The rules also forbid a few more shady tactics such as review “hijacking.” That’s when a merchant takes a product listing page filled with legitimate reviews and swaps in a different product that those customers never actually used. (Earlier this year, the FTC made its first enforcement action for this practice, fining a supplement maker $600,000 for doing this on Amazon.)
But how to automatically discount reviews that don't match the new product name, i.e. distinguishing from a major name change from a minor rephrase of the same product
Not sure how reliable ML is in that scenario
There were cases were Amazon's own product pages were hijacked like that in the past...
Try browsing through your oldest Amazon orders--you may very well see something you didn't buy at those links now.
If you don't, how do you fix a listing error?
This feature exists on Amazon, Etsy, eBay, etc.
Don't forget that it needs to be automated as Amazon is too big to do this manually. And whatever rules you come up with can't be gamed.by creative lawyers.
> as Amazon is too big to do this manually
Amazon allowed a guy to build a dick-rocket for a trip to space. They can hire a hundred people to review those requests. Don't worry about poor Amazon not coping.
Why not allow linking back to the V1 version and its reviews from the V2 so shoppers can judge for themselves instead of having one take the place of the other?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-di...
You also see this happen with retailers, where manufacturers work with retailers to build exclusive cheaper versions of existing products that use those products' names and packaging. You end up with situation where the Walmart version of your specific product is actually different than the ones sold everywhere else.
Amazon is allowed to be smaller if it can't figure out how to do it profitably.
This is beyond ridiculous. Any company pulling in 3.2 billion in profit can easily increase costs without increasing prices just by accepting a little less profit. Hell, they could increase costs and lower prices and still be both highly profitable and sustainable by any sane definition of those words.
You might also be interested in the proportion of the operating income they do make that comes from AWS rather than retail:
Amazon choose to make investments which skew the profit margin.
They definitely have money to improve things like reviews, however they choose to invest it in other areas.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/21/20826405/amazons-profit...
Free cash flow isn't profit, and the way you measure whether something is worth investing in is against the opportunity cost. If they expect to invest a dollar in X and get back $1.25 and you say they have a dollar so they could invest it in Y that gets them back $1.03, the only reason for them to do that is out of charity, and the act of doing it would cost them $0.22 on the dollar.
And you're still not solving the problem, you're just moving it somewhere else. You say they could spend money on this instead of investing in something else, like Amazon Basics. Now Amazon Basics doesn't make batteries, or USB cables, or what have you. There is less competition in that market, so people have to pay more for that stuff.
It can't come out of what they're paying to shareholders because they never pay anything to shareholders.
> It makes poor people have to pay more to buy stuff.
Poor people aren't using Amazon because Amazon hasn't had the best prices online in years. You can get the same stuff for much cheaper on AliExpress or Walmart's retail and 3rd party marketplaces, or one of the dozens of other marketplaces online.
Bling has this rather weird feature that allows you to search for similar (product) imaged, I don't know how often it works but iirc it displays prices under the similar (read the same) products.
I think eventually that might become a desirable standard. A platform, interested in the long game, wouldn't want to sell the same goods for 4 to 50 times the regular price. Just like brick stores use to guarantee the lowest price.
Sam Vimes' boots:
Poor people relying on a fake review are harmed by a greater proportion than are rich people who can afford to wait to send it back and get a refund.
Also, lemon market:
When the buyers can't tell if they're being ripped off, there is a death spiral of quality on the market as the price that consumers will bear has to assume the risk of lemons, but only lemons can be profitability sold at low prices.
This is a silly economic theory. Rich people buy high quality goods that cost several times more money, often thousands of dollars as opposed to tens, for signaling reasons. Those products often are more durable, but not in proportion to how much more they cost. If a $1000 pair of boots lasts five times longer than a $50 pair of boots, you're still paying $750 more in the long run, and paying it as an up front cost, and taking a higher risk because anything that damages the high cost product is a bigger loss.
That isn't to say that you can never find a product which is such garbage that it costs more even though it costs less, but there is no reason to expect that to be the common case, and a big reason to expect the contrary: Sellers will try to charge more to people who can afford it even past the point that higher prices can cost-effectively improve quality, and rich people will pay those prices because they're less price-sensitive or more willing to pay for signaling.
> Poor people relying on a fake review are harmed by a greater proportion than are rich people who can afford to wait to send it back and get a refund.
You're making a proportionality argument here, but that's irrelevant. The question isn't what rich people do. It's if the amount it would cost to prevent fake reviews is more than the cost to ordinary people of them existing.
And the effect you're referring to only applies to a narrow range of products. If you order some paper towels and end up using napkins for a couple of days while they send some different ones, it's not a big deal. Conversely, if they send you an incompatible replacement battery for your device, you're stuck using the one that only lasts 15 minutes until you can get another one even if you make $100,000/year.
> When the buyers can't tell if they're being ripped off, there is a death spiral of quality on the market as the price that consumers will bear has to assume the risk of lemons, but only lemons can be profitability sold at low prices.
The assumption here is that Amazon reviews are the only means for people to evaluate quality. There are retailers that don't even have review systems and still don't become lemon markets because people can rely on third party reviews or brand reputation. And those systems are typically better because they're not tied to a retailer with a dominant market position, which improves competition in retail and routes around the perverse incentive of the retailer to host dishonest reviews.
Sprinkle some AI to it, and it becomes manageable.
That’s their problem if they allowed themselves to grow so big they can’t manage their own store.
If they can’t handle product updates, they shouldn’t allow it.
Also, yes, they could spend some time to review the updated pictures for the listings or make it a paid feature for the sellers. They could even use AI to compare descriptions and if USB-flash drive becomes 1TB SSD drive, they could flag that.
They love money and fees. They can offer a review process to keep reviews for a new version once manually reviewed and confirmed as substantially the same product, perhaps with new images of new packaging.
Examples: A part gets obsoleted by vendor, sustaining engineering has to find a replacement. They conduct a small study to see how the new part works. The budget for conducting lengthy tests to determine if a simple change has any effect at the worst case tolerances is typically not there.
Suppliers quality changes over time. This is known as supplier quality fade. Suppliers will often underbid a part to win a contract. Then once volume ramps up they begin value engineering. Maybe they add more regrind material to an injection mold. Or they progressively begin to make the part slightly thinner on each subsequent batch. Maybe they begin to use a toxic filler material without notice.
An colleague literally had a situation in which a steel casting supplier was putting rocks in the castings.
Companies move injection mold tooling from vendor A to vendor B. The tooling might be the same but the settings are different, so the results are then different.
Without an excellent quality team that has money and time to check everything this will happen.
If you are competing in a marketplace with low margins there will never be enough money to check everything.
If you have a product which you keep calling FOO but has changed some spec in the new version (without hw change, perhaps you enabled some firmware option and now it can record 25 minutes instead of 20), it should get a new fingerprint. If it has changed a supplier for a chip, new fingerprint. And so on.
And aside from the fingerprint, you should also give all the entries that contributed to it (which when hashed in a structured function should give the same fingerprint), plus things like its production date.
Name="FOO", cpu.model="x-dragon-v5", cpu.supplier="Fukimata Japan", ..., fan.supplier="Fans-R-Us",...
Reviews then are tied to the product+fingerprint instead of just the product.
Google already does this for games and apps on their play store.
You shouldn't have to sort because companies are showing you reviews for product A, but you are looking at product B. These aren't even reviewing the same product. It is dishonest, and the consumer shouldn't be the one with the responsibility here.
Amazon feels like one of those fake garbage websites that sometimes SEO their way to the frontpage of search results. For a long time I seriously had no idea it was even a real store.
Haven't used Allegro much since I've left the country. Heard that after they got bought by someone, they made some user hostile actions like greatly increased their comissions from each sale. Good to hear that. they are still strong and opposing Amazon.
Its funny amazon has major warehouses in poland and czechia (fulfillment to germany) but they dont even have czech store. You can buy from amazon.de and have it delivered to czechia but amazon doesnt compete on the market. They try with amazon.pl but i dont think its very popular. Lots of the other companies have things like pickup at physical stores (using packeta.com) or nonstop storage boxes that are everywhere in cities. Amazon would have hard time competing there so why bother.
It might show that amazon sttopped inventing in the space. I think its more likely that companies like that will start to successfully compete with amazon in germany. Then again amazon would probably just buy them if it was too threatening.
The UX is overwhelmingly bad, shipping usually costs more than the free shipping threshold on allegro - it just has no value proposition.
> I think its more likely that companies like that will start to successfully compete with amazon in germany. Then again amazon would probably just buy them if it was too threatening.
Why do these companies even sell out to Amazon given how much higher their potential value proposition is? Without heavy antitrust monopoly bullshit, I can't imagine Amazon competing with anything that actually tries to be an usable service.
And photos, the original listing ones before the user ones.
This wouldn't help for example with different revisions of the same product, but still would do wonders against sellers recycling say reviews of a cat litterbox to sell a pair of shoes.
> But how to automatically discount reviews that don't match the new product name
That could really work but the discount should be 100% on the seller, otherwise Amazon would have no incentives.
If this is not the case it's that Amazon does not care.
Something simple like either you delete the reviews or you pay to have your changes reviewed. If it is important to you to change everything it must be worth something.
Regardless, simply version the product on change and only show reviews for the current version would do the trick.
Just because something is difficult to automate doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
Sometimes it does mean that.
The number of updates to product listings is large and the proportion of updates that are scams is low. That means you need to be thorough enough to not have false positives or your false positives will outweigh actual scams by a big margin. Which means high cost per inspection. But then you have to apply the high cost inspection to all the updates that aren't scams.
It's completely plausible that the cost of doing this could exceed the cost of the scams, i.e. doing it isn't worth it.
To prevent this you need actual criminal penalties, because going to jail is a deterrent in a way that having your account closed when you can just turn around and sign up for another one is not.
The problem is, there is no guarantee that it's worth more than it costs.
If you don't go after Amazon, the issue continues. If you don't go after the supplement seller, they rebrand and/or just start selling elsewhere and keep up their deceptive practices.