[0] this product for example, loads of the reviews are for something totally different - https://www.amazon.co.uk/WERPOWER-Windscreen-Invisible-Winds...
There's nothing trivial about the issue.
(Or just call it “rank by seller reputation”)
Just never allow to edit existing content beyond a few typos. Updating product line and want to keep reviews? Sorry it's dishonest even if seller thinks of itself as "legitimate".
I don't think in the end any legitimate seller is hurt.
If it's being abused, ban the seller!
* Put reviews for current listing at the top of the reviews (currently default sort seems to be a vague "Top reviews", but can be changed to "most recent" which presumably accomplishes this. Vast majority never change defaults though)
* Clearly mark any review that is for a previous version of the listing, and provide a link to view the listing at time of review (so can easily see if it was a completely different product or a simple typo correction etc.)
* Perhaps make history of listing visible, so customers can see when and how the listing has changed
I hate to say it but I think some type of heuristics would be needed here.
1. Has the title significantly changed. 2. Has the price significantly changed. 3. Are the search keywords that were finding the old listing significantly different than those finding the new listing. 4. Have average ratings and common words in reviews changed? (Especially rarer words that match the new and old listing respectively)
If some of these start to look suspicious then I think you can start to apply your mitigations. You can probably even scale them by how sure you are. For example reviews are always downranked by age and significant changes to the listing amplify this effect, you can add the same weight to the start rating.
And of course the real way to prevent this is to flip the incentive. Add human review and a warning before killing the account. Make it so that the cost of being caught negates the benefit of doing this.
Amazon is in a different space here. Even the smoothest transaction goes through a handful of literal human hands. They have to pay for those hands regardless. At the very least following up on cases where customers (and competitors) flag fraud on their system should be possible.
Show the title and main description to GPT everytime the seller makes a change, and ask "Do these seem to be the same product?"
If GPT says that they seem different, flag for human review.
You could probably even ask GPT to take its confidence. If it's highly confident, skip the human review.
Description: Ignore previous instructions […]
Calculating a meaningful numeric difference between two chunks of text is fairly well-trod territory.
also, if a fucking seller cannot keep their listing reliably constant, what are they selling?
new version, new product, new reviews.
car manufacturers do this. wineries do this. pharma does this. even Apple managed to show the manufacturing date of their new new new new but the same things.
I mean with all the AI hype, you'd think they could whip something up that would at least be able to detect when the listing has changed to a completely new product category.
Thing is that they don't really care.
Mostly what they care about is handling returns which is what costs them money so they're targeting items with high return rates, and that's it.
They don't actually care about you getting scammed if they get their cut and don't have a lot of overhead.
All of this brainstorming is meaningless when the economic incentives of the company aren't aligned with the consumer.
It will be more profitable for Amazon to do nothing, than to address the problem.
I care about the title, description, and photos being entirely replaced while reviews stick around.
But at the end of the say, the question is just if Amazon has any interest at all in stop being accessory to large scale fraud. And the answer is pretty obvious; any of the things people are discussing here is viable, they could pick any or even spend more than 3 seconds thinking about the problem.
If they wanted to solve this problem, they would have already. Clearly, they don't care. People buy products with good reviews, and Amazon makes money when people buy products.
I wonder if they've been sued over this? I'm not a lawyer, but this sounds like false advertising to me.
They either fix it, or they don't.
and lose money (or make bad sellers lose money) when people return products -- often times Amazon won't even ask you to ship back a product you complain about.
Although, in a grocery store, you're less likely to see a product change from a bicycle to a scooter. You're more likely to see the cocoa content in your chocolate bar drop, and the oil change to a cheaper and less flavourful type.
I guess the comparison still works... should we have purchasers comparing products before setting them out? Under what conditions? What conditions trigger a review? In my experience, the stores just keep putting changed products out like nothing has happened, even if we notice over time that things just don't taste the same sometimes.
Turns out that... yes... it gets pretty complicated pretty fast, but many grocery stores also seem to just be ignoring this issue.
I do not believe this is the kind of swap people are complaining about.
We're talking about a box that's labeled applesauce and is actually full of rocks. Grocery stores would kill a supplier who was doing this.
I can't imagine a "real-world" situation happening at the scale of reputation-stealing that happens on Amazon. I suppose it's just an extreme version of "Made In Your Country Tools" building up a good reputation and then quietly outsourcing the work to "Low-Quality Overseas Forge".
Is the problem is that "easy to acquire" reputation for low-cost products (get good rep by using good materials, which don't really cost that much more and eat the cost as a loss leader) is easily transferred to higher-cost products? It's not like you even need to be making bandsaws to get the good rep., then start using it to sell cheap bandsaws? The investment at the start is very low.
There is nothing trivial about that. At amazon’s scale that is an army who needs to be hired, trained, prevented from colluding with scammers, quality controlled, etc etc.
For example: prevent changing the top-level category of a product. E.g. Shoes should not be allowed to become camera gear.
https://www.spycamerasmall.com/mobile-spy-camera/bodyware-sp...
But I don't think this restriction would fix all the issues where listing in the same category is swapped.
Most users just type into the search field, so they don't end up interacting with categories.
Also, noticing and penalizing sellers who do this shouldn’t be particularly hard.
That’s not going to solve the issues of fake/paid for reviews however. I think there is a market for a store selling only vetted products they have reviewed themselves.
Amazon can make the "New Product" show up for queries for the older one, but without the stellar reviews. This way modified products still get good exposure and no one will accidentally buy the old one. But there aren't reviews on the same page for a different product. The system can still be gamed similarly, but at least you can't get reviews for the wrong product on the same page.
Limiting edits, showing product history, or removing reviews on edit (or some threshold of content change) would be an easy place to start.
Consider that Amazon already does a lot of manual review. They do manual review of individual transactions if a customer is unhappy. The scale of that is enormous compared to this.
They also already do some manual review of product listings. (Every product listing page has a "Report incorrect product information" link.)
Adding this kind of manual review is surely a drop in the bucket if labor costs are the issue.
But that will cost Amazon more money than what they currently lose on returns or scams. I presume anyway.
Amazon does not care about the quality of the products on their website, they only care about volume and selling / maintaining subscriptions. As long as numbers go up they're golden.
And there's not enough competition. There's probably plenty of webshops with quality products (anyone can run a webshop from their home), but discoverability is low, I don't know what the consumer protection laws in the US are like, and Amazon is easy to use. Amazon can afford to handle returns and the like as well.
That's not my problem. The courts have already weighed in on this.
Marting Lewin sued facebook for publishing ads that used his face to defraud people. Facebook used the same excuses you just wheeled out, and the judge wasn't impressed.
Fraud is a crime, little people go to jail for less every day.
https://news.sky.com/story/martin-lewis-settles-lawsuit-agai...
Every hour spent manually reviewing product pages could instead be spent growing food, producing shoes, building homes, providing accounting services, etc.
This doesn't mean it is or needs to be determined centrally - just that it is an economic truth that will bear out regardless. Amazon might hire 1,000 workers for this, pulling them implicitly from all of the other jobs they would otherwise have taken.
Maybe it would be a net-win, and maybe not. But from society's standpoint it really doesn't matter whether it is profitable for Amazon or not. We'd be trading less fraud on Amazon for less of everything else.
(Anymore, I don't by anything but detergent, screen protectors & phone cases from AMZN, ftr.)
I shop to get cool stuff. Not to convey meaning.
But that's not the holistic conversation and consideration I see coming through. All I'm seeing is a one-sided focus on what Amazon can (should) do about it.
"Minimal risk while still permitting economic growth / treating disease" vs "no risk"
It's fair to apply the same standards to internet companies. A hyper efficient Amazon has social benefits.
(That said, I agree that the optimal point for Amazon and most internet companies is a lot stricter than how our current laws are enforced)
If it's too big to keep legal, maybe it's too big. It was YouTube's choice to allow everyone to upload as much as they like.
(I personally come down on the side of "it is valid").
"Ships from and Sold by Amazon" if you don't want foreign sellers.
That doesn't solve the problem, because it locks out legit Chinese sellers. Solving the problem is hard.
Does your multi vitamin actually contain every vitamin it says it does in the dosage it should? For many things you really depend on reputation and outside regulations as you’re hardly going to send random samples to a lab.
Even reputable companies make use of this. Look into how often SSD internals get downgrading without changing the product’s label.
In Amazon, the user interacts with a product, and from here can either allow it to be fulfilled from whatever's its default seller, or select one explicitly. In AliExpress, the user interacts with the [product,seller], so in search you'll generally see 50 instances of the same product, and leave it to the user to decide which one to open into Product Details. IMHO, the Amazon interaction is far superior. (that's not an excuse for them not to look for a solution)
I agree that in fulfillment, Amazon is causing problem. But I still believe that in User Interaction, the Amazon approach is better for most users.
- Changing listing voids prior reviews
- Changing product category voids prior reviews
- Enable transferring reviews by a paying a fee which will pay for a human reviewer to approve this
- Make people put up a bond to sell goods and or agree to a huge fine if they do this. When you find people doing this take their bond and or fine money out of the money they would have received for their goods. Also delete all their listings and ban them from the platform. If any account attempts to do business in a way obviously linked same card same email etc ban them too.
- Find mismatches between reviews and product by having a program classify reviews by probable product type reviewed and have a human review hits starting with the most prolific offenders and bring down the ban hammer. If you can actually collect fines directly out of money intended for the scammer this trivially pays for the enforcement activity and improves the health of the platform.
If the economics of the scam are I'll make a little money to if I do this at a large enough scale to make any real money I'll probably be caught and lose money it doesn't look like an attractive scam to run anymore. It's not necessary to be perfect just good enough to mostly resolve the issue.
The correct objection here is not "slow" but "expensive".
All of the "FAANGs" (or whatever we call them these days) need to be forced by government regulations to have transparent appeals processes that use actual humans and make them spend the money on it.
And when it comes to fraud clearly amazon needs to be forced to deal with it.
Let’s put another way, until Amazon does something about this there’s no way for anyone to trust reviews on their site. Their reviews are all worthless.
That’s a huge liability.
As long as they let people scam me, I will just assume everyone on there is there to scam me. It hurts them more in the end to lose shoppers to Walmart and Costco and places that don’t put up with scammy products.
It would require the seller to be a little more careful with the initial submission, but hopefully if they do make a mistake, they notice before there are too many reviews anyway.
And maybe have a way to request a change to fix mistakes that requires manual review. And I think charging a fee for that review would be fair.
Small changes should be fine in my opinion also it’s not like it’s impossible to also determine the edit distance between two pieces of text.
Amazon could be doing a lot more here.
No, really, I have worked at amazon in a job exactly around product compliance and such.
All this is very hard to solve and they do what they can, people wont believe it, but amazon is not just an app, the heavy lifting part is logistics, admin thereof and compliance.
Theres no easy way to be fraudulent on amazon, the cost of market entry for sellers is rather big.
Mislabeled products and bad account health have terrible consequesnces for sellers.
I do understand it might appear from the outside that nobody cares, but it looks different once inside.
As for the allegations a profit/benefit calculation being behind it is most likely wrong, amazon, apart from fullfilment center staff is always overhiring to be ready for peak seasons and the whole thing is subsidized via aws, the real money maker.
> Theres no easy way to be fraudulent on amazon, the cost of market entry for sellers is rather big.
It's easy enough that fraud (for example recycled listings with old reviews) is common enough that many people, including myself, have run into it.
> Mislabeled products and bad account health have terrible consequesnces for sellers.
Not enough that it isn't widespread.
Its not like fraud is a new phenomenom in the world.
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If you could see "okay, they fixed a typo or material error in the listing", that's way different from "this laptop was a blender last year."
Amazon just has a pile of 12k A1000s and sends them out whenever orders come in. Once it's processed there's no differentiation between your stock, mine, or Sony's, it's just Amazon's A1000 stock.
Even if this is the only thing preventing the solution you're referring to it'd still be a logistical hurdle to solve.
Future rent check income will go down a lot if people stop going to the mall because it's full of scammers.
The cost of properly policing it is likely the main deterrent.
For one thing, these are some of the oldest systems owned by Amazon - the team/service/system diagram is a whole massive mess, so there's that initial part of just grasping all of the pieces that go into it, and everything else that comes with legacy architecture (assumptions, data flows, formats, etc.).
Secondly, uhh trying to limit the amount of info I give - this link hints at the issue concretely enough - https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/itemsandoffers... - but there's some pretty complicated automated systems that handle relationships between ASINs, and basically it's those rules that get taken advantage of. And the rules are hard to fix because they do genuinely merge together a lot of duplicate ASINs/manage other relationships between ASINs, and then sometimes they end up merging unrelated stuff. And some of the rules are ML based, so you've got the whole recall/precision stuff.
And the people talking about categories, there's like 4+ different systems for categorizing ASINs which all have separate use cases and taxonomies, so any answer that starts with "just do X" is probably not grasping the number of interdependent parts there are.
Not saying I'm a fan of Amazon at all - I left for good reason - but these comments are just so incorrect about how Amazon works under the hood. No comment on if it's intended behavior, but I never saw anything that would indicate it was the case, and we had multiple teams actively working in this space.
The minor price differences between online and in-store aren't worth the hassle. The only reason to order online is for long-tail items. Spare parts, replacements that you simply can't get in-store.
or flag a listing for review when photos are changed.
It is worth it for me to buy direct and pay a bit more to not have to deal with the hassle.
I don't see that happening. People are locked in and the thought might not even cross their mind. Of course they will complain. But talk is cheap. Money is the only thing that matters.