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Comment by ncallaway | Hacker News Reader

It does affect the bottom line, though.

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).

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I absolutely shop more at Best Buy, Costco and other places because of this reason. Whatever I buy at these places, I know they stand behind the quality. Do I go to Best Buy for a $10 cable? No. But a $3000 DSLR, I would rather buy from B&H.

I have always found it best to ignore the good reviews and instead look at the negative reviews to identify patterns of complaints.

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.

Positive reviews aren't the only ones being spoofed though, with competitors often posting fake negative ones for other products [1].

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[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54063039

Yeah I have seen that as well and should have clarified that is a possibility. However to avoid that I also look at the middle reviews and avoid the reviews with no or little explanation. However, I avoid the top reviews at all cost which typically is just the manufactures product description anyways.

It also depends on the cost of the product and the PITA it would be to return if defective on how deep I go into looking a the low to mid range reviews.

I agree with what you're saying and I use Amazon much less now too, but Amazon definitely monitors the numbers and they're making more money this way. Who knows how much they're trading long-term reputation for short term gains?

> Who knows how much they're trading long-term reputation for short term gains?

I think this is exactly the risk. Amazon didn’t become huge chasing quarterly or short term gains. The damage they’ve done to their reputation over the last several years may take another 5-10 years to show up in the numbers in a significant way, but by that point it’s much harder to turn around.

It’s hard to know what the long term damage will be, if any, though. I’m certainly not their representative median customer.

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