
Also, I just stopped buying from Amazon a couple of years back. Only purchase in my history for the past 3 years is an Apple charger since when I changed from Android to iOS they didn't deliver them with the device anymore and Amazon had the cheapest price from the actual Apple distributor (no re-distributor).
Only upside they have is that their delivery is fast and service is ok (compared to normal retail offering online store)
Can't wait to be able to go somewhere, look at the options and talk to a human.
Online shopping is shit
how?
Knock-off products, that again are not a secret.
Unless there's viable competition, these things are not going to change.
Lied to. Stripped of our privacy. Influenced and manipulated by analysis of our own behaviours. And so on.
It's a shame it's come to this.
Still, amazon weights the 5-star no text reviews higher to arrive at 3.5 stars.
(The product now has 7 reviews with at least 3x 1 star text reviews and the weighting still favors the no-text 4/5 star ratings: [1])
[1] https://smile.amazon.de/Lego-Technic-42125-Ferrari-Corse/pro...
see also: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.09177
Nothing new. This has been the case for years. The worst of it was that they used to (I think this might no longer be the case) accept reviews from anyone with an account, whether they bought the product or not.
We have direct experience on this. My wife used to sell products on Amazon. People were leaving reviews that tagged as "Verified Review" BEFORE the product was delivered. Often times they would buy an item, leave a review and cancel before it shipped.
Even worse, these products required some use before anyone could form an opinion. This did not matter at all. People could leave reviews before buying, right after buying, before receiving and when the package was dropped off, etc.
And, of course, 100% of the reviews left before the product shipped or before it arrived were negative. 100% of the review left by non-buyers were negative.
In other words, sellers on Amazon have been conducting armed warfare through negative reviews, star ratings and seller feedback.
The other thing they are doing is consuming competitor's advertising budget before prime time. Say you have a budget of $1000 per day for click-through-ads on Amazon. That's $30K per month. Competitors would hire people --usually in China or India-- to click on your ads furiously right after midnight US time. By the time people awoke in the US and went to buy on Amazon your $1,000 ad budget was gone and nobody saw your product offerings.
We burned through tens of thousands of dollars exactly this way. I had to fight Amazon for months to get them to have a look at the statistical analysis I put in front of them. At the end of that process they refunded us a fraction of our spend. What worse is that we lost all search ratings (some of our products were on page one for applicable keywords) and Amazon absolutely refused to turn back the clock and restore our standing. It was an absolute nightmare. They could not have cared less. This is when my wife decided to stop selling on Amazon. As a doctor she had no patience for that lunacy.
The other problem is that Amazon does not preserve advertising records (or they didn't back then). If you did not manually download your statistics with regularity there was no way you could reconstruct what happened six months ago. If I remember correctly you get a few weeks or one month's download and that's it. I don't know if it's true or not, but their seller-no-service people told me the records are not preserved.
Even worse, they refused to provide us with the identity of the seller or sellers who attacked our advertising budget and through negative reviews. They told me they identified them and banned them from Amazon. If they were in the US or Europe we wanted to seek legal action against them. Amazon, once again, could not have cared less.
Based on my experience and that of others whose lives have been turned upside-down by Amazon product and account suspensions as well as flat out fraud in reviews and ratings, I would not recommend that anyone bet their livelihood on Amazon. They could destroy your existence overnight. I know people who are still trying to recover from daring to think they could "build a business" on Amazon. It's a farce. You own nothing. They control everything. And they can flick you off the platform without consequence because you are less than a rounding error.
In our case we both benefited from having careers and a successful tech business, so the Amazon failure didn't hurt us badly. Not so for friends who, quite literally, depended on their "Amazon store" to live, thought they had a shot at improving their lives, risked money they could not afford to lose and actually wanted to own a nice lifestyle business.
RANT_MODE: OFF
> before..delivered
Community Team at one time sanctioned this behavior. Now they don't bother.
> warfare
Were you perhaps paying into the minimum number of seller features? Not FBA?
> ad poison
As an ardent adblocker that's a bridge too far. That's more the province of disincentivizing 419 email scammer fake banks.
> nightmare
The consumer side nightmare is Community Team. Spend some time crafting a high value review then yoink "this review violates our terms" but never mentions which rule or with which language. I empathize with your suffering
"Your review has been removed for violating our rules"
'Which rule?' or 'Which part of my review?'
silence ensues or another link to the rules with no qualification.
Differently abusive are single character "reviews". I _HATE_ Communities Team. Everyone should complain about that first; they have a hand in seller misery. There is no department above them. There are no appeals. There is no recourse.
> that anyone bet their livelihood on Amazon
The safe bet as a side hustle seems to be drop-ship accounts paying neither warehousing nor ad spend.
Amazon Retail Customer Service quality has steadily decreased these prior three years about the same rate as FBA packaging atrocities. Ship a teddybear wrapped in bubbles in a giant box. Ship a laptop in a skin tight box. Send an SSD loose in a soft mailer.
Don't allow Amazon to be your sole selling platform.
On the buyer side ask for retail escalation to "put a note for the Auditors"
wink
Dwight, as a reviewer of X, can you help this customer? Rene asked <the question>
So it's like it's been directed at you. So people will answer with "don't know" or "I didn't buy this" or whatever.
it happens a lot in the past 2017,2018
there's lots of such services sold on marketing forums
in my opinion,
rating should based on how much products sold
whatcha think?
What does Amazon really offer now: 1) Search convenience, which is really not that big of a deal and 2) Fast delivery but everyone is catching up and do we really need that thing in 2 days instead of 3?
I never buy on Amazon and I don't feel as though I'm missing out.
Living in "Servicewüste" Germany I would still buy from amazon, even without the first two points that you mentioned. Because customer support... isn't a thing here. On top of that there's things like higher prices, and more expensive and slower shipping usually slower by up to a week, not by a day or two.
Amazon's customer support goes way and beyond to help you out, I've had hundreds of euros worth of stuff sent to me again right away, no questions asked - because I called them and said that the official delivery information saying that it's been delivered to me personally an hour ago is not true, and I don't have the items.
That all being said, I do wish amazon would take care of fake reviews, and mixed inventory from different sellers.
Once you start looking you see this problem everywhere. Why is the Apple App Store absolutely crap? Why is the Google App Store even worse? Why is social media filled with astroturfing?
The problem isn’t just convincing fakes, the problem is also that the platforms have an alignment of incentive with the fakes. While removing fake reviews or fake outrage bait is a tractable problem, wanting to remove it is a harder problem- it just doesn’t make sense for platforms absent more competition.
Tl;dr: Fakes/spam can prosper on platforms if they only harm the user and are helpful to the platform.
It smelled toxic. Smell didn't dissipate after a month. Returned it and found out buried under all the 5 star reviews of people citing the same issue.