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Comment by esalman | Hacker News Reader

I was recently researching car dashcams. On Amazon the top brand has thousands of reviews but the most critical one accuses the seller of offering free mounts in exchange for 5* reviews. The second most prominent one is featured heavily in a deal aggregator website which I knew about from before.

I decided to do my research outside of Amazon. The most reliable brand which I chose based on independent review sites and user forums does not actually appear on first 10 pages of Amazon search results. I bought it anyways, and it is so good value for money that I have ordered another one. Safe to say I don't trust Amazon recommendations at all.

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One way to overcome this sort by "Most reviews" which normally Amazon hides (I think they do it to give chance to sell new brands/products more). You have more chance to find the product you want and more trustful if it had 10K reviews instead of 10 reviews. I wrote about how to do it. Full disclosure, I am the author of free web app tool on the article. https://medium.com/@ceyhunkazel/amazon-search-hack-eliminate...

I directly clicked through to your junglesearch.net Looks nice! But is it really free, or do you 'live' off user search data?

Thank you for the comment. It is really free , I do not sell user search data I do not even record them, I only use Yandex Metrica to see how users use the site to improve site usability. One main problem is user try to chose "Most reviews" sort option without choosing any Amazon Department (When All Departments is active most of sort options will not work so I do not show them) and I even placed a site tour to make users notice it and it worked for some some users but not all of them but it is an improvement. Actually money comes from Amazon Associates Program that's the only way to monetize the site.

Would you mind adding an option to change amazon country?

This.

In Europe each country (with an Amazon presence ofc) has its own website, each with its own stock and sellers. Buying from the US website is often a no-go, because of the shipping times and the customs fees, and also buying from other european countries is often bad as you forego free shipping and returns.

But anyway thank you for your product, it's already pretty useful for brand products. :)

Thank you for the feedback! I will gradually add other countries first two are UK and CA. What is your country?

Germany.

And thank you again :)

Site is recently reopened (2 weeks) with new domain https://www.junglesearch.net and I get feedbacks to add other countries and I really like to add them. It requires some API work to get new country's categories and checking which options are working on which department so it required some work. CA, UK are on my top list to add.

Bad news Amazon closed related associate account again.

By the way Amazon canceled the affiliate account again after commenting in this thread so probably it will be closed again. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18277073

I've noticed that sellers have been gaming this metric as well. I was recently shopping for a phone case and other phone accessories. What I found is that sellers are re-purposing SKUs from other highly rated products. I found a ~4.5+ star product with thousands of reviews but saw that most of the reviews were for a completely different item that is no longer being sold. So they'll take a highly rated product, put a different item in its place.

I heard that issue recently, merchants exploits this variant issue and Amazon does not provide a way differentiate variant comments.

I'm in the market, can you tell us the name?

I'm not OP but something similar happened to me. I ended up buying the Papago goSafe 535. Pretty decent bang for buck.

Sorry for the late reply, I went road-tripping with the new dashcam. I went with Viofo A119. I think it's pretty reliable and good value for about $90 (plus an SD card). Also ordered a CPL filter got one of the cams, it's not arrived yet.

Thank you! I ordered one.

Coincidentally, I've been looking for a dashcam. Care to share which one you selected?

Sorry about the late reply, I've replied here- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18277994

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