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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

The dumbbells being damaged during delivery reminds me of an other annoyance with amazon reviews: they won't let you distinguish between actual issues with the products and issues with the delivery/Amazon after-sale services etc...

I can't count the number of low-star reviews where it says something like "the guy tried to deliver at the wrong time" or "I bought the wrong product by mistake and Amazon wouldn't take it back" or whatever. That doesn't help me at all.

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You can't blame the users though. If I have a bad delivery experience, I'm going to leave a bad review. It's Amazon's problem that they don't let you differentiate between product issues and delivery issues.

Oh yeah, I'm definitely blaming Amazon, they should let the user categorize their complaints.

And I'm going to mark it 'unhelpful', because I don't care about your bad delivery experience. The only people who need to hear about your bad delivery experience work for Amazon customer support.

I bought Quickbooks from Amazon a couple of years ago and what actually showed up was a very clearly burned DVD with "Quickbooks" hand-written on it. Best case was I'd received a pirated version of the software. Worst case is who knows what kind of malware might have been on that DVD. Had no choice but to leave a 1 star review to warn others but that really doesn't help anyone who wants to know if Quickbooks is good software to run a small business on or not.

Between this and a few more incidents, I no longer buy anything on Amazon where getting a valid OEM brand version of an item is important to me.

The good news is that for the few years I was pretty much Amazon exclusive the rest of the internet got really good at ecommerce too so it's a much better ordering from other companies online now.

I think they're correct to dismiss this type of review. I know when I'm looking at reviews and someone writes 'the product arrived faulty - one star', this tells me nothing about the product when it's intact, which presumably most of them are.

Whoever receives a faulty example, they'll obviously get their money back, and I find this type of review misleading when trying to evaluate a working version of the product.

Damage during delivery can be part of the product. I recently bought a window A/C unit, for which about 30% of the reviews claimed damage during delivery due to poor packaging (it is delivered in the manufacturer's packaging, not repackaged).

Since it was otherwise well-reviewed and cheap, I took my chances. Sure enough it was minorly-damaged when I received it, but worked out ok.

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