When Amazon Customers Leave Negative Reviews, Some Sellers Hunt Them Down | Hacker News Reader

When Amazon Customers Leave Negative Reviews, Some Sellers Hunt Them Down

wsj.com

58 pointssharkweek23 comments

I purchased some "Rose Oil" from an Amazon seller. What I got was not rose oil at all. When I told them it wasn't he offered to send me something else, but not rose oil. I declined and asked for a refund instead. I have a strict, "you only get to screw me once" policy and this guy was flat our scamming people.

He refunded the money, but Amazon wouldn't let me post a "review" of the bogus product he was selling after that and they did nothing to stop him. I would have had to keep the crap he sent me to submit a review.

I let my "Prime" account expire and rarely purchase anything from Amazon now. That's been about 3 years now. I don't think I've spent even $100 there since.

I had this... a third-party seller started harassing me via email to submit feedback

so I did... I gave them a two star review with something along the lines of "kept pestering me to leave feedback"

then they started emailing me demanding that I remove it, which I ignored

then they started phoning the number for the delivery, which happened to be an elderly relative (as they were the order recipient)

contacted Amazon, who responded with "we'll deal with the issue and get back to you within 48 hours", which never happened

my prime subscription will now lapse (having been a prime member for more than a decade)

Once I bought medicine for pets of a big pharma brand on a SA big e-commerce platform and was delivered a fake. I reported the issue yo the platform and the manufacturer which confirmed it was a fake. That was ~5 years ago and the same scam is still prevalent on the platform.

Not sure if pet medicine is regulated by the country's food and drug administration, but you might consider reporting it to them.

It is and I'm sure they are aware of the problem but this goes way beyond it. The original product has all the certifications needed, this was a counterfeit and selling it was a crime.

I gave all the evidences to the multinational company and possibly the guy that sold me it got fucked. But still he was only a small fish on a sea of counterfeit. Government is inefficient and outstretched and I think it's just not cost-benefit for companies to go after these guys as lawyers are expensive and it's not difficult for the mafia to find people willing to sell their counterfeit products online. They might even be ignorant to the point they believe they are selling original products and not going against the law.

Counterfeit goods is a big industry on Brazil. Products like cigars are mass manufactured at Paraguay and then smuggled to Brazil. They might even be decent products sold at a quarter of the price and in some cases even original products as they avoid import taxes and the premium of the internal market.

In this case the counterfeit is easy to detect and avoid as it will never come with a box. Boxes takes a lot of space and make smuggling prohibitive. So instead of putting the salesman against a wall I can just ask him: "Does it come with the box?" and I will receive an excuse as an answer and will know that it is a counterfeit.

I'm not sure if this is still happening but years ago I started getting emails from sellers if I put a bad review, they were both to my direct email address and using amazon. One of the reviewers had a stalkery vibe and was messaging me monthly. I wasn't responding but I wanted it to stop so I finally reached out to amazon executive customer service. I have no idea why the sellers should have direct access to my email like that and could even tell it was me from a review, that's a disturbing amount of information to give a seller.

I used to have somebody reach out with an offer for a refund or replacement or something else for every single mediocre review I left. Most of my bad reviews about the product arriving damaged got deleted because it was the sellers fault, not the products fault, whatever that means, which is probably why windows 10 keys are still selling - almost 100% are fake or illegitimate in some way, but if you criticize that they might remove your review because “it was the sellers fault.” I stopped using Amazon a while back and I dunno if it’s still common

What sucks is the reviews, back when they were more legitimate, was one of the best features of Amazon. It was a huge value add before sellers started rigging the system.

amazon is responsible for the changes. amazon could fix the scam items and/or protect their reviews from being gamed. they choose eyes wide open not to do either of those things for business reasons.

I don't get why Amazon doesn't clean this up. Isn't this massively detrimental to their business in the long term? They're losing customers...

There's no competition for people to move to. This is why monopolies are bad.

Damaged in transit isn't the fault of the product, that should have been posted as a review of the seller. When someone enters a negative review it should be asking whether it's a shipping issue or a product issue.

Tip: Never post positive reviews for any product you buy on Amazon. The seller / Amazon algorithm will increase the price of the product in the future if you do. If the product is bad definitely post a negative review with the facts so that others are warned.

Does Amazon score reviews based on user "negativity"?

I don't know, and I am not advocating posting negative reviews for every product you buy. Only the ones that genuinely do deserve negative reviews. Everytime I have posted positive reviews, and wanted to purchase the same product again, I found its price jacked up. If the review system is being used against us users, then it makes sense to stop using it and supporting it.

same zomato does.. these bastards increase the food price if they see many positive ratings.. i have seen some food items price increased by 21% in 6 months

There is rampant food inflation in the US.

True. Give a restaurant positive ratings and all the listings in it will show a price hike in the future. Worse, if you rate the the individual items too, the price of the items you rated positively will be shown higher to you across Zomato. Same with searching for a restaurant or particular food item - suddenly all the prices will be jacked up in that particular restaurant or for that particular food item (this is particularly rampant in Swiggy).

I’ve bought so many products from Amazon over the last year that were damaged, incomplete, or which never showed up after “shipping” that Amazon has been seriously tarnished as a brand at this stage. What happened?

Wouldn't it be easy for Amazon to see when negative reviews are being deleted? They could factor this into their overall rating or investigate the sellers proactively if they wanted.

Sometimes people want to amend a bad review. But this is usually accomplished with an update not deletion.

non-paywall: https://archive.is/COcpb

Which is behind a CAPTCHA.

Is there a non-paywall & non-CAPTCHA solution?

It’s not behind a captcha. The owner of that website doesn’t like Cloudflare, so if they detect you’re using Cloudflare DNS or WARP, you’ll get a fake captcha that looks like Cloudflare’s. Completing it won’t give you access to the site. It’s possible they use the same technique in other scenarios as well.

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