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Comment by Raed667 | Hacker News Reader

From the article listed (a toy drone) [1], reviews range from talking about car oil, stickers for kids, a plaque for finishing a race, honey, something about horses (?)..

What is this mess !? And how is this not Amazon's top priority?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08P14T1Z2

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I worked for a startup that sold a food product direct, with a significant part of sales on Amazon. We decided to switch our standard size from 12 packs to 8 packs to better fit our customers consumption habits.

But on Amazon that meant creating new listings for new SKUs, abandoning hundreds of positive comments/ratings on each 12 pack flavor SKU, which would crush sales for a while.

So instead we let inventory run out for each 12 pack SKU, then shipped replacement 8 pack SKUs, and renamed the SKUs from 12 packs to eight packs.

They still had some reviews praising them for having a dozen packs, which was weird but the ratings were still there.

There must be -somewhere- an acceptable delta to keep your listing while doing legitimate edits.

The line should be somewhere in-between:

1- changing the package size from 12 to 8

2- changing a german car oil listing, to a horse accessory and then a toy drone

Maybe there is and that is why the listing took the path it did. "Horses and cars are both modes of transportation, so I guess this change is ok." then "Horses and drones are both hobby activities in this day and age, so I guess this change is ok." I lean towards change in package size ok, but just about anything else is not. Otherwise you can anneal the product page to fit your needs.

A "diff" view for the product description like in version control systems, and the revievs sorted according to the time the change in product description happened, and not some commingled ratings which have nothing to do anymore with the product.

That's crazy. Can't you add two variants to the same product? Like how a single t-shirt item can have different sizes and colors? Or maybe Amazon only allows that for certain listings, or only if they're set up that way from the start?

We couldn’t. It’s been a year and Amazon wasn’t my primary responsibility so I can’t remember the details out Amazon manager laid out, but we were forced to go through this time consuming and painful process.

This reminded me of shopping for an SSD. I found Western Digital and Sandisk versions of the same drive). All the stats were the same, and they were most likely the same hardware with a different label (WD owns Sandisk). One had a higher review. What's interesting is different people will purchase each, so you're actually getting a different set of reviewers, so the ratings could be genuinely different.

Honestly if I were your customer I would probably really dislike this since I tend to put food products on subscriptions.

Also the fact you were able to do this for something (I am assuming) was relatively innocent shows someone could do this for more nefarious purposes.

> shows someone could do this for more nefarious purposes.

That's what happened with GGP, scammers get high ratings on some cheap product, then switch it with crap while keeping the high ratings.

We did have Amazon subscriptions, and it was a nightmare, esp. given how little contact Amazon allows with your customers.

Unfortunately, Fakespot isn't catching it either:

https://www.fakespot.com/product/taktoppy-drones-for-kids-uf...

And the example from the article also got an A, but looks like Amazon may have fixed it? Only 54 reviews now:

https://www.fakespot.com/product/shwd-ufo-drones-for-kids-ha...

ReviewMeta identifies it as untrustworthy, unable to give an adjusted star rating because it eliminates the only review: https://reviewmeta.com/amazon/B08P14T1Z2

Though, looks like there's only 1 review now, so I dunno what it would've done earlier.

Because they take a percent off the top as the payment processor. And even if you return an item, they're not going to return that fee. When the seller fulfills the order it's even better ,amazon has almost no cost for the entire transaction. They won't care until people start ditching them in large numbers, not the trickle the dissatisfied in these comments (myself included) represent.

I'm assuming through their (in)famous hiring process, that they have smart/competent people around. They for sure know that this kind of thing will turn people off the platform long term.

Devil advocate: Could it be that the problem is actually quite complex due to whatever reason?

Their hiring process works well for a very limited number of people, especially in core IT positions. I am working with Amazon (they are my supplier in an IT project) and I have friends who work for Amazon, core IT people are very good, project managers are a mixed bag, the "business oriented" people are hit or miss, some are good and some are plain incompetent. This is because they are probably too large and hire too many people and they cannot always be too picky (a friend is a hiring manager and he is complaining how hard is to find competent people).

That being said, the problem is not very complex to solve, but the motivation is fairly low: they get a percentage of everything is sold, at some point that income can be a lot larger than the damage a few news articles usually do.

Kodak hired smart people too and they all worked towards its demise.

If everybody's incentives are geared towards quarterly results no way in hell they're going to be the ones to fix the fraud in their area if it's actually making their division $$$.

There's almost certainly a tragedy of the commons effect going on here (where the commons is trust in Amazon).

Will it really turn people off the platform though? I’m part of the very small minority who hates Amazon right now simply because of how easy it is for shops to game the review system. But I am more than willing to bet most consumers are ever so happy to see prices on products continue to drop in exchange for any brand recognizability or quality.

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