At their scale it is absolutely impossible to moderate and keep the problems away. The stacks are against them. Each seller has the incentive to try to game their own product reviews, while AMazon has to attempt to stay on top of the whole marketplace.
No matter how much they paddle that AI will take over that part of the business, well it won't for a long, long time and we're not the ones that should be training them.
Maybe the concept "too big" should be brought to the table, to at least make them pay for the bad service.
1) Amazon drastically ramps up the burden of proof of real actual reviews, and rather than erring on the side of posting it ends up false-positively identifying customer reviews. HackerNews headline next week: "Amazon is censoring real customer reviews for products! Company no longer customer obsessed!"
2) Amazon dramatically cracks down on sellers, reducing overall inventory, and sucking up some real genuine sellers in the process. CNN headline: "Amazon destroying small family business sellers - hundreds reporting going out of business as they're being driven out of the market". Hackernews headline: "Amazon inventory down x%. I no longer go to Amazon anymore to find what I need because it's not available any more".
I could keep going.
My point is I don't think it's in any consumer's interest for Amazon to decrease their inventory, or crack down on reviews. And any increase in quality or human review of the products or reviews will only raise prices, which again, people don't want.
Remember - Amazon's stock price isn't based on their profits. Their profit margins are razor thin because they actually generally do pass on most cost savings down to customers.
It's incredible how people take completely for granted that there is a website with 1) Infinite selection, 2) Low prices (yes yes no longer the lowest but still fairly low), 3) Free shipping, in many cases same day or next day or 2-day.
And on top of that there is a completely hassle-free non-questions-asked return policy.
The cost of all this is this marketplace is incredibly attractive to unscrupulous sellers who will abuse it to list counterfit goods and spam fake reviews. And no matter how hard Amazon works on these the sellers can be just one step ahead.
Government regulation can't help here, it can only kill Amazon and make it ultimately less beneficial for consumers.
Anything I can buy at Costco instead of Amazon, I do.
If Costco is selling a blender, it's probably only selling a single one. The fact that it's in Costco's inventory in the first place is the review.
But yes, agree. Now we call it “curated”, but with Costco’s return policy, there’s an actual risk to them for stocking outright garbage, which is a huge value, even if I never return things.