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Comment by ccleve | Hacker News Reader

All the books have approximately the same number of reviews. Is Amazon completely uninterested in dealing with fake reviews?

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More positive reviews = more sales. They are not just uninterested in dealing with fake reviews, their algorithms reward products with positive reviews regardless of their authenticity. Of course if you report it, they eventually deal with it, as long as it is required by some law.

Only if they’re taking a very short term perspective. If the customer is left feeling like they’re consistently getting scammed, they will stop shopping at Amazon and take their money elsewhere. I highly, highly doubt Amazon is letting these through the net on purpose.

It doesn't seem like they care. For the last coupe of years, their packing of books for mailing has been so bad (end result that the books one received would be severely damaged) that I've stopped buying books from Amazon altogether (I'd already stopped buying anything but books due to bad reviews and scams). Most of my friends/work colleagures have done the same.

There's a threshold they have to respect to avoid damaging their own reputation. It's exactly the same thing Google do by offering misleading results to increase traffic and engagement. Google are just a bit more elegant about it.

Amazon has a huge range of products for sale, and it is easy to get a feel for what works better there than not. At the end of the day all the reviews and UI doesn't matter as much as that it can actually ship for free and arrive in 1 or 2 days, and that returns are as easy as giving the item to a clerk at a store (no rewrapping or shipping fees needed). This is their only competitive advantage IMO.

Maybe 10 years ago that would be true. Amazon isn’t the only online store with that feature anymore, though. I got a rug from Target in 2 days. Walmart also directly competes.

The amount of profit Amazon will make from “Tom Lesley” and the like is negligible compared to the actual long term reputational damage that low quality products do to their brand.

What 1 or 2 days? Its more like 3 to 5 days now.

They seem to go out of their way to not give an avenue of reporting these issues.

They would get DoS’ed by people who don’t like certain authors.

Then they should do a better job themselves...

At Amazon's scale, chances are that for any product someone decides against because of reviews, a competing product is going to get bought instead - also on Amazon.

What would however be a big problem for Amazon is the marketplace becoming unusable and untrustworthy in the eye of users.

Not every e-commerce site agrees. I tried to review a book that I wasn't entirely happy with on bol.com recently. They told me I can only write reviews of books that I purchased there (ironically I bought it at a retailer that is part of the same holding). I ended up putting it on Amazon instead.

These days they seem largely uninterested in even stopping the sale of counterfeit high-dollar physical goods.

Seems like "Lesley" should get himself a Midjourney account to go along with thhe ChatGPT account, because his covers kinda suck.

I wonder if our clicks alone are actually somehow driving his numbers up at Amazon? I surely would hope so. It would be amazing to actually see the reviews of real people who inadvertently bought these books because they showed up as recommended in some independent search.

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