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Comment by lr1970 | Hacker News Reader

lr1970

> 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.

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> In a zero-trust marketplace it is impossible to ascertain the truthfulness of such statements.

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.

some places will only put this in like 1/4 or 1/10 of the packages, so this isn't sure-fire either.

Sure, but then that reduces the effectiveness of such techniques by 1/4 or 1/10, while still carrying the risk a secret shopper finds it.

you don't need 100% of customers to leave a positive review, that would actually be suspicious in itself!

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.

Can't Amazon but 100 boxes, open then and look for the note, and close and bring back to the store and sell again?

Or don’t buy anything not fulfilled by amazon?

Huh? I could equally as well falsely accuse your product of being low quality, and Amazon would be totally fine with that. I’m not seeing a difference.

The real reason (or the least cynical one) is that product reviews should not be used to review the seller/fulfiller/courier/etc. (because a single product may be offered through many combinations of those, and you're supposed to be reviewing the product itself).

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).

> In a zero-trust marketplace it is impossible to ascertain the truthfulness of such statements.

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.

Amazon can't read the messages that sellers send to buyers?

The message is printed on the receipt or is a separate 'coupon' included in the box.

Reviewers can upload pictures.

And a competitor could print a tag out and put it in the box, then take a photo.

Adversarial systems are just so fun to deal with…

Yeah I guess the only solution to this problem would require Amazon to act on reports like this and order products from the vendors to determine the veracity of the claims.

"When pigs fly" comes to mind.

Those vendors don't put these fliers in all their packages, they might do one every ten for example, so that solution wouldn't really work. You can't expect Amazon to buy a dozen of each product they sell just to catch one flier.

Yeah that does sound silly. What if they did random checks of the stock in their warehouse, oh wait... Comingling.

As far as I'm aware, this doesn't happen with commingled merchandise. I'm also not sure how that would work, since I might order from one seller and get a message to review another seller. I think if that happened Amazon might do more about it than they seem to in other cases.

The messages are in the shipping box, not the packaging.

I feel like you can be reasonably confident about whether someone with an established history of legitimate reviews and purchases over many years is likely to be crafting a review to discredit their competitor or leaving a legitimate review.

Actor should be also non-established someone.

My wife received a post card as separate US Mail piece a day or two after the goods were on hand. It said that a 5-star review would be rewarded with a gift card. There was no wording that specifically encouraged that kind of review, but we certainly thought it was shady.

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.

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