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Comment by kioleanu | Hacker News Reader

Amazon has a problem with fake reviews and it seems they are ok with it.

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”

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As an economics grad, I always wondered why online reviews existed at all. There's no skin in the game for anyone.

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.

> 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.

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.

But a cable is such a simple item to find out if it's broken, it takes 5 seconds, plus I can just buy two and be 99% sure I have one that works.

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.

Its even cheaper to just send it to known problem detectors, and outsource the work of flaw detection to the customer.

> Akerlöf doesn't seem to apply here, there's no hidden information that comes out later.

The hidden information is how much quality control has gone into the manufacturing process. Seller A and seller B are both selling a cable for $10. Seller A bought thier cables for $8 because they spent a lot of time honing their manufacturing process and weeding out bad cables; the chance of getting a bad cable from them is 0.1%. Seller B bought their cables for $2, because they just went for the absolute cheapest option they could. The chance of getting a bad cable from them is basically 75%. You as someone buying it from Amazon can't tell the difference; so sellers like B make loads more money. Unscrupulous people hear about this and many more sellers like B show up. Sellers like A get frustrated and leave.

Seller B got their hands on the rejected cables from seller A. They were in fact paid to scrap them and instead are selling them after putting a sticker over a label.

> there's no hidden information that comes out later

Sure there is: How well a cable handles being bent, and whether or not it catches fire... Cables and especially chargers are some of the products I'm most cautious about buying from sellers I'm not confident about exactly for that reason.

(not that origin is sufficient - the one charger I have had that got closest to setting the house on fire was a genuine Apple charger [many many years ago, they had a design flaw with a too-short sleeve on the cable on the early Macbook chargers; it'd bend and short and melt])

>But a cable is such a simple item to find out if it's broken, it takes 5 seconds

This is so incredible false, cable quality varies greatly:

- wires, gauge and material. Copper is expensive and some cheat using aluminum or Al plated copper. Gold plated terminals, tinned copper, etc.

- wire material and single/multi strand determines resistance and current rating, along with loses in the cable.

- insulation and sleeves can be made from different materials with a lot of properties, incl. max temperature, flame retardant and so on: pvc - cheap, rubber - expensive, nylon/polyamid - expensive, silicon - very expensive.

And that just touches the basics...

"find out if it's broken" isn't the same thing as cable properties/quality.

If the cable fails to carry a signal, or fails to do so without interference, it should be pretty easy to determine this. Failure to do this would make it "faulty".

Lets say the cable catches fire due to high resistance/poor isolation (used at 40-50C or close to oven exhaust, causing thermal runaway) - is it broken? In that regard you can use a lamp cable to connect an oven - it will totally work for 5seconds, it might burn down later, though.

SO a QA process that tests for more than 5 seconds will find that.

But a cable is such a simple item to find out if it's broken

5 seconds?!

Poor assumption. You're presuming this is "only the types of cables you buy". Many times I buy cables to do things with devices, for which I have no working cable already.

Examples:

* My device stops syncing with my cable. Is it the device, or the cable? I buy a replacement cable, just in case.

Replacement cable doesn't work. Now I think it's probably the device.

I spent time here, checking to see what's changed, maybe an update, maybe a config setting, maybe something else. Or, is the device just broken? Do I send it away for repair?

* I want a cable to use with something I've had for years. Lots and lots and lots of examples here, all sorts of devices, like serial cables to debug with routers/switches, test cables, even just an ethernet cable, if you may not have had one before.

Now you test, and you can't tell. Is the port on the device bad? The settings you are using to connect? The device firmware? A problem with the port on the computer you're using to connect to the device?

Hours and hours wasted.

Worse, you advocate buying two. Great. This means that no matter what, I'm returning that spare cable. Now it's not '5 seconds' to determine it is bad, it's 'no matter what, I'm spending 20 minutes returning something I never wanted to begin with".

Frankly, I'd rather spend $10 extra on some types/classes of $20 cable, to have it pre-tested even.

"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%."

Are you sure? Is this ergodic? Does the ensemble average predict the time-series average?

Amazon has a huge counterfeit goods problem, and buying from Amazon itself as opposed to a third-party merchant on the Amazon platform is no guarantee, because of their "commingled stickerless inventory" program.

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.

https://blog.majid.info/amazon-counterfeits/

I'll buy an iPhone off Ebay before I'll go to Amazon for one, at this point - in fact I've done both. The ones I've gotten from Ebay were represented as new in box, and were in fact new in box. The one I got from Amazon was represented as refurbished, and wasn't - it showed up with a badly degraded battery and a chipped display, both of which I had to replace on my own dime. From the way it looked and was packaged when I got it, I feel lucky not to have found it stolen.

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.

Off topic, but I’ve found Swappa to be the best place to buy used phones. They’ve got great customer service and guarantees.

>... honesty is expensive and cheating is cheap. Why would we trust it?

Most people are well meaning and as long as the site isn't flooded with fakes it can work ok.

Are they really though? I know a lot of some people, who would consider themselves "well meaning" (fair, honest, just, whatever) and they totally do this all the time.

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.

I think it only becomes a problem when the system gets big enough. If there's 20 different online storefronts, it's a lot more time and effort to game the reviews on all of them, than if there's only Amazon.

I'd guess about 99% are basically ok with reviews. The trouble is if only 5% of those bother reviewing and 1% of the bad ones post a bunch of fakes.

Incidentally I use argos.co.uk a bit and have found the reviews there always ok so far. Maybe Argos polices it or that crowd doesn't bother faking? It's different from Amazon in that there are no independent sellers so the only people motivated to fake would be the manufacturers.

As you say, that breaks down the second anyone decides to use fakes.

That there is no skin in the game for anyone is not a fault of online reviews per se in my opinion.

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.

I would suggest that in lieu of individual seller brands on Amazon we do have one seller brand: Amazon

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.

> I tend to think if I buy an iPhone on Amazon, it will be the genuine thing from Apple

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.

Does doing that "walk into shop and pay" thing mean you also have to do that old "talk face to face with another human being" thing? Good lord, what would you have us do next? Go to market to buy some fresh meat & veg and prepare an actual home cooked meal?? /s

Not at Argos, the original catalogue shop.

They used to have large paper catalogues to browse (or take home), but now I think it's computers.

You can order and pay using a terminal in the shop, from a phone app, or by asking the assistant. You get a paper receipt with a big number (presumably something similar on the app, which I haven't used) and wait at the back.

After 2-3 minutes, your order number appears on a screen at the back of the shop. You show the receipt to collect it.

The image in the article shows most of it. Behind the photographer is usually a display of a few things: toys, bicycles, watches etc.

https://internetretailing.net/mobile-theme/mobile-theme/argo...

There are other motivations than self-interest. People may altruistically care about other consumers' welfare. They may be reciprocal, taking revenge for a bad product by writing a bad review, and rewarding a good one. Or they may just like to express their opinions!

>skin in the game

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.

I leave reviews for two reasons: To reward a seller when I really like something, and to punish a seller when I really hate something. Rarely in between.

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.

You make good points, but on Amazon I just have to assume that all the reviews are fake. I've seen how easy it is to buy fake reviews, the lengths sellers go to get people to leave only 5-star reviews, and Amazon's inability or unwillingness to do anything about it.

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.

I think many of the reviews on Amazon are real because a lot of them are negative reviews warning people not to buy the product, and those are generally the ones I look at.

That's harder to game, because while a seller certainly could post a negative review citing some irrelevant flaw (and I have seen that), and hope that triggers buyers who don't care, they won't stop other people (like me) from posting negative reviews too, and what I'm looking for is products with a reasonable number of negative reviews where there is an absence of reviews mentioning things I care about.

I also know first hand from selling a novel on Amazon that you can perfectly well gain honest reviews in ways allowed by Amazon, and I also leave a reasonable number of reviews on Amazon myself, so I have every reason to expect at least a portion of the reviews to be honest.

Overall I've managed to avoid buying anything that appears to have been fake from Amazon, despite having bought a couple of thousand products at Amazon over the years (based on the order page stats, and taking off a few hundred as an estimate of digital only products)

Sellers also leave negative reviews for products from competing sellers.

This is irrelevant to me unless they 1) do so while describing specific flaws that I'll actually care about, and 2) every honest seller is affected by it.

It probably sucks to be an honest seller affected by it, but I've yet to find a situation where I have unable to find a product I'm happy with, so clearly they're not doing this often enough to affect me much.

I've seen 1 star "reviews" on products that directly reference a specific competing product or seller that the "reviewer" recommends instead. You'd think with all of Amazon's computing power they could detect obvious scams like that.

> “Why do you think any of the reviews on Amazon are real?”

Because they contain facts which anchor them to reality and act as “proof of work” in some way.

I don’t care for a review which says “this camera takes amazing pictures” that could apply to any camera and is subjective, but one which says “the cover on the sd card slot is sharp and cut my finger twice” is likely someone who has used that specific camera, and has a specific comment, and while it could be faked - why would it be? Like the difference between house adverts that say “cozy kitchen” vs “marble countertops”, didn’t Freakonomics find that specifics increase value more than generalities because people know what a marble countertop is but a cozy kitchen is filler when there’s nothing good to say.

Yeah, that's my heuristic too, but I'm worried it's going to get increasingly gamed as time goes on.

Especially since, you know, GTP-3 is a thing, and its effects are going to be felt pretty soon.

I think you've got the right idea. It's about incentives.

With fake positive reviews, the seller has an incentive to leave them up, and Amazon has no particular incentive to remove them -- you, a random user, has to somehow convince Amazon to take them down.

With fake negative reviews, the seller has an incentive to get them taken down, and has the data to prove that the reviewer didn't actually buy the item. (Actually buying all your competitor's items to leave fake negative reviews about them would dramatically increase the cost of the tactic.)

End result: ignore positive reviews because they're easily faked, check negative reviews because they're probably accurate.

Why trust the negative reviews? I'm sure it is common to try to hurt the competition by leaving fake negative reviews. If a company is willing to buy positive reviews, why would they stop at buying negative reviews?

Worse, that way you would end up avoiding the "fair players" who don't leave fake negative reviews with the competition.

Because it has worked fine in avoiding bad products so far, and while it would suck for fair players to lose my business, as long as I avoid bad products that is what matters most to me as a buyer.

Depends on the negative review. You ignore all the "it sucks" reviews. But the ones that go into detail about why it sucks are usually accurate. At least in my experience.

And in terms of trying to game out the fake reviews, I've found relying on the 2 to 3 star reviews are the best. The liars who are trying to trash the product tend towards 1 star. The liars who are trying to sell the product almost always go for 5 stars. 2 to 3 stars, sometimes 4, are usually the people who actually bought it.

> Why trust the negative reviews?

Fake reviews aren’t all that cheap, in the scheme of things. Leaving bad reviews on the competition doesn’t have anywhere near the immediate impact on your bottom line as fake good reviews on your own products. I also haven’t seen reports of people being paid for bad reviews, when confessions of people being paid to write good reviews are all over the place.

If someone can post fake negative reviews on Amazon, Amazon can certainly afford to false flag negative reviews on everyone else. So either both parties are truthful or both parties are manipulative. Plus, it takes nontrivial effort to plausibly explain how a product is defective.

In case a popular product is simply handled by Amazon or other sellers, they aren't responsible for the quality itself. Bad review of a keyboard on one site is as valid as on another.

> As an economics grad

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.

A massive portion of Amazon’s value in the early years were product reviews. To this day they are proud of pioneering this aspect of e-commerce. I remember using Amazon reviews in the 90s and 2000s even to weigh what I bought at bricks and mortar stores. It’s the same reason that sites like Yelp exist.

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.

These days, if I want an honest appraisal of a product then I prefix the search with "reddit" not "review".

Ahhhhh, economics is the study of maximizing socially acceptable sociopathy.

"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.

Honestly it didn't used to matter as much because the number of honest people leaving legit reviews outnumbered the influence of actors exploiting the system. But that was a while ago. But I swear at one point the fact that no one had skin in the game wasn't significant. People seemed to understand what they were for and used them accordingly. And the vultures hadn't discovered them yet.

You mean advertising?

Negative reviews are the only actual reviews.

> Basically, honesty is expensive and cheating is cheap. Why would we trust it?

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 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.

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.

Was gonna say, "their job depends on it" sounds ike something straight out of a Kitboga scam baiting video.

This must be some kind of common sales technique then perhaps because I recently experienced this same playbook at a car dealership with the sales manager. After pulling out technical arguments as to why they couldn't do the price we agreed upon over email anymore, they went the emotional route and bluntly told me that I was hurting the well-being and livelihood of the sales person I was dealing with by not accepting their higher offer. I came in ready to purchase, but at that point, I exited as quickly as possible. This was supposedly a reputable dealership for a major car brand.

The counter is that your hurting my family etc... but I agree best to leave.

Tangentially, my Amazon account had been compromised. The person hacking my account bought amazon vouchers (fortunately the attached debit card was empty as i always keep cards i use online empty until i actually buy stuff).

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).

I've stopped purchasing items sold by 3rd party sellers on Amazon and it becomes a much better site.

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.

Yeah I wish they'd just let me perma-select prime. Not even risking getting burned.

I didn't know they used to have that filter though. That would be super useful to make a comeback

The 3rd party market place on Amazon has become Aliexpress with higher markups. Unless I have an immediate need and I can not find the item locally, I just order it from Ali.

Unfortunately, this is not enough anymore. Amazon commingles their legit inventory with 3rd party inventory that drop ships from their warehouses. They don't differentiate between the two inventories, so you can still end up with a counterfeit product; even when "Sold and Shipped by Amazon".

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 left a bad review for a returned Taotronics space heater and I got an email from a random gmail account with the offer of $65 ($50 and $15) worth of Amazon gift cards. I contacted Amazon and reported them. The agent claimed they would do something, but obviously I have no idea if they would.

The space heater in question had a very high rating. Now I know why.

- If something benefits Amazon, it's legitimate.

- If somethings doesn't benefit Amazon, it's abuse.

Their double standards are disgusting.

I’ve reported so many of these scams and nothing comes from it. If you really want to go deep into the dark side of amazon search for 2tb usb drives.

If someone wants to check how serious this problem can get search Amazon for "laser protection googles", check the prices of cheap googles and compare to their very high ratings. There is no way those cheap pieces of plastic can protect eyes from lasers, and there are tests in youtube to probe it. Amazon is allowing a horrible health problem for their customers, some people will have severe eye issues or can get blind for life.

You have very carefully tested the hypothesis that "neither Amazon nor its sellers care about good customer service or quality products".

The question is - what are you going to do with that information?

Five star garbage sells better than two star garbage. There is absolutely zero incentive for Amazon to fix this.

I just thought of something. One way customers can battle fake reviews is by always attaching a picture of the product with the review. So when you see 5* reviews for a shower enclosure and you scroll down through the comment section and see pictures of tennis balls you know something isn't right and you likely won't buy the product since the comments appear to be for something else.

There are some FB groups where users can make money by receiving some products, write a review then send it back. then they get something in return. its not super hidden as well

Funny enough, I saw two different 5 star reviews of some boots with the same amateur type photo.

> This review was not accepted by Amazon, saying that seller feedback should be given on the seller page.

Gold.

Amazon has a team of like 50 researchers working on solving this problem.

But whose salaries depend on Amazon selling more stuff.

But if their solution results in Amazon making less money, it will never ship.

I’d like to believe that they truly see the long term financial value of building more customer trust, but I can see this being a bit of a back burner project due to short term losses

They build the customer trust by taking financial hits - if you’ve been a long time prime customer they are good at refunding the purchase when you aren’t happy. It doesn’t protect others from ordering the same bad widget but you are at least satisfied not to make it a bigger issue.

That's not how Amazon works, they take a lot of 'short term losses in exchange for trust' decisions, like warning you if a product has increased in price since you added it to the wish list, possibly triggering additional research of competitors that might have it cheaper.

> they take a lot of 'short term losses in exchange for trust' decisions

I'm sorry, but I don't believe your statement. They're not doing enough about fake reviews, and definitely aren't doing enough about poor quality products, fake products, and poor products squatting over good / brand products. Their marketplace is not curated enough, and buying a product is a gamble.

There are a few posts about that; one I remember is that someone bought a book off Amazon, but got a fake / copy / low quality reproduction instead.

Why don't they just put a "this review looks fake" button next to the helpful button?

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)

Or how about this:

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.

The one with the customers won't work because creating a new account is trivial.

Actually, I think so is creating a new company to sell stuff on Amazon. Mind you, if your company is kicked off Marketplace, it has to rebuild its reputation and inventory and stuff.

But yeah, they should definitely mark companies that pay for reviews as dodgy. I don't think they would ban them - because ANYONE selling stuff on Amazon is earning them money - but they could do more.

I don't think the problem hurts Amazon enough though. It's not like people stop using Amazon because of bad reviews. And I'm sure Amazon is undercutting the market so that any competitor with good reviews is unable to compete.

Price beats everything, when it comes down to it.

> The one with the customers won't work because creating a new account is trivial.

Creating a new credit card isn't.

Actually it is. Have you tried ENO by capitol one or Privacy or any other VCC company. Folks use em to buy 300 pairs of shoes when the limit was 1 per customer.

#2 would be better if they just blackhole the reviews. Have folks go through the effort but never show them to to anyone except the company account.

At least #2 won't happen: Banning customers means blocking people from paying you money. You don't get to be the richest man in the world by making sure people don't pay you money.

I can actually confirm, that amazon invest heavily in this. However, they struggle with growing their team and their resources as fast as their (seller) business grows.

Why actually and not just confirm? Also, investing in something internally means absolutely zero as none of those investments seems to have paid off so far, since there has been absolutely nothing deployed or done by Amazon in public to fight the review spam.

"However, they struggle with growing their team"

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) )

I've seen other people say the same thing about fraudulent products but amazon hasn't taken the most obvious step, stopping commingling products, there. This makes me believe that they aren't serious about that issue and I don't see why I should believe they're serious about this one either.

It is clearly insufficient and I do not care why Amazon failed.

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?

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