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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't Amazon allow sellers to send freebies to people and still count as a verified purchaser?

For me, a good start would be:

- Only allow people to rate things that they bought with their own money, as evidenced by a credit card or bank account linked with their name on it.

- Only allow people to rate things after they have purchased multiple products, or after you've spent above a certain threshold (e.g. $100).

AFAICT, those are not currently requirements on Amazon and would go a long way (in my layman's imagination) towards fixing the problem.

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Unfortunately, I don't think those would help, and they might hurt.

Your first suggestion doesn't address paid reviews. Usually the scheme is "buy it, and we will reimburse you with a little extra on top after you leave a review."

Your second suggestion would probably bias towards fake reviewers. It's pretty rare for someone to get paid just for one review.

One of the hard things to realize is that paid reviews are written by real people. Most of them probably know they are doing something shady, but not all - some think this is a legitimate marketing interaction. Many of them also leave real reviews for stuff - including negative reviews. It's generally not actually bots writing reviews.

Sure, but it would surely reduce the scale of these fake reviews. Right now, companies can buy reviews in batches of thousands; the only actual cost is in somebody/something creating that review and some overhead.

If Amazon also required actual purchase of that item, now there's the extra cost of actually buying that item. Even more so when you're talking about things that are expensive. This would drastically lower the amount of spam that could be generated unless the company wants to throw some huge money at it.

Returned items would still potentially be an issue, but I'm guessing Amazon already has things in place to kick off users that return too many items.

Yeah, microeconomics, make it more costly and harder to Crete fake reviews.

Amazon has the brain power and resources to mitigate this problem...

Oh wow, so the paid reviewers actually “buy” the product. What a shit show.

Amazon probably doesn’t consider this much of a priority to deal with as it doesn’t hurt them just their customers.

Item 1) Currently, sellers give out coupons codes that make a $50 item into a $5 item. People buy in reviews group buy it...it counts as a purchase and Amazon marks their review as "Verified Purchase".

Item 2) Professional reviewers have purchased multiple products above certain threshold.

Easier way to stop this is to prevent reviews from people who used a coupon to buy something and the price is above some threshold (i.e. seller doesn't knock to $5 between 10PM and midnight for their reviewers to buy it).

If I can think of this solution - why can't Amazon? Simple answer is they know of this behavior and encourage it.

I have shifted my purchasing behavior to buy from Walmart, Target, Ebay when at all possible. I know Walmart isn't exactly an angel - but I'd rather have 2 devils in the marketplace than 1. I even try to buy books from Barnes And Noble...but unfortunately the fulfillment time + price is hard to beat w/ Amazon. I rarely have books above the B&N threshold for free shipping.

Ebay helped facilitate a fraud against me and are still on my black list. The whole process was horrible and costly. Up until it happened i used them regularly to buy and sell. I know its tangential but my thoughts are based on your white list. Essentially eBay and to a degree Amazon are perpetrating fraud indirectly on a massive scale.

Tried selling a MacBook on eBay. Winners gave instructions on shipping to a bust stop in Africa.

I reported it fi eBay as method of payment looked dodgy as well.

Was instructed that everything was fine and to ship it. I didn’t.

Now a week later I got another email say that it might be a scam. So they canceled it.

Fuck coupons if they enable fraud.

I tried to switch to Target, especially for standard household supplies, but they seem to be actively pushing people away.

- they killed their subscription service (last year?) - laundry detergent may or may not be taped (they at least bag it), leading to spillage - they use the same flimsy tape for all of their packages - they stopped using any sort of package space filler (I really liked when they were using long sheets of paper - makes me less worried about plastic waste, and we could give them to our son so he could color on them) - you need to use their app for curbside pickup (Home Depot does this right with the ability to do it with or without their app) - inconsistent availability of items for shipping

It's easy to meet their free shipping limit, and it's nice to have the option to pickup from a local location, but unlike some retailers, I feel Target would rather you either shop in their physical stores, or go somewhere else.

Sam's, Costco, and Walmart.com, as well as grocery.walmart.com ... Walmart is definitely firing on all cylinders these days. (Costco has literally the worst website, and they rarely have great deals on it like in the club, so... thinking about letting that one go.) For cheap Chinese stuff, going to Ebay. Also going to Ebay for things like used laptop chargers, since I figure the odds are higher that with new ones, they might be counterfeit.

Unfortunately, I still put up with Amazon for probably 40% of my purchases. It's fast and generally cheap. (Even though even Amazon Prime has gotten ridiculous)

As we learned in this breach, people are buying themselves and then getting reimbursed via PayPal.

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