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Comment by ColanR | Hacker News Reader

> And yet Amazon has no real interest in solving its counterfeit problem

I don't get this Amazon hate. Weren't they the ones who originally came up with the idea for putting purchaser reviews with the product, and the 5-star rating system? It seems like their solution was to 'crowdsource' the problem. Now people have learned to game the system, but I buy plenty of electronics from amazon and from ebay, and I'm careful enough that I've never ended up with a counterfeit.

Edit: I've noticed that ebay gives seller ratings, and amazon does product ratings. I guess that belies the different focus they each have. It would be cool (and probably a big improvement) if amazon put both product and seller ratings in equally prominent positions.

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purchaser reviews with the product

No. Companies have been doing this for as long as there has been advertising and mail-order catalogs. Did Amazon do it on the web first? Unlikely, but cannot be proven.

and the 5-star rating system

Also unlikely. The five-star system has been around for at least a century. In digital form, I had it on one of the first web sites I built, around the same time that Amazon.com launched, and even that was cribbed from online review systems that existed before the web.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2009-10-15/amazon-tu...

As I linked elsewhere, Bloomberg seems to think they were the "first successful online retailer to embrace consumer views".

Too many qualifiers to be meaningful.

Which qualifiers make it unsupportive of the point? Given it was already specifically talking about customer reviews, I think it's plenty meaningful.

Oh gosh, the purchaser reviews are even worse. Either they're for a different product, or as I found out when I ordered a pair of earbuds and found a small leaflet claiming to provide a free gift card for a 5 star review, paid for.

>Weren't they the ones who originally came up with the idea for putting purchaser reviews with the product, and the 5-star rating system?

Were they? I doubt it...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2009-10-15/amazon-tu...

It doesn't say if they were the first, but it looks like they were at least one of the first.

Edit: yep, Bloomberg says they were the first to do it.

Maybe first on the web, but not the first online.

I routinely get offers to buy a review from me inside the actual Amazon product itself. The system is being gamed under the nose of Amazon.

Yeah, it took me a while to track down a cheap bluetooth headset recently. When there's >50-100 reviews, usually someone mentions if the reviews are being bought.

How often are you buying stuff from Amazon that this happens? I probably buy something at least 1-3 times a month and have never gotten a counterfeit or review request. I almost want to get one just to see what it would look like to be honest.

All the time. They’re super common in electronic accessories (phone chargers, cases, etc.), for example.

Seemingly every time I purchase cables or accessories.

I can see that happening (most of my returns are cables or accessories). But how do you know whether it's a counterfeit when you buy it? Most of the time, I'm not even looking at the brand that I'm buying.

The mental overhead spent checking if the order could be counterfeit or choosing a more reliable seller is exhausting.

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