Up to tenth of Amazon shoppers in GB 'bribed' by sellers to offer good review
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
When this happens I leave a review saying so, either on the product itself or on the seller's page.
Amazon always deletes these reviews. So, Amazon knows about the practice, and approves of it. Not much you can do at that point.
Amazon has suspended big sellers like Mpow and Aukey for this practice, so they do take action on these tactics
I understand that, so I only leave reviews on the product if it's a single seller, selling their own product. I think "this product comes with a scam offer" is a valid review of the product.
I also leave seller reviews, of the seller, on the seller's page. (Many people don't realize you can do this.) These are deleted too.
I went down a long odyssey recently of trying to get a refund for a food item that was four months expired the day it was delivered. Amazon refused. I escalated it. Amazon refused again. I tried to leave a bad review. Amazon deleted it. I reviewed the seller itself. Deleted again. Kept trying over and over again for several days, making ever so slight tweaks to conform to the policy. I came to the conclusion it was simply impossible to leave a negative piece of feedback.
If you did stop buying from them, I hope more people follow your lead!
I hope for a future where their monopoly position is litigated away so that there is a fair marketplace with other options for next day delivery for common household items. I prefer to shop in brick and mortar stores, but there's definitely a legitimate use case for next-day delivery of household supplies. I have a family member currently experiencing severe mobility issues who lives several hours away from me in a rural area, and unfortunately Amazon is the only way I can get things like household medical supplies to her door on short notice.
All those fake positive reviews also go along with the new product.
Therefore the only logical thing to do is to associate these reviews of the practice with the original product, as an indication of review quality.
If they actually wanted to manage the issue the option to report the product you received to CS would be right there as close to next to the leave a review button as possible.
Amazon doesn't give a toss about anyone or anything outside of their platform image (and subsequent bottom line).
I started looking into it because of the weasel word "up to" in the title. "Up to" doesn't mean anything. 1% is "up to" 10%. 0.0001% is "up to" 10%.
And what do you know? When I try to dive into an article with a weasel worded title to find the actual data they're referring to, it's nowhere to be found.
As of this moment, I can say that I've never received a penny for writing a review. I have a small number of Amazon affiliate links on my website, but they're all for products that I personally researched, bought at the advertised price, and now recommend. No one can credibly accuse me of conflict of interest. If I say I like a thing, it's because I genuinely like it.
Getting a few bucks from a scammer isn't worth the reputational risk to me.
More recently I succumbed to the temptation of fast shipping. Unfortunately the delivery wasn't so fast when the delivery driver decided to text me maniacally while I wasn't home instead of ringing the door buzzer for someone to let him in. So I bought elsewhere and now I had two of these shower knobs to look at. The Amazon one was indeed counterfeit. More flashing, text was a completely different typeface.
At that point I was down to buying an occasional small item when Amazon dangled a free prime membership in front of me. I've had reason to return every one of those orders I've placed in the past four years.
Lesson learned. Stop buying from Amazon.
It's the only way I can think of that actually financially discourages the practice.
This makes me think that all of these issues on amazon are a feature not a bug. Amazon allows this to happen to drive a wide offering. And of course no consumer protection agency taking proactive steps to prevent this. They do issue refunds, but after you’ve wasted time waiting for and testing the product and then returning or threatening them.
I reported it to Amazon, and they've done nothing yet but to take down my review that said the seller tried to bribe me.
I agree for average buyers it’s better than anything else. Especially for the uniformed.
I think the official reviews by professionals (very trusted) have affiliate links to AMZN but it is not hard to look up gear at B&H or Adorama.
People have asked "whatever happened to forums?" and they are alive and well at dpreview. It's a community of photographers that inspire me and help me out in a pinch. I went to a volleyball game that was a total loss for me, asked for help, and got exactly the crystalized knowledge and perspectives that I can't get from books at the library and I'm going to back with the right gear and the right tactics and turn it around.
Between the pro reviews and the contact with photographers at and beyond my level I get a clear picture of the gear and the people who are reviewing it.
On AMZN or Best Buy on the other hand I have to process reviews through this lens: you get people who leave bad reviews who just don't know what are doing or don't have the correct expectations, there was the guy who put the paper in a photo paper upside down, got an inksplosion, blamed the printer and returned. Well, I put the paper in upside down and got the same results, the difference is I knew it was my fault. There's also the strange problem that a certain fraction of certain products just aren't up to spec, circa 2008 it seemed that Sigma lenses for Canon were usually good but maybe 20% of people got a bad one.
I don't see a problem with dishonest reviews on AMZN for that kind of stuff but I find dpreview easy to parse.
Rtings.com for electronics.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?reviews/ for high-end audio products.
I never left a review, but would report the practice to Amazon. If Amazon cares, they didn't indicate it to me.
I'm not saying I trust the reviews on Amazon, but why even read them? I'm trying to think of purchases I made recently of stuff that actually mattered. I got all of my Minisforum Ryzen small-form factor PCs for my homelab cluster. Le Creuset cookware to stock my kitchen. I think I probably got the Dyson v7 Fluffy that's sitting in the corner of my room staring at me right now. My wife got our Litter Robot boxes from Amazon. When a bunch of my DeWalt power tools got stolen, I actually tried to restock from Home Depot, but they were out of a bunch of shit and Amazon wasn't. All of my Aruba Instant-On access points came from Amazon. Clearly, not everything is reputable and you should avoid certain categories of things. I know my wife was trying to get skin care products from there at some point and says it was all obvious knock offs that were watered down and she could get the same stuff but actually real from department stores and just started doing that. But best I can tell, high quality durable goods from well-known brands sold by the actual brand with pre-existing reputations are perfectly fine. Go to Gamer's Nexus or L1 Techs if you want honest word on the best PC parts. My dad was a plumber for 45 years. If I want to know what brand of tools to get, I ask him.
I suspect it largely comes down to the brands purchased, the shadier brands will be lower quality, and more likely to be underhanded, with the more respectable brands being less likely to bribe, and more likely to be 'reasonable to good' quality.
All that said, I do purchase no-name brand chinese products occasionally, but have never really had much of an issue with that other than the occasional 'didn't arrive'.
I have otherwise ignored all bribes.
If you live in a ZIP code full of congressional staffers, sitcom writers or stock market analysts you get 1 day shipping with Prime. If you’re not so lucky (say you live in the same ZIP code as the warehouse) it could be 5 days.
I just ordered the lens that I need to shoot volleyball games, a famous camera store can get it to me one day sooner than AMZN can despite being closed for a Jewish holiday. AMZN would sell me a ‘refreshed’ lens but the last one of those I bought from them failed in six months.
All the time I see something on the shelf at Target for $45 that is $65 on AMZN. The chattering classes who are bought off with 1 day shipping wax about AMZN’s logistics network (always seems to use USPS, UPS and FedEx to reach me, maybe they get a better deal because they threaten to leave…) or payments (hmmm… Visa, Mastercard, American Express, …) but it is gaslighting end-to-end.
Once a store gets one of those membership programs they quit thinking straight (how do I make money off sales?) and wind up thinking crooked (line goes up…)
The only thing harder than canceling your Prime is making an order without being signed up for a “trial” subscription which is one more reason to shop elsewhere.
Amazon was a pretty decent bookstore once, then a pretty decent "everything" store, then they just enshittified the hell out of everything. While it's good that anti-trust actions are finally being taken, it would have been even better if the practice of predatory pricing sustained by VC money (not just at Amazon) had been nipped in the bud long ago.
Such a price comparison service needs a large team manually curating categories and most of all: the product metadatas. So much manual work. Yet it all made sense, even in a country of just 10M people. (The company is called Prisjakt and is now starting to go to shit for unrelated reasons.)