It was not a 5 star product. It was a 2 star product, at best.
I tried to mention the fact they were paying for reviews in my review (to explain the other 5 stars).
Amazon rejected my review.
It's against Amazon policy to let others know that sellers are buying reviews.
In a zero-trust marketplace it is impossible to ascertain the truthfulness of such statements. Let say, you a seller on Amazon and your competitor posts a review for your product accusing you of soliciting 5-star reviews from your customers. Now you have an egg on your face. How will you prove that this accusation is false? There were actual cases when sellers were buying blatantly fake 5-star reviews for their competitors to trigger Amazon ban of those competitors. This is a war zone out there.
Spot check via secret shopping. Get a few complaints about a seller doing this, place an order to an Amazon.com employee's home address and have that employee report in whether there's a "pay for review" in the package. Easy.
Can't come from their competitor that way.
a couple hundred or a couple thousand 5-star reviews is plenty anyway. It's the old "don't be greedy and get noticed" thing.
plus, you can get an initial bump from taking another item and changing the name, or buying from one of the "free item for positive review" services. The fake reviews just need to be enough to offset the ongoing bad reviews. 1/10 boxes is fine.
There's a separate place in Amazon's UI for rating/reviewing sellers, though it's not as easy or obvious to find (at least on mobile).
I guess. I mean, my account has been around since 1997. We do a fair bit of ordering each year. And this was the only time I've reported someone bribing me.
It seems there are at least some signals there that would be useful.
Adversarial systems are just so fun to deal with…
"When pigs fly" comes to mind.
The messages are in the shipping box, not the packaging.
The post card had all sorts of Amazon logos and regalia. It has been destroyed.
Clearly this channel couldn’t be snooped by Amazon unless it provides the means for printing and sending the cards.
Amazon's "customer focus" is a misnomer, because the resellers are more important customers than the buyers are.
I used to spend about 60% of my disposable income at Amazon. That’s dwindled to maybe 1-2% over the last 5 years. I do most of my shopping at Costco or Target now. Amazon is a last resort only. Their customer experience sucks. It reminds me of what happened to eBay and Etsy. I’ll be cancelling my 10-year Prime membership at the end of this year, because I don’t use it anymore.
The entire system is designed so that those spending considerable amounts of time and money on cheating come out on top. Because few customers are going to scroll till page 15 and spent hours doing detective work to filter out the products with fake reviews (and even if they do it's become almost impossible). The most aggressive manipulators win and get all the business. Amazon must be aware of that but they don't do anything, in fact it's gotten worse in recent years.
So naturally: "After carefully reviewing your submission, your review could not be posted to the website. It appears you reviewed shipping or packaging experience."
I finally got a review through by pointing out the misrepresentation that they did not come in a tray, and not mentioning breakage. So you have to read between the lines of that review.
I bought the next set of Aliexpress, and those were fine. What a garbage rule. On the one hand, I understand people are quick to complain... but there's no nuance, and it's definitely become stacked in sellers favour - at least the unscrupulous ones.