Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online | Hacker News Reader

Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online

bbc.com

569 points_wldu416 comments

Amazon has a problem with fake reviews and it seems they are ok with it.

I bought a replacement screen from Amazon and it wasn’t working properly. I thought I did something wrong so I contacted the seller/manufacturer and they told: oh yeah, it‘s defective, we‘ll just give you your money back. I agreed and then the person said „cool, now in order to process your request, please click these buttons on Amazon” and they sent me a screenshot showing how to leave a 5 star review. wtf.

I refused and asked them to process the refund. First they said they can’t process the refund technically without me pressing those buttons and then that their job depends on it.

I requested a refund through Amazon and tried leaving a 1-star review saying that the product was defective and the seller tried to condition me into giving them a 5 star review. This review was not accepted by Amazon, saying that seller feedback should be given on the seller page. This does make sense if you have multiple sellers selling the same product, but it was not the case here. These guys were the only ones producing and selling it and if the score of 5-star reviews is from people being coerced to leave a review, then it should be there, not on the seller page where it’s very easily buried.

In the end I also contacted Amazon support with screenshots and I had to explain the problem 3 times as the customer representative said they didn’t understand what more can they do since I already received my refund. I’m the end, they said “they forwarded the message to the proper department, have a nice day”

Amazon has a team of like 50 researchers working on solving this problem.

But whose salaries depend on Amazon selling more stuff.

But if their solution results in Amazon making less money, it will never ship.

I’d like to believe that they truly see the long term financial value of building more customer trust, but I can see this being a bit of a back burner project due to short term losses

They build the customer trust by taking financial hits - if you’ve been a long time prime customer they are good at refunding the purchase when you aren’t happy. It doesn’t protect others from ordering the same bad widget but you are at least satisfied not to make it a bigger issue.

That's not how Amazon works, they take a lot of 'short term losses in exchange for trust' decisions, like warning you if a product has increased in price since you added it to the wish list, possibly triggering additional research of competitors that might have it cheaper.

> they take a lot of 'short term losses in exchange for trust' decisions

I'm sorry, but I don't believe your statement. They're not doing enough about fake reviews, and definitely aren't doing enough about poor quality products, fake products, and poor products squatting over good / brand products. Their marketplace is not curated enough, and buying a product is a gamble.

There are a few posts about that; one I remember is that someone bought a book off Amazon, but got a fake / copy / low quality reproduction instead.

Why don't they just put a "this review looks fake" button next to the helpful button?

Wire it into a neural net, don't make it a way to snipe competitors products.

ok, ok... probably not a realistic solution.

I've left a few reviews recently and one good thing I have noticed is they seem to be adding some checks (I think they're intentional).

Like you review a product and it says "overall rating 1-5" but below it will have subcategories like maybe "true to size 1-5" "value 1-5" or similar (can't recall the real ones).

Every once in a while they throw in a curveball like "warmth 1-5" which would make sense for a sweater but is nonsense for something like a plate or ssd. I just press [X] and figure it's a check for a fake reviewer. (either that or a fake reviewer added a nonsense category)

Or how about this:

1. Add a way to report solicitations for fake reviews. Ban companies that pay for fake reviews for a year and all their reviews above 3 stars are removed. Customers who report requests for fake reviews are given a small bonus; maybe a $5 credit or something.

2. Amazon themselves pretend to be sellers and solicit fake reviews from customers. If a customer reports the request for a fake review, they're given the same bonus but told that they were part of a sting operation. If the customer gives the fake review, they're banned from Amazon for a year, and all their reviews are removed.

Obviously some details need to be worked out: need to make sure the system can't be abused, need to make sure the fake review solicitation doesn't make real sellers look bad. But if done properly, ti should make the whole fake-review solicitation completely impractical.

The one with the customers won't work because creating a new account is trivial.

Actually, I think so is creating a new company to sell stuff on Amazon. Mind you, if your company is kicked off Marketplace, it has to rebuild its reputation and inventory and stuff.

But yeah, they should definitely mark companies that pay for reviews as dodgy. I don't think they would ban them - because ANYONE selling stuff on Amazon is earning them money - but they could do more.

I don't think the problem hurts Amazon enough though. It's not like people stop using Amazon because of bad reviews. And I'm sure Amazon is undercutting the market so that any competitor with good reviews is unable to compete.

Price beats everything, when it comes down to it.

> The one with the customers won't work because creating a new account is trivial.

Creating a new credit card isn't.

Actually it is. Have you tried ENO by capitol one or Privacy or any other VCC company. Folks use em to buy 300 pairs of shoes when the limit was 1 per customer.

#2 would be better if they just blackhole the reviews. Have folks go through the effort but never show them to to anyone except the company account.

At least #2 won't happen: Banning customers means blocking people from paying you money. You don't get to be the richest man in the world by making sure people don't pay you money.

I can actually confirm, that amazon invest heavily in this. However, they struggle with growing their team and their resources as fast as their (seller) business grows.

Why actually and not just confirm? Also, investing in something internally means absolutely zero as none of those investments seems to have paid off so far, since there has been absolutely nothing deployed or done by Amazon in public to fight the review spam.

"However, they struggle with growing their team"

it means

"Amazon considers that unimportant and refuses to pay competitive wages"

Amazon had 21$ billion income in 2020, it is not a tiny company struggling for resources. ( per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) )

I've seen other people say the same thing about fraudulent products but amazon hasn't taken the most obvious step, stopping commingling products, there. This makes me believe that they aren't serious about that issue and I don't see why I should believe they're serious about this one either.

It is clearly insufficient and I do not care why Amazon failed.

Amazon had 21$ billion income ( per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) ).

50 people is nothing for them, and it is basically ignoring problem.

Also, can you provide evidence that they have any people working on the problem?

Tangentially, my Amazon account had been compromised. The person hacking my account bought amazon vouchers (fortunately the attached debit card was empty as i always keep cards i use online empty until i actually buy stuff).

Four days in a row i was told by different customer support reps that the voucher will be cancelled in a few minutes (oddly enough i couldnt cancel it myself), and none actually did it all the while amazon tried charging my card and asking to update payment details. Since then, around 2 months ago, i stopped buying on amazon all together.

Oddly enough i usually get a notification when i login from a new device, but this time i didnt even tho the voucher was bought by someone in Panama (not sure if they used a real name or not but they sure weren't logging in from my device).

> This review was not accepted by Amazon, saying that seller feedback should be given on the seller page.

Gold.

As an economics grad, I always wondered why online reviews existed at all. There's no skin in the game for anyone.

If your neighbor recommends you a crap lawnmower, he'll have to explain to you why he thought it was good. You can ask him questions and compare his motivations to yours. He'll also end up living next to a badly mowed lawn if he doesn't put some work into it.

The seller has every reason to pay people to write good reviews. He doesn't even need real people, it's the internet and you can invent people, complete with their own unique photos and profiles.

Basically, honesty is expensive and cheating is cheap. Why would we trust it?

My personal experience with Amazon is that it's the shop to go to for stuff that is ok if it is broken. If I buy a cable for £10, and there's a 10% chance it's faulty, it's not a huge problem for me. The other use case is where the guarantee comes from the brand. I'm not sure why but I tend to think if I buy an iPhone on Amazon, it will be the genuine thing from Apple, and I have history with Apple apart from Amazon reviews.

> My personal experience with Amazon is that it's the shop to go to for stuff that is ok if it is broken. If I buy a cable for £10, and there's a 10% chance it's faulty, it's not a huge problem for me.

I'm rather surprised at that, from someone who claims to be an economic grad. First of all, you must realize that that 10% isn't stable: the "Market for Lemons" effect will guarantee that if nothing is done to stop it, that 10% will become 90%.

Secondly, you're not factoring in either your time or the opportunity cost of having to buy your second cable. If you order your cable and it arrives the next day but broken, you spend at least an hour figuring out that it's broken, and then have to order another one, and then wait at least another day for it to come.

But a cable is such a simple item to find out if it's broken, it takes 5 seconds, plus I can just buy two and be 99% sure I have one that works.

Akerlöf doesn't seem to apply here, there's no hidden information that comes out later. With a car there's all sorts of dimensions to it that might annoy you.

Perhaps the idea is that all cables will go to crap eventually, but my detection cost is also fairly low on that. Additionally, and this is probably not a great dynamic, I can go to the website of a box-store, which will carry some of the same brands, presumeably vetted more than the junk shop.

Its even cheaper to just send it to known problem detectors, and outsource the work of flaw detection to the customer.

> Akerlöf doesn't seem to apply here, there's no hidden information that comes out later.

The hidden information is how much quality control has gone into the manufacturing process. Seller A and seller B are both selling a cable for $10. Seller A bought thier cables for $8 because they spent a lot of time honing their manufacturing process and weeding out bad cables; the chance of getting a bad cable from them is 0.1%. Seller B bought their cables for $2, because they just went for the absolute cheapest option they could. The chance of getting a bad cable from them is basically 75%. You as someone buying it from Amazon can't tell the difference; so sellers like B make loads more money. Unscrupulous people hear about this and many more sellers like B show up. Sellers like A get frustrated and leave.

Seller B got their hands on the rejected cables from seller A. They were in fact paid to scrap them and instead are selling them after putting a sticker over a label.

> there's no hidden information that comes out later

Sure there is: How well a cable handles being bent, and whether or not it catches fire... Cables and especially chargers are some of the products I'm most cautious about buying from sellers I'm not confident about exactly for that reason.

(not that origin is sufficient - the one charger I have had that got closest to setting the house on fire was a genuine Apple charger [many many years ago, they had a design flaw with a too-short sleeve on the cable on the early Macbook chargers; it'd bend and short and melt])

>But a cable is such a simple item to find out if it's broken, it takes 5 seconds

This is so incredible false, cable quality varies greatly:

- wires, gauge and material. Copper is expensive and some cheat using aluminum or Al plated copper. Gold plated terminals, tinned copper, etc.

- wire material and single/multi strand determines resistance and current rating, along with loses in the cable.

- insulation and sleeves can be made from different materials with a lot of properties, incl. max temperature, flame retardant and so on: pvc - cheap, rubber - expensive, nylon/polyamid - expensive, silicon - very expensive.

And that just touches the basics...

"find out if it's broken" isn't the same thing as cable properties/quality.

If the cable fails to carry a signal, or fails to do so without interference, it should be pretty easy to determine this. Failure to do this would make it "faulty".

Lets say the cable catches fire due to high resistance/poor isolation (used at 40-50C or close to oven exhaust, causing thermal runaway) - is it broken? In that regard you can use a lamp cable to connect an oven - it will totally work for 5seconds, it might burn down later, though.

SO a QA process that tests for more than 5 seconds will find that.

But a cable is such a simple item to find out if it's broken

5 seconds?!

Poor assumption. You're presuming this is "only the types of cables you buy". Many times I buy cables to do things with devices, for which I have no working cable already.

Examples:

* My device stops syncing with my cable. Is it the device, or the cable? I buy a replacement cable, just in case.

Replacement cable doesn't work. Now I think it's probably the device.

I spent time here, checking to see what's changed, maybe an update, maybe a config setting, maybe something else. Or, is the device just broken? Do I send it away for repair?

* I want a cable to use with something I've had for years. Lots and lots and lots of examples here, all sorts of devices, like serial cables to debug with routers/switches, test cables, even just an ethernet cable, if you may not have had one before.

Now you test, and you can't tell. Is the port on the device bad? The settings you are using to connect? The device firmware? A problem with the port on the computer you're using to connect to the device?

Hours and hours wasted.

Worse, you advocate buying two. Great. This means that no matter what, I'm returning that spare cable. Now it's not '5 seconds' to determine it is bad, it's 'no matter what, I'm spending 20 minutes returning something I never wanted to begin with".

Frankly, I'd rather spend $10 extra on some types/classes of $20 cable, to have it pre-tested even.

"First of all, you must realize that that 10% isn't stable: the "Market for Lemons" effect will guarantee that if nothing is done to stop it, that 10% will become 90%."

Are you sure? Is this ergodic? Does the ensemble average predict the time-series average?

Amazon has a huge counterfeit goods problem, and buying from Amazon itself as opposed to a third-party merchant on the Amazon platform is no guarantee, because of their "commingled stickerless inventory" program.

Apple accessories in particular are heavily counterfeited, I'd bought some USB-Ethernet adapters for a meeting room with too much WiFi interference. They seemed to work fine then I got a new Mac and it refused to recognize the adapters, and they appeared with weird Chinese characters in System Profiler. On careful inspection, they turned out to be fakes, but highly convincing ones. Amazon refunded me, but the distinct impression I got was they don't care as long as they get the money from a sale, and refunds for the few customers who do complain are just a cost of doing business.

https://blog.majid.info/amazon-counterfeits/

I'll buy an iPhone off Ebay before I'll go to Amazon for one, at this point - in fact I've done both. The ones I've gotten from Ebay were represented as new in box, and were in fact new in box. The one I got from Amazon was represented as refurbished, and wasn't - it showed up with a badly degraded battery and a chipped display, both of which I had to replace on my own dime. From the way it looked and was packaged when I got it, I feel lucky not to have found it stolen.

Outside the realm of phones, I've also been burned on camera equipment. I ordered a Nikon 200-500mm telephoto lens a few years back, which was represented as sold by Nikon. It proved not to be - by its serial number, it was actually a gray-market item intended for the Chinese market. That wouldn't happen with a sale direct from the manufacturer, and it also totally invalidates the otherwise very good manufacturer's warranty. It's a great copy of the lens and of new enough manufacture to have got past the teething problems, so I kept it. But that was the last time I bought something that pricey on Amazon, too.

Nikon's policies are what they are, and have been that way for longer than I've been alive. They're not what I have a problem with here. Amazon is, and at this point I'd only even consider doing business with them on similar terms to what you describe - small-ticket stuff that I don't really care if it's not what the seller claims it is.

But then, on the other hand, that leaves Amazon with no point for me at all. In the months since I placed my last order there, I've found small business e-commerce to be alive and thriving, and you know what? It turns out that when you place an order with Spice Place or Betty Mills or B&H or Adorama or whoever, yeah it takes a little longer to show up, but also what's in the box will reliably be what you bought! Wild, right? Even books, now, I get from Indiebound, or Ebay for obscure out-of-print stuff that's hard to find from regular booksellers. And for the basic staples of living, there are plain old regular stores. You can just walk into buildings and buy food and tools and things! You don't have to wait for anyone.

At this point, I'm about two-thirds seriously convinced that the whole Prime experience with next-day delivery is as harmful to the customer as it is to the drivers and to the neighborhoods increasingly choked with navy-blue panel vans. I know it exerted an unhealthy hold over my thinking for a lot longer than I'd have preferred in retrospect. It remains wild to me that Amazon found a way to make small-business ecommerce and brick-and-mortar retail look more appealing than itself, but they've certainly done a solid job of it, and I hope they keep it up.

Off topic, but I’ve found Swappa to be the best place to buy used phones. They’ve got great customer service and guarantees.

>... honesty is expensive and cheating is cheap. Why would we trust it?

Most people are well meaning and as long as the site isn't flooded with fakes it can work ok.

Are they really though? I know a lot of some people, who would consider themselves "well meaning" (fair, honest, just, whatever) and they totally do this all the time.

When you combine the actually bad people with those people, isn't 30-40% of the population constantly fucking with the system?

See also: Democracy. App store reviews. The soundscape. Climate change. Etc.

I think it only becomes a problem when the system gets big enough. If there's 20 different online storefronts, it's a lot more time and effort to game the reviews on all of them, than if there's only Amazon.

I'd guess about 99% are basically ok with reviews. The trouble is if only 5% of those bother reviewing and 1% of the bad ones post a bunch of fakes.

Incidentally I use argos.co.uk a bit and have found the reviews there always ok so far. Maybe Argos polices it or that crowd doesn't bother faking? It's different from Amazon in that there are no independent sellers so the only people motivated to fake would be the manufacturers.

As you say, that breaks down the second anyone decides to use fakes.

That there is no skin in the game for anyone is not a fault of online reviews per se in my opinion.

Brands were invented to enable a trust relationship between manufacturer and consumer. Brands are an anchor of trust. There is no such anchor for sellers.

As you wrote, your neighbor won't recommend you a bad lawnmower because they have an interest in a continued good relationship. If your neighbor is secretly exchanged for a almost, but not quite identical one, willy-nilly and all the time you would not be able to build a trusting relationship in real life too.

But that is exactly what happens on Amazon. What good are seller reviews if sellers change and disappear all the time. What good are they if I can't click "Buy again" and then rely on buying not only the same product but also from the same seller I already trust?

I wish seller brands were as prominent as manufacturer brands but I can understand why neither Amazon nor traditional brand have an interest in such a system.

I would suggest that in lieu of individual seller brands on Amazon we do have one seller brand: Amazon

We all know that Amazon has counterfeit goods and only cares the minimum.

We all know that Amazon has fake reviews and only cares the minimum.

We all know that Amazon "marketplace" is over-priced imports from AliExpress (if we're lucky!) or perhaps is refurbished goods, fake goods, or just scams.

The brand that sucks is Amazon. The seller that is ripping us off is Amazon.

This can't go on forever. They really are killing their brand. 10 years ago, Amazon had the reputation of a king. They were revolutionizing delivery and could do no wrong.

Today... you ask a group of people their opinion on Amazon and we're already up to half negative on average, at least where I am.

They are literally killing their own brand by doing this.

> I tend to think if I buy an iPhone on Amazon, it will be the genuine thing from Apple

Maybe, but in the UK I'd choose ten other suppliers before giving a penny of profit to a company like Amazon.

Tesco, Argos, the Apple store, Currys, any phone network, Carphone Warehouse, John Lewis...

Several of these have next-day delivery, same-day collection, or even the old fashioned walk-into-shop-and-pay thing.

Does doing that "walk into shop and pay" thing mean you also have to do that old "talk face to face with another human being" thing? Good lord, what would you have us do next? Go to market to buy some fresh meat & veg and prepare an actual home cooked meal?? /s

Not at Argos, the original catalogue shop.

They used to have large paper catalogues to browse (or take home), but now I think it's computers.

You can order and pay using a terminal in the shop, from a phone app, or by asking the assistant. You get a paper receipt with a big number (presumably something similar on the app, which I haven't used) and wait at the back.

After 2-3 minutes, your order number appears on a screen at the back of the shop. You show the receipt to collect it.

The image in the article shows most of it. Behind the photographer is usually a display of a few things: toys, bicycles, watches etc.

https://internetretailing.net/mobile-theme/mobile-theme/argo...

There are other motivations than self-interest. People may altruistically care about other consumers' welfare. They may be reciprocal, taking revenge for a bad product by writing a bad review, and rewarding a good one. Or they may just like to express their opinions!

>skin in the game

I do write/have written reviews, incl. tear down pictures for some products as I'd be happy if I find similar approach/reviews.

Normally I read only 3 and 4 star reviews, or the ones that have disassembly pictures and seem to have been written by coherent people. It's a slow process, unfortunately but it does help with selection.

EU (and the UK) have 2y of mandatory warranty and 2weeks free returns, so the fake reviews are not so prominent.

I leave reviews for two reasons: To reward a seller when I really like something, and to punish a seller when I really hate something. Rarely in between.

Well written reviews are a common good, and there is good reason to believe that leaving reviews encourages others to do the same, and that helps me, so I do it.

Yes, I know there'll be fake reviews, but most of the time they are pretty easy to spot.

Not least because the reviews that swing things for me -- both towards buying and away from it -- are the negative reviews.

Most of the obvious fake ones are good reviews, but I'm usually more concerned about what the worst thing someone has to say about a product. If someone posts about a printer that it doesn't work with Linux, I won't buy it (at least not without double-checking and verifying that said reviewers info is outdated) no matter how many positive reviews there are. Meanwhile, if I can't find any negative reviews complaining about things I care about it will often convince me to buy.

That is a lot harder to game than getting a bunch of people to write that they love the product.

You make good points, but on Amazon I just have to assume that all the reviews are fake. I've seen how easy it is to buy fake reviews, the lengths sellers go to get people to leave only 5-star reviews, and Amazon's inability or unwillingness to do anything about it.

Why do you think any of the reviews on Amazon are real? I think any random review you pull up is more likely than not to be fake. Of course, we can't know for sure, but Amazon has simply lost my trust.

I no longer believe any of the reviews on Amazon are real, and Amazon will have to prove to me they are before I ever trust a review on that site.

I think many of the reviews on Amazon are real because a lot of them are negative reviews warning people not to buy the product, and those are generally the ones I look at.

That's harder to game, because while a seller certainly could post a negative review citing some irrelevant flaw (and I have seen that), and hope that triggers buyers who don't care, they won't stop other people (like me) from posting negative reviews too, and what I'm looking for is products with a reasonable number of negative reviews where there is an absence of reviews mentioning things I care about.

I also know first hand from selling a novel on Amazon that you can perfectly well gain honest reviews in ways allowed by Amazon, and I also leave a reasonable number of reviews on Amazon myself, so I have every reason to expect at least a portion of the reviews to be honest.

Overall I've managed to avoid buying anything that appears to have been fake from Amazon, despite having bought a couple of thousand products at Amazon over the years (based on the order page stats, and taking off a few hundred as an estimate of digital only products)

Sellers also leave negative reviews for products from competing sellers.

This is irrelevant to me unless they 1) do so while describing specific flaws that I'll actually care about, and 2) every honest seller is affected by it.

It probably sucks to be an honest seller affected by it, but I've yet to find a situation where I have unable to find a product I'm happy with, so clearly they're not doing this often enough to affect me much.

I've seen 1 star "reviews" on products that directly reference a specific competing product or seller that the "reviewer" recommends instead. You'd think with all of Amazon's computing power they could detect obvious scams like that.

> “Why do you think any of the reviews on Amazon are real?”

Because they contain facts which anchor them to reality and act as “proof of work” in some way.

I don’t care for a review which says “this camera takes amazing pictures” that could apply to any camera and is subjective, but one which says “the cover on the sd card slot is sharp and cut my finger twice” is likely someone who has used that specific camera, and has a specific comment, and while it could be faked - why would it be? Like the difference between house adverts that say “cozy kitchen” vs “marble countertops”, didn’t Freakonomics find that specifics increase value more than generalities because people know what a marble countertop is but a cozy kitchen is filler when there’s nothing good to say.

Yeah, that's my heuristic too, but I'm worried it's going to get increasingly gamed as time goes on.

Especially since, you know, GTP-3 is a thing, and its effects are going to be felt pretty soon.

I think you've got the right idea. It's about incentives.

With fake positive reviews, the seller has an incentive to leave them up, and Amazon has no particular incentive to remove them -- you, a random user, has to somehow convince Amazon to take them down.

With fake negative reviews, the seller has an incentive to get them taken down, and has the data to prove that the reviewer didn't actually buy the item. (Actually buying all your competitor's items to leave fake negative reviews about them would dramatically increase the cost of the tactic.)

End result: ignore positive reviews because they're easily faked, check negative reviews because they're probably accurate.

Why trust the negative reviews? I'm sure it is common to try to hurt the competition by leaving fake negative reviews. If a company is willing to buy positive reviews, why would they stop at buying negative reviews?

Worse, that way you would end up avoiding the "fair players" who don't leave fake negative reviews with the competition.

Because it has worked fine in avoiding bad products so far, and while it would suck for fair players to lose my business, as long as I avoid bad products that is what matters most to me as a buyer.

Depends on the negative review. You ignore all the "it sucks" reviews. But the ones that go into detail about why it sucks are usually accurate. At least in my experience.

And in terms of trying to game out the fake reviews, I've found relying on the 2 to 3 star reviews are the best. The liars who are trying to trash the product tend towards 1 star. The liars who are trying to sell the product almost always go for 5 stars. 2 to 3 stars, sometimes 4, are usually the people who actually bought it.

> Why trust the negative reviews?

Fake reviews aren’t all that cheap, in the scheme of things. Leaving bad reviews on the competition doesn’t have anywhere near the immediate impact on your bottom line as fake good reviews on your own products. I also haven’t seen reports of people being paid for bad reviews, when confessions of people being paid to write good reviews are all over the place.

If someone can post fake negative reviews on Amazon, Amazon can certainly afford to false flag negative reviews on everyone else. So either both parties are truthful or both parties are manipulative. Plus, it takes nontrivial effort to plausibly explain how a product is defective.

In case a popular product is simply handled by Amazon or other sellers, they aren't responsible for the quality itself. Bad review of a keyboard on one site is as valid as on another.

> As an economics grad

This perhaps explains the rest of your comment :-) Often in economic theory it's assumed that people are totally rational, and often rationality is assumed to include sociopathic levels of self interest. Daniel Kahneman, the author of Thinking Fast and Slow, uses the word "econ" to describe the mythical creature that statisfies these properties. He makes the point that most people are not econs to some lesser or greater extent (either because they don't fully act in their own self interest or otherwise don't act fully "rationally" in the economic theory sense).

I often leave online reviews because I feel it's the right thing to do, even if I personally don't benefit from them. In part, I feel like they're payment for reviews others have left which I've used, even though an econ wouldn't bother because those other reviews would exist regardless of my "payment".

I do get your point towards the end of your comment that it's easy enough to come up with fake reviews, either by paying some econ-ish people or just using a machine. I'm talking more about the earlier point about recommendation from your neighbour only being reliable because of the consequences of a poor review.

A massive portion of Amazon’s value in the early years were product reviews. To this day they are proud of pioneering this aspect of e-commerce. I remember using Amazon reviews in the 90s and 2000s even to weigh what I bought at bricks and mortar stores. It’s the same reason that sites like Yelp exist.

Perhaps most of the reason they were honest early on was Amazon’s product selection early on was only books and media, and secondly there was a community where you could look at other people’s review history to determine if they were a shill and report it. That “community helpfulness” was common in early online communities. I’d say the majority of reviews were real through the mid-aughts.

It was only after the Amazon marketplace became indistinguishable from the main site that the scale of sellers flipped the incentive structure towards cheating.

These days, if I want an honest appraisal of a product then I prefix the search with "reddit" not "review".

Ahhhhh, economics is the study of maximizing socially acceptable sociopathy.

"It is economically infeasible for people to be helpful!" - the last human on earth, probably.

You'll do well. Keep the blinders on, read your Ayn Rand, don't think about things too much. Greed is good.

Honestly it didn't used to matter as much because the number of honest people leaving legit reviews outnumbered the influence of actors exploiting the system. But that was a while ago. But I swear at one point the fact that no one had skin in the game wasn't significant. People seemed to understand what they were for and used them accordingly. And the vultures hadn't discovered them yet.

You mean advertising?

Negative reviews are the only actual reviews.

> Basically, honesty is expensive and cheating is cheap. Why would we trust it?

We shouldn't. And indeed, if you look at a random legitimate review of something it's unlikely to be particularly helpful. More users does not make the data better beyond maybe "was it dead on arrival?".

Platforms should empower users to build rings of trust with users they do trust, while keeping it as private as they're comfortable being. People will build social capital because it's useful, it's fun and for the top 0.01% of users is something that can be a job.

I just thought of something. One way customers can battle fake reviews is by always attaching a picture of the product with the review. So when you see 5* reviews for a shower enclosure and you scroll down through the comment section and see pictures of tennis balls you know something isn't right and you likely won't buy the product since the comments appear to be for something else.

There are some FB groups where users can make money by receiving some products, write a review then send it back. then they get something in return. its not super hidden as well

Funny enough, I saw two different 5 star reviews of some boots with the same amateur type photo.

I've stopped purchasing items sold by 3rd party sellers on Amazon and it becomes a much better site.

Unfortunately it seems you can no longer filter search results by "Sold and Shipped by Amazon", you have to filter by "Available from Amazon Prime/free shipping" and then filter manually which is a pain.

Yeah I wish they'd just let me perma-select prime. Not even risking getting burned.

I didn't know they used to have that filter though. That would be super useful to make a comeback

The 3rd party market place on Amazon has become Aliexpress with higher markups. Unless I have an immediate need and I can not find the item locally, I just order it from Ali.

Unfortunately, this is not enough anymore. Amazon commingles their legit inventory with 3rd party inventory that drop ships from their warehouses. They don't differentiate between the two inventories, so you can still end up with a counterfeit product; even when "Sold and Shipped by Amazon".

I've actually had better luck with 3rd Party sellers that ship on their own (not from an Amazon Warehouse). If they send you a counterfeit, their store reputation is going to take a hit. Though at this point, eBay might be a better option.

Lately, I've started buying direct from the manufacturer when possible, or shipped from B&M store. Their prices are the same, or better.

> I refused and asked them to process the refund. First they said they can’t process the refund technically without me pressing those buttons and then that their job depends on it.

People who are familiar with phone scam baiting will recognize this as a standard scam tactics. First go for the technical play and then emotional one. They can't scream on text so they don't jump to the angry one.

Was gonna say, "their job depends on it" sounds ike something straight out of a Kitboga scam baiting video.

This must be some kind of common sales technique then perhaps because I recently experienced this same playbook at a car dealership with the sales manager. After pulling out technical arguments as to why they couldn't do the price we agreed upon over email anymore, they went the emotional route and bluntly told me that I was hurting the well-being and livelihood of the sales person I was dealing with by not accepting their higher offer. I came in ready to purchase, but at that point, I exited as quickly as possible. This was supposedly a reputable dealership for a major car brand.

The counter is that your hurting my family etc... but I agree best to leave.

You have very carefully tested the hypothesis that "neither Amazon nor its sellers care about good customer service or quality products".

The question is - what are you going to do with that information?

Five star garbage sells better than two star garbage. There is absolutely zero incentive for Amazon to fix this.

I left a bad review for a returned Taotronics space heater and I got an email from a random gmail account with the offer of $65 ($50 and $15) worth of Amazon gift cards. I contacted Amazon and reported them. The agent claimed they would do something, but obviously I have no idea if they would.

The space heater in question had a very high rating. Now I know why.

I’ve reported so many of these scams and nothing comes from it. If you really want to go deep into the dark side of amazon search for 2tb usb drives.

If someone wants to check how serious this problem can get search Amazon for "laser protection googles", check the prices of cheap googles and compare to their very high ratings. There is no way those cheap pieces of plastic can protect eyes from lasers, and there are tests in youtube to probe it. Amazon is allowing a horrible health problem for their customers, some people will have severe eye issues or can get blind for life.

- If something benefits Amazon, it's legitimate.

- If somethings doesn't benefit Amazon, it's abuse.

Their double standards are disgusting.

Amazon loves fake reviews as long as they are 5 star. The more it looks like people buying stuff using amazon are happy, the better that marketing is for Amazon. Look at all these people who are so happy to be buying stuff on Amazon, so much better than the alternatives.

Amazon could clean this up and then watch the average drop. From the removal of the fake fives but also it makes it look more "socially accpetable" to leave 4 and 3 star reviews. So it costs Amazon to do the right thing by the people parting with money for stuff so they don't.

Amazon are well aware of /their/ incentives and when their incentives align with what looks to me a lot like fraud they'll play the plausibly deny game.

Or perhaps I'm wrong they don't know and there's nothing they can do. Amazon employees will probably confirm that.

Disruptive solution proposal: Get rid of the review system entirely. Stars, comments, user pictures; eliminate all of it. For everyone.

There. Problem solved.

That would be very stupid

I thought this place liked disruption.

Disruption often means to offer an alternative, better solution to a poorly solved problem. You seem to be suggesting we don't try and solve the product validation problem at all!

Replace reviews with raw data - total number of purchases (at this price and version), return rate, etc.

How does that tell you if the product is any good though? Popularity doesn't automatically imply quality.

It doesn’t - but if 80% of purchases end in returns you’d know to stay away.

A reputable distributor would stop carrying it.

And how exactly does that solve the problem?

Because the truth is that the reviews are probably almost all fake. Who the f**k IRL takes the time to log back in and leave a product review when the product arrives? I've never done it, and I used to buy from Amazon quite a lot.

Unfortunately some people are dumb enough to give Amazon free business. I used to be that naive myself.

> Who ... takes the time to log back in and leave a product review when the product arrives?

Nice people who want to help others out, and angry people who want their money back.

I do it. It’s easy because the site prompts me to do it. And I’m happy to help future buyers.

This is somewhat true. I review only when am highly impressed or thoroughly disgusted with a product. So-so products where I got more or less what I hoped for, and which is not too highly differentiated from alternatives, I don't bother with reviewing them.

This was what most people did when they bought things online even 15 years ago. I used to leave reviews for almost everything in the 90s and early 2000s. Amazon was a community. At some point of scale that changed.

I don't think reviews are bad, but I think 5 stars is.

Should just be thumbs up, thumbs down. Maybe a "meh" in between.

Alternatively, ask for ratings as 5 star, treat 4 as a meh, and anything 3 or below as a thumbs down.

There are lots of weird things that happen in reviews (from real people). I've often come across three-star reviews which say:

"Product was awesome, but shipping took three days, not one".

There are other reviews I've found useful, for example ones that point out minor flaws. That ability would be lost if you had a simple "good/bad" reaction only.

No please don’t Netflix the Amazon reviews. There is a huge advantage in granularity. Everything in life isn’t so binary, where you either loved or hated it. There is so much gray area in between that makes ratings useful. Netflix neutered their whole rating system when they introduced the thumbs up and down system.

I don't find it useful granularity. It just adds noise.

Product has <huge major flaw>. 4 stars.

Product was a slightly different shade than the picture. 1 star

Stars are also not very granular, vs stuff related to the product itself.

Google's "does this place offer wifi?" type questions seem better than reviews

This is half of an idea... people still want/need guidance on purchases.

High quality, curated, independent reviews is probably something that most people would enjoy and appreciate.

That said, the current system is fairly worthless, and what little worth it has is based on hacking it by looking at a specific subset of reviews.

> people still want/need guidance on purchases

It’s funny because Amazon normalized folks needing reviews on things before buying it.

In a way, before Amazon you effectively did have 'quality, curated reviews' - in the form of what products brick and mortar stores chose to stock. Most decent stores aren't going to stock complete garbage, so if you found an item with the attributes you're looking for, it would probably work.

That is a deep and wise point :-)

There was also ebay feedback which was key to shopping for a lot longer I'd say.

This comment isn't entirely without merit. If Amazon could guarantee the genuineness of every product and description, and delivery times, is there any need for star ratings? Reviews are better because it's easier to differentiate between fake and real reviews for now ( as fake reviews usually contain grammatically incorrect sentences, multiple copies with different names etc )

That's what we have done at the marketplace I'm running in the UK. There are no seller ratings and users are encouraged to share feedback.

Good idea. Just list percent returns instead.

I don't know about elsewhere, but Amazon India has been slowly phasing out returns for replacements. It used to be fairly easy to get a return on Amazon, but now almost every product I've bought in the past year or so (and that's a lot of stuff in a variety of categories, thanks to the pandemic) has been replacement-only. If someone gets a fake product, I doubt they'll look for a "replacement", so I'm not sure switching to a return% will be good enough either.

This is, of course, in addition to other issues with removing reviews, such as lacking nuance on why something was returned, etc. I've seen some stellar reviews on Amazon that went out of their way to list the minutiae of a product and the experience of using it, and that's helped me out a lot in the past.

I would presume that most people that buy reviews for their own products would ask for them to be 5 stars.

I wonder if anyone is deliberately paying for bad reviews of their competitors' products?

Or perhaps disgruntled customers [possibly who purchased an artificially inflated 5 star item only to find it garbage].

To me, that's actually the correct use of the system. I was thinking more in terms of people deliberately gaming the review system.

I'm sure some do, happens in the restaurants and hotel ratings systems, too (yelp, Google, trip advisor).

It would be interesting to know how often this happens compared to buying the 5 star reviews. My guess would be that the fake negative reviews for competitors are less than 10% of the total fake reviews.

My mother-in-law no longer buys anything of significance from Amazon after being burned with counterfeit materials.

I carefully check reviews, use fakespot, etc.

There is a point where the eroding of trust will be significant enough to affect the bottom line. Eventually most people know to not trust Amazon reviews, soon it will be.

How are so many people buying counterfeit stuff on Amazon? What are they buying? Why would someone copy it? Are they just looking at price?

Certain things it's impossible to avoid - I'm trying to buy 18650 batteries for a flashlight and it's overwhelming trying to find legit sellers. There are some classes of products where it's really hard to tell what's real (reviews not matching product description, obviously fake 5-star and 1-star reviews etc.)

This is where independent resellers via Shopify, their own cart system, etc. have a chance. There's no way to be sure you're getting a real battery from Amazon so I always buy this type of thing from a community-trusted independent vendor that has a real account with authorized suppliers.

It might cost more in shipping and delivery time, but it's strongly preferable to having my desk catch fire due to missing or defective safety components, which are very common among knockoffs. At least there's someone to sue if that happens with an authentic battery.

Shopify is a clusterfu*k of scripted random generated pop-up stores that have no intention of delivering what they promise, most shopify stores are worse than wish.com in my experience

You still have the brand problem with shopify - anyone can spin up a shopify store selling low quality products.

If you can run a shopify site as part of a known brand that helps of course.

Yup, I've completely abandoned Amazon for ANY kind of battery, and other categories of products (and I've been buying from Amazon for two decades).

I last (foolishly) tried again a few weeks ago for some SR44 cells. Should be easy, right? Nope, after digging into scores of bogus products and reviews, Fakespot, etc., it was just obvious that there are zero trustworthy products in that category. I found another battery specialist supplier, even tho they had a bit longer lead time and no free shipping.

(and don't even get me started on Amazon's lame search and sorting functions)

I think for generic sizes Amazon basics are fine. Costco is also good for routine sizes. It's the more exotic/industrial sizes that get tricky.

It's hard to attribute the lame search and sorting to incompetence at this point, it's starting to seem more like active malice.

Totally agree about the searching. I've considered seeing if Amazon has anything resembling an API, or if using some kind of screen-scraping was possible to create an overlay app that would do actually usable searching, but figure they'd just shut it down legally or technically, since good searching is obviously not what they want. It is so obvious that they don't want good searching that the structure their databases in such a way as to ensure that the result is what I call Data-Mush. E.g., the size and weight of the item needs to be two separate sets of fields, clearly identified for the dims/weight of the item itself, and the dims/weight of the packaged item. Yet there is zero consistency or clarity on even that most basic data. Yuk

On the batteries, even the common 18650 is a hopeless cause, at least if we want to get a battery that is what it claims.

A long time ago, it was useful to sort by average review, but now, I need to look at summing the percentage of 1+2-star reviews, and eliminating the high scores, then among the least-bad, check those for bad reviews (e.g., shipping failure, not the vendor's fault, etc.).

It has become a massive chore to use Amazon and hope to get something that is not crap, so evidently, the management there is optimizing for quantities of crap over quality.

Have you tried 18650batterystore.com? I had very nice experience with them.

Not sure how much this will help for batteries but I've found it helpful for other products, go to the manufacturer's site and try to find a list of authorized distributors. Most of the time you'll find that an authorized distributor also has an amazon store front. Not sure if it still avoids the stock co-mingling problem though if it is stocked through an amazon warehouse.

A lot of the time it's stupid things like advertising a product is glass or crystal when it's actually clear plastic. I got burned by that once. I've also seen manufacturers get burned when they put their branded merchandise up on Amazon only to have a clone/ copy sell under the same SKU. The manufacturer ends up fielding the returns, getting the 1 star reviews, and has little ability to prevent the copycat products.

It's not always "Nike" or some big brand, often it's smaller brands who have built up a reputation but don't have the legal team to fight with Amazon and protect their product from pirates.

It’s anything. Even minor brands.

My brother was gifted some magnets (strong like bull).

He wanted more, so Amazon had them. They’re not that expensive, but they fell apart. My brother contact the business owner and sent some pictures.

They were counterfeit..

They small business owner sent my brother new ones though, which was nice of him.

Order directly when you can.

Here’s an example from real life just last week. Clorox ToiletWand Refill. Go look on Amazon, I’ll wait here. You’ll find many different sellers, some obviously “third party”, and some that look original but when you delve into the reviews you find stuff like this: https://imgur.com/9vyE8kq

I didn’t want to buy a toilet cleaner that would fall apart and make me fish it out of the toilet, so we went and got them from Target instead.

Amazon needs to separate out the ebay-style new/used peer-to-peer marketplace from the more trusted "Sold by Amazon" stuff.

Both marketplace types are useful (especially for books), but consumer goods need some kind of notice when you're buying from anyone other than Amazon.

And the item with counterfeits is the first hit from google ...

I don't understand why counterfeiting isn't just an immediate ban for the vendor. Isn't this a huge liability risk? Or do the get some protection because they're just the "marketplace", like a common carrier?

Amazon comingles inventory. I doubt Amazon knows which vendor supplied the product that was reported as a counterfeit. Even if they did what would stop someone from opening BarCo after Amazon closes FooCo's account?

There is even a counterfeit book problem on Amazon

A big one. I used to spend a lot of money on textbook-grade books from Amazon, but I've mostly stopped now. There's a veritable deluge of people reporting getting copies that are obviously Xeroxed, or photo scanned and printed on cheap paper. It's just not worth the risk.

I'm not surprised! The price of text-books is such that even getting one or two sales out of an account could make a counterfieter decent money

Even the ones that Amazon sells themselves (not "fulfilled by Amazon"): https://twitter.com/nostarch/status/1183095004258099202

As a little experiment for other HN readers out there, try this:

Pick out a few random words here: https://www.randomlists.com/random-words . Put those few random words into Amazon's search bar and then order the list from most to least expensive. Then scroll down a bit. This should give you a pretty good selection of a random set of 'real' items. Do this, say, 3-4 times to get ~10 random items not influenced by your search history (presumably). Open them up in new tabs for easier organization. Now, go into a few of those items and try to say that they are 100% not 'fraudulent'.

How many could you get through before you gave up in frustration? Personally I got to about 5 before I gave up trying to determine if they were junk or not.

I would do anything to filter out those weird spelling Chinese brands that always clutter my searches.

Likewise. If I see that there are ten sellers for what is (often very obviously) the exact same thing, I know it's crap and the reviews are fake. This would be so easy for Amazon to detect and filter themselves, but they don't. As it is, I end up having to click through to the second or third page of results before I even find anything unique enough to be worth running through fakespot/reviewmeta.

Considering that after almost 25 years there is still no functionality for reporting listings as being fraudulent or counterfeit, that tells you exactly where amazon's priorities lie.

As soon as they implement that feature they'll be swamped with reports on every product regardless of whether it's fake or not. Rival sellers will use it to try to monopolise a product, annoyed customers will use it to take revenge on genuine sellers, and occasionally people will report an actual fake. Unless it's much better than a simple report function it won't work.

I'm sure Amazon has some smart people looking at the numbers on this, but as just one anecdata, my family has been buying a ton of stuff from Amazon since they were just books. Now we buy things that are repeat purchases or a couple of trusted brands (e.g. Amazon Basics or Anker). For bigger purchases (like a medium-basic coffee machine) we're either looking at Costco and Target, or researching a lot on Consumer Reports. Wirecutter used to be good, but hard to trust these days too.

We definitely spend less at Amazon because of lack of trust and counterfeit concerns, and it seems directionally true for the HN crowd. That's got to be a worry for anyone at Amazon - if the people who were early adopters are starting to leave your platform, that's got to be concerning...

Definitely, if it's food or health/medical, I'll skip Amazon & buy it from Target or Walmart directly (not a 3rd party seller on their platforms). Other categories like memory cards, kids products, I'll also avoid Amazon (especially since Amazon reviews of those products often claim they received a fake).

The online version of Walmart now sources from a range of suppliers like Amazon does. I was tracking down the supplier of a used laptop and discovered an eBay posting with exactly the same text and photos.

I buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, some of it I know is a cheap knockoff, but at least I’m paying cheap knockoff prices.

But things I won’t buy on Amazon are SD cards or water filters for my fridge. You end up paying full price for a cheap knockoff. I’m sure there are others, but these two stand out in my mind.

Also just anecdata, but I’m the same way. I don’t mind buying commodity goods off of Amazon, but if I need to know that I’m truly getting product X of brand Y, I now typically go elsewhere, because I just cannot trust that I’m not going to get a counterfeit product. Over the years, I’ve received two counterfeit books and three counterfeit hardgoods from Amazon. That may not seem overwhelming, but it’s enough to break my confidence.

the question really is whether buying brand name goods vs consumables is a bigger market.

amazon might be OK with people going to a different place for brand name goods but continue to buy low cost, no-brand goods from amazon if that market is much larger.

> Over the years, I’ve received two counterfeit books and three counterfeit hardgoods from Amazon.

What I've been ALWAYS wondering when people say such things:

Did you seriously get them when buying from Amazon itself as vendor or are you conveniently leaving out the fact that you bought from some random company which uses the Amazon marketplace?

Because I really cannot believe that something as big as Amazon would be dumb enough to sell counterfeit goods under their own name, and people usually don't mention if they bought from Amazon or not when they say such things.

Amazon.com and marketplace inventory commingle. Pickers don’t care which box seemingly identical products come from.

> Did you seriously get them when buying from Amazon itself

Does it matter ? I go to amazon.com, I give my money to Amazon, I receive a package from Amazon, so for me (and the average user) the one selling me a counterfeit is Amazon.

I see it and treat more like a platform now, a marketplace. Like ebay. It just so happens that one of the biggest sellers there is Amazon itself. My usual process of buying - search for the product I need (generic term for simple items, or exact model), click on "prime only", this filters out a lot of shipments from China. Then either filter out, or carefully look at the seller of each product. Takes some time and getting used to, especially that UI isn't favouring this workflow.

Stock commingling means that you may buy a product that's sold and shipped by Amazon and still get some other seller's counterfeit. That seller simply claims to sell the same product as Amazon, with the same product code, and places it into an Amazon warehouse. Amazon will ship from the place closest to you so they might just ship what they think is the correct item from another seller's stock even if it's actually a counterfeit, and do the clearing later. They later assign one genuine item from the Amazon stock in another warehouse to the seller's stock.

As a buyer you have no control over this and Amazon does their best to be opaque and not allow buyers to publicly flag issues beyond a return and refund because it would reflect poorly on Amazon's image and make them look like peddlers of cheap knockoffs.

Yeah, this whole "marketplace" thing needs to die. I'm watching the exact same thing taking place in real time with a local shopping website that has started including external sellers and "facilitating" or "fulfilling" the order for them through their marketplace. One of the main things I'm noticing is that this "marketplace", as with Amazon, is being flooded with Chinese, unbranded knockoffs with fake pictures. Each actual product * every conceivable variation/renaming of product * every seller willing to sell it = huge explosion in products. (Okay, exaggerating a bit for effect there, but true to some extent).

The marketplace thing only kinda works if you have "dedicated" or "focused" or "themed" sellers that functioning within clearly defined niches/segments. Instead, you get a seller that randomly sells 15 kitchen towels, 3 garden ceramics, 50 woodwork jigs (really only 5, 50 variations), and 1 food product. Next thing you know, I'm searching through 50 pages of "school supplies".

> Does it matter ?

If you can't do the due diligence of even reading the one word that declares from whom you're buying then yes, it matters, it is your fault to be that careless.

What I hear you saying is that Amazon can't be trusted to police their own marketplace, their brand is worse than worthless in that it is an active signal of distrust, and I might as well go to eBay - actually I might better go to eBay, who have much more experience with this same problem and are much more likely to address it effectively. Duly noted.

> If you can't do the due diligence of even reading the one word that declares from whom you're buying

I'm buying from Amazon. From my point of view the other company is not more than a supplier.

If I am the one at fault is not really the point. I will learn my lesson and shop elsewhere, in the end it is Amazon that suffers: if I shop from a big brand's website I expect them to be the ones to do the job of filtering out the crap, not me.

(And this is not even taking into account the issues of amazon commingling the inventory and not fighting properly the fake reviews)

If I use "marketplace", the company that appears on the credit card bill is Amazon. So they're the one with the contractual relationship and who should be held responsible.

Amazon stock is commingled with marketplace sellers, so even buying directly from Amazon isn't a guarantee that you're not getting fakes nowadays https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/external/G2001414...

Maybe if Amazon made it easier for buyers to filter out marketplace vendors, or didn't automatically co-mingle inventory between themselves and Fulled by Amazon vendors, it would be a lot easier to cut them some slack?

Same. I thought if you bought directly from Amazon instead of a third party seller, then you'd be safe from counterfeits. But it turns out they just mix all the third party stock in with the first party https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/external/G2001414...

So now it's not safe to buy SD cards and USB sticks directly from Amazon either now

Get SD cards from B&H or Adorama. They serve the pro photographer community, who are ferocious about storage quality largely thanks to war stories from 20 years ago when flash memory really was a crapshoot - also why any new camera body released with only one card slot provokes a million old dudes to fuss about that one wedding shoot they lost in 2003 or whatever. But in this case it's to your benefit, since the media you get from those sellers will be what they say it is.

(I get mine from Micro Center. Kinda feel bad about not going to my local camera store, but the guy who owns the place doesn't really seem at home with technology. I don't even know if they carry UHS-II cards, but I get all my used gear there, and with the margin on that stuff it's not like I'm hurting them by getting a $80 SD card elsewhere...)

This might also be helping their Amazon brands. Easy to stand above the crowd in terms of quality this way. Also, they have all the data they need to target the most profitable / fragmented segments.

Amazon is basically my last resort these days. Unfortunately, the ongoing pandemic means there are times where I can’t justifying going out to buy something. But I wonder if they’ll be taking a bigger than expected hit once things clear up.

Maybe there is a big difference between the US and Europe, but here the only things I can't find anywhere but amazon are typically the cheap Chinese knockoff things (e.g. new cushions for my bose headphones), for everything else there always is a cheaper solution by going with one of the smaller online retailer.

That way I don't have to go through the horrendous amazon interface, which I have the impression tries to actively prevent you from finding what you want. Similar to the strategy of large supermarkets that rearrange goods to maximize customer time at the shop.

Even here in Europe, Amazon still has the monster competitive advantage of Prime. If not for that, I would probably be buying all my gear from Saturn, Mediamarkt, etc.

It's also worth nothing that European Amazon has waaaay less stuff available in general than US Amazon.

When it comes to Amazon reviews you never go by the average you go to scroll down to the actual reviews and read what the one and two star reviews are complaining about and decide if that is acceptable assuming it will happen with your purchase, IMHO.

Sort reviews by new. It’s amazing how many “5 star” items have an average of 2-3 stars when you look at the latest reviews.

I was looking for some L plates for my car. A lot of reviews called them “beautiful”... it is a white square with a letter L that sticks to your car... trying to find one which didn’t fall off or damage the car was far from trivial. Fortunately newer reviews mentioned damage or falling off or does the job which gave some steer.

I have been purposefully shopping elsewhere recently. Other sites are usually cheaper and there is less doubt about what is actually going to get received.

Sorting by new also usually exposes things like hijacked item or seller pages more easily

I love that Steam shows an average of recent reviews. I think it’s very telling that Amazon does not.

I thought the reason Steam had "recent reviews" was to account for patches/updates and so on?

Not sure why that wouldn't apply to other products. Product design/packaging/formulas change, as does a seller's customer service...

I change the sort URL parameter from &s=review-rank to &s=review-count-rank and tend to put more weight against products with thousands of decent reviews; if nothing in the category has hundreds of reviews, that's a sign to look elsewhere. Perhaps false optimism or a flawed heuristic, but seems to work out for certain categories of stuff.

A lot of reviews raise a red flag in my mind. Particularly, for products which are new. I’ve been burnt with counterfeit and low quality products with a large number of reviews.

What happened to Wirecutter?

I just discovered Wirecutter and have been happy with it so far (just bought a new toaster oven!). I'm also curious why they're throwing shade

> Amazon loves fake reviews as long as they are 5 star.

Do they? It's not immediately clear that an Amazon where the average item has 4.7 stars would sell more stuff than an Amazon where the average is 4.2 stars. Consumers mostly compare items against others on the same site and it's possible that all grade inflation does is make the top performing items harder to separate out and makes buying harder.

As a counterpoint, Uber suffers from ridiculous grade inflation and it doesn't appear to have made riders love them any more. It's simply resulted in everyone adapting to 5 = slightly above average, 4.9 = average, 4.8 = run away screaming.

> It's simply resulted in everyone adapting to 5 = slightly above average, 4.9 = average, 4.8 = run away screaming.

Just out of curiosity from someone who doesn't use Uber, is this an exaggeration or meant pretty much literally? (Not with regard to running away screaming... but is 4.8 genuinely a terrible score?)

IIRC Uber will put drivers on notice if they're rating approaches 4.6

Jesus Christ. What's even the point of a 5-star system then? It should be a very simple two option system. Was the ride safe? Did you get where you were going? Then hit the thumbs up button. Otherwise hit the thumbs down button. Or even better, no rating system at all and just provide the option to file reports in bad cases, with that report information being made public in some sense. This idea that rideshare drivers need to be offering entertainment while they drive in order to ensure 5 stars is offensive. When people took cabs, nothing like this happened. A cab pulled up, you got in, they drove, if they tried to take a long route you complained, then you paid your money and got out. End of transaction. Most were good, some were bad. The fact that the cabbie was able to hold and maintain their job was the source of trust you needed to have confidence you would arrive intact.

> This idea that rideshare drivers need to be offering entertainment while they drive in order to ensure 5 stars is offensive.

I find that especially annoying because I don't want to be entertained. I want to get from point A to point B while minding my own business (looking through the window if I'm in a new city or reading something on my phone if not). I don't want to hear about the driver's cryptocurrency adventures, and I don't want them to apologise to me if some other driver cuts them off or something.

Of course I'm gonna give them five stars regardless because I know how ride shares work.

"Uber tells drivers online. “If your rating over the most recent 100 trips is below a 4.6, your profile may be at risk of deactivation.”"

from https://qz.com/1038285/uber-will-make-riders-explain-when-th...

(citation is dead - not sure where Uber keeps this info now and is it even public)

I had a driver once in Poland who told me she was avoiding Asian riders because they didn't give 5* scores, while other customers did, and it was affecting her rating. For some reason in western countries it's assumed no problems == 5*. Would be good if there was a baseline to be able to separate what is "alright, nothing to complain but nothing special either" and "exceptional".

My local Toyota dealer has contacted me after I've used them for a service to ask that I give 5/5 on the feedback form that I get sent. They say that if they get lower than 5 from a few customers, they get a visit from head office. But 5 is "excellent" while 4 is "good", and being British, I tend to go with "good" when they did just what I asked.

Yeah. "All went well" should be a totally acceptable base line, with room above and below. (especially since the "above range" can be quite subjective and/or down to luck)

Its very cultural thing and I suspect it depends if the country uses grading to the curve in schools /uni's.

"Uber tells drivers online. “If your rating over the most recent 100 trips is below a 4.6, your profile may be at risk of deactivation.”"

from https://qz.com/1038285/uber-will-make-riders-explain-when-th...

(citation is dead - not sure where Uber keeps this info now and is it even public)

The archived citation: https://web.archive.org/web/20170225191129/https://www.uber....

Another quote from that:

"If your average rating falls below a 4.3 after your first 25 trips, your profile will be deactivated and you will need to take a quality improvement course in order to be considered for reactivation."

Amazon has become exceedingly dishonest over the last few years.

They deleted my negative review of the Kindle with no explanation or recourse.

Since maybe November, a couple of things I've ordered (shipped and sold by Amazon) were listed as new but were very clearly used. One of these items was a piece of safety-critical equipment that was dangerously damaged and could very likely have caused death or dismemberment if someone with less experience had received the item and tried to use it. I assume some clueless Amazon warehouse worker eyeballs returns and tries to figure out if they can plausibly trick the customer into thinking it's a new item, and if so they put it back up for sale as "new".

I don't get why Amazon loves fake five star reviews. It's put me off them completely and I'm no longer a customer. Are you sure that this is accurate?

If you look at the review average, Amazon skews the numbers anyway. It’s a weighted average.

If they sorted this out and the average reviews started to drop, they could very easily adjust this algorithm and never tell anyone and they’d be fine. I don’t think this is the problem

I feel like the fake reviews are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Over the last 5-10 years, Amazon's main shopping website seems to have gone from a reasonably reputable location to an internet cesspool to rival ebay or craigslist.

For example, looking for an item one is presented with a wide variety of almost identical products from a wide variety of almost identical, completely unknown brands, with no trust or confidence in any of them.

Now obviously, these brands/products are most likely nothing to do with Amazon, they're just using Amazon as their storefront, and sometimes fulfilment, but it still reflects upon Amazon, and ultimately taints their brand with the same brush.

Maybe Amazon makes more money in this way, by taking a cut of this flow through various service fees, but for me it makes Amazon less useful to go to when I don't know exactly what I want already, and more often pushes me to go direct to a more trusted source.

At least with ebay the items are cheaper and I know I'm buying bottom of the barrel stuff.

To be honest, they also sell high end stuff on ebay and you know it's going to be legit just based on the seller feedback and what the item is.

Half the time the manufacturer themselves are selling directly on ebay!

I'm just spitballing, but what do you guys think about this as a fake-resistant review system?

To list your product on Amazon as a seller, you pay $500 per year as a "review incentivization fee." The algorithm randomly selects buyers and emails them 1 month after their purchase. They are offered $10 to write a review. The chance of being randomly selected as a reviewer auto-adjusts to target a goal of 50 reviews per year, and no one except those people is allowed to post reviews. Also, reviewers can update their reviews later if their impression of the product changes.

If a seller wanted to keep farming reviews, they would now have to buy up the vast majority of their own inventory in the hopes of being selected. Also, my system prevents people who are experiencing one-in-a-million problems (or who are just habitually disgruntled) from dominating the conversation.

Sellers already pay people to write reviews– and compensate for the product. How is this system any different?

> If a seller wanted to keep farming reviews, they would now have to buy up the vast majority of their own inventory in the hopes of being selected.

They already have 100 people buy their product and fully pay for it for a review.

It's different because it has Amazon randomly selecting who gets paid to write a review, and the reviewer doesn't have any incentive to lie since they get the $10 regardless.

Sellers are currently paying people (in money and product) for 5 star reviews, which is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve.

The seller merely includes a promotion - leave a good review, receive a gift card (or straight up refund for cheaper products).

Your system may have minor chance of success if there was no way for the sellers to contact customers.

It might reduce the incentive for the seller to deal with post-sales problems after that 1-month period. Once they see a person hasn't been selected, they can ignore any of their support requests without worry of a bad review.

They could still leave seller feedback. Amazon has both seller feedback and product reviews two separate metrics and seller feedback impacts a sellers standing on Amazon where as product reviews only reflect on the product.

You're just describing the Early Reviewer Program and suggesting all other reviews be banned.

Many Amazon sellers openly solicit good reviews with a card included with the purchase promising discounts or gifts for good reviews.

This method would just increase that. "We'll pay you $100 if you get chosen and write us a 5-star review" would be a reasonable offer for both buyer and seller.

If I got that offer I would post the 5-star review, claim the $100, and then edit my review to say "They tried to bribe me. 1 star. Photos attached as proof."

But you're right, I think that's a legitimate issue. I'm not saying my plan is perfect, but I'm pretty sure it improves on the status quo.

Review deleted. Seller feedback should be posted to the seller page.

This its a no loose situation for the seller

In that case, I post the 5-star review, claim the $100, delete my own review, and post negative seller feedback.

The GP proposed revamping the review system entirely. What makes you think their revamped system would include a possibility for the seller to delete reviews?

>1 month after their purchase.

Way too short time for almost anything that's not a direct consumable.

>They are offered $10 to write a review.

That's too low (or too low depending on the product), negative experience is a lot more likely to be vented.

Sounds similar to sortition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

The only fake-resistant review system is one read by critical people.

The problem the star average is used as the only proxy for quality. Even without fake reviews it's completely meaningless since different people like different things (relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/937/).

When I buy things I look at what people complain about when they dislike the product. Is this electronic badly grounded and gave you an electric shock? I'll look somewhere else. Did you give this gay bar a 1-star review because they didn't let you in with the rest of your hen party? Awesome!

Amazon vine? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Vine

Sounds good, may want to tweak the parameters. $500 is a lot to get skin in the game for a small seller, $10 seems good, but then a month is probably not long enough. I buy a lot of tools and machines and gadgets, those are probably best reviewed after 1-2 years of use.

Reviews are broken. There needs to be a web of trust for reviews. I would weight a review from somebody I know or trust 1000x more than every Amazon or online review ever left.

It's not just store reviews that are broken - web search is also completely broken because of affiliate spam

I spent far too much time at the moment with each purchase researching and tracking down trusted reviews.

Unless it’s a really big ticket item I’ve given up on product research as the investment is just not worth my time. I just buy whatever Wirecutter tells me to; usually they’re not too wrong.

OMG wire cutter. Affiliate advertising once removed.

EDIT: NextDesk scandal aside, when was the last time you saw WireCutter recommend a product that did NOT offer affiliate commissions (let’s just call a spade a spade: these are kickbacks).

I don’t use WC anymore so I can’t answer that myself. I stopped using them when I saw some companies completely ignored in 2 different industries with which I’m familiar. Those companies did not have kickbacks.

Yes, they will never recommend something they can’t monetize. But they also do some basic product testing and I’ve yet to get actual crap buying their recommendation. If I’m getting something under $100 they get me a good enough solution and save me a lot of time. It’s just not worth the research cost to do better.

I guess the paid alternative is consumer reports, but I feel like they’re not noticeably better.

Have you found a good alternative to wirecutter?

I am sure there are plenty of honest reviews on the internet, tucked into enthusiast sites or on personal blogs. It's hard to find them unless you're a member of their community. Unless they review a lot of products, you have no continued relationship with them. This means you can't evaluate your opinion of their reviews (as to trustworthiness, or even just taste).

Surely anyone who devotes a lot of time and money to reviewing products is going to want to be (and deserves to be) paid. That means direct payment has to come from the customer, or the business.

The "business pays" model has an incentive to exclude businesses that don't pay, to push you towards more expensive items, and in general to get you to buy shit you don't need. But at least the reviewer has some skin in the game, since you won't continue to buy through their referral links if they recommend too many products that are too bad.

The "customer pays" model seems to solve a lot of the incentive problems, but it's always hard to get people to pay for something that others are giving out for free (even if the free ones are occasionally subpar or even harmful!)

Ultimately, I'm not really sure I see "buyer pays" review sites as terribly unfair? Surely they'll just pass the cost on to customers. Some of the businesses, like NextDesk, seem to find the process unfair. I have some sympathy for them, but the reality is that the products I've bought based on Wirecutter recommendations tend to be better. I don't have the time, or even the ability these days, to pick through search results trying to figure it out for myself.

Maybe I will give Consumer Reports a try, but is the cost of the subscription (of which I don't know the utility), and the lock-in, worth the marginal cost of missing out on great products like NextDesk? Does Consumer Reports even give more complete surveys of options than Wirecutter? Hard to say. I think I would go insane if I spent any more time than I already do looking for "truth" on the internet.

If you don't mind paying and can handle German, Stiftung Warentest is very reliable. I only wish similar organizations were more widespread.

https://www.test.de, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung_Warentest

In the UK there is an organisation called Which? They publish a magazine and have a paywalled site with reviews of most household products.

Their reviews are more trustable than from a regular affiliate site but a lot of products score quite well despite being mediocre at best.

I've recently had bad experiences with wirecutter's recommendations. I no longer trust them. It started a little before the NYT acquired them but the downward momentum accelerated from there.

The biggest flaw I see is their product selection process, it always involves looking at the amazon top sellers. Those are usually filled with astroturfed, paid and bribed reviews.

Honest question: have you found something better? Or do you just do all your own research now?

I haven't found anything better. It's back to my own research and conclusion. I miss the days when sorting Amazon's best selling item was the way to go, adding reddit as a keyword to the search query for best X or even sorting Newegg ratings by best. Nothing seems trustworthy anymore.

I don't mind spending the time researching things because the frustration of owning something that isn't up to usually snuff costs more time, grief and money.

All that being said, here are a few sources I still respect:

* Appliances: Consumer Reports * Kitchenware: America's Test Kitchen * Hardware: Project Farm (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2rzsm1Qi6N1X-wuOg_p0Ng/vid...) * TVs/Monitors/Audio: (https://www.rtings.com) * Gym Equipment: GarageGymReviews (https://www.garagegymreviews.com) * Laptops: (http://www.notebookreview.com)

Actually Wirecutter has gone down the toilet and is just as scammy and pay to play as everything else now.

https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...

It seems like the only hope for a solution here is competition? One would assume review sites need to both be more honest, and take a smaller commission, before they gain market dominance.

Google tried this in the Play Store. People hated it because it was super creepy.

Web of trust doesn't scale. This isn't broken because most reviewers can't be trusted. It is broken because a very very few actors are abusing these systems. As someone above pointed out, Amazon can fix this. It isn't a hard problem. The issue is, their incentives are not aligned with fixing it.

My solution: only read negative reviews. They're much more telling. As a bonus, they'll often kill impulse purchases, saving me money.

This is a useful trick for quickly vetting just about anything that's outside your area of expertise. Often a simple search like "X sucks" or "X is bad" can be very telling. It's a good sign when it's difficult to find well written negative reviews. Of course, there are many misguided negative reviews, but they can still help you make an informed decision.

They’re way too negative and usually list weird one off problems or shipping issues.

The real action is 3 star reviews. Those people have really given a lot of thought to the review.

Also the reviews with pictures tend to be useful.

> They’re way too negative and usually list weird one off problems or shipping issues.

That's presumably why they said "read" the negative reviews. Obviously you don't then base your decision off negative reviews that turn out to not matter.

It's not a completely foolproof solution, because competitors with dirty tactics can write fake negative reviews.

Almost no one write 3 and 4 star reviews out of spite.

I agree, sometimes the complaint is a niche problem resulting from the buyer's false expectation but, generally speaking, I've avoided buying a lot of products.

Recent example, shredders all have great 5 star reviews but only the odd negative will point out the obvious problem that cheap shredders are made cheaply and will break in a short space of time.

I think we need this too, but I'm skeptical it would work. I'm afraid most of us don't know/trust enough people. For example, I'm considering buying a sofa from store X, but no one I know has ever bought from store X.

There's a good chance that the items you're most ignorant about are also the items your friends are most ignorant about (or at least enough of them that it'll significantly reduce the quantity of the feedback).

Also, once this became a thing, once it became monetizable, my web of trust would shrink drastically. I mean, geez, I'm even suspicious of my doctors prescriptions.

Maybe we need professional reviewers with a transparent system in place to protect against manipulation (as much as possible). Something like Consumer Reports on a larger scale.

There’s no incentive to fix reviews. Amazon doesn’t gain anything neither does the company selling the product. Unless you’re willing to pay money for reviews, reviews will never factor in the consumers’ interest. People aren’t willing to pay for content.

One solution as a consumer is to buy from a place you trust. It would be nice if there was a version of Amazon that didn't have 3rd party sellers and only consisted of reputable (verified supply chain) products.

Since Amazon is not providing this, one example of a place to shop is Costco in person. Things sold by Costco are generally reliable enough. On top of that, Costco has a generous return policy so I can buy whatever I need. If it was truly unusable/broken, I can return it easily.

Part of the reason I continue to shop on boutique eCommerce sites, for lack of a better term, is that a store with a good reputation can essentially verify it's own catalogue. I know if I buy for X or Y store they will have chosen the best product for the job, because their store's reputation is built on their ability to curate good products.

In the UK we have John Lewis which is a department store with a decent reputation. OK, they are far from perfect, but their product range is curated to the point that when you search for, say, a toaster, you're not overloaded with 1000's of options and their own customer reviews seem to be quite genuine.

Anything over £100, I tend to default to John Lewis rather than amazon.

Can confirm, its a shame they stopped delivering to the EU :/

Is there a review system where I can see just my friends' reviews? Eg browsing for a phone and I see my buddy's review, you see your buddy's?

I have no friends.

I'm really sad that APlus (the first incarnation) never really took off. Their review system where you would ask e.g. your tech-friend for tech-recommendations, and those are then visible to any other friends (I think that's how it worked?) seemed really nice.

I bought a board game from amazon recently and it was really poor quality and it was only when I checked on the manufacturers website that I realised it was fake.

When I went to report it, the seller had been removed and the item was no longer available.

I contacted support and of course they refunded me the money without any issue.

My problem is that they knew they had shipped me a fake product, why didn't they contact me to to tell me it was fake and either send me a real copy or offer me a refund?

Because it reduces loss to not tell you. Some number of folks wont know or care

I recently got an email offering 50% off a seller's products if I left a good review. This is happening on all marketplaces, not just Amazon. The only way I see to truly solve the problem is only allowing verified buyers to leave a review.

Buyers also get brochures with their product offering gift cards and the like for 5-star reviews, though.

Exactly. Crowdsourced reviews are easy to manipulate. On the other hand, a “review commission” isn’t practical either.

A verified buyer is nontrivial to determine. The purchaser could be under the influence and financed by the seller.

Sellers generate fake orders for their products using real identities, actually send the product to those people, but leave a fake review in their name.

I've tried raising the issue repeatedly with Amazon, but I've now given up and look forward to the random crap I get sent almost on a monthly basis.

Where do I sign up to get free random stuff sent to me from Amazon review farmers?

Ideally you don't.

Better idea: Only verified buyers who have been on Amazon for X amount of time (or some other process to gain trust) should be allowed to leave reviews.

I never experienced it myself, but I’ve seen reviews claiming they had a letter in their package that they’d get X currency if they leave a 5-star-review.

Sorta similar but different, I left a 3 star review for something (cheap headphones that were OK but not great), and got a few emails after it offering me credit etc. if I changed it to a 5 star review.

I didn't, but did report it to Amazon (no idea if they cared at all.)

I don't get it. Why do they have to send real product to the person if they're not relying on the receiver to write the review?

They could ship an empty box if they just needed a tracking number. If the customer isn't coming into the feedback loop, they don't need the product.

Because Amazon itself is usually handling the storage and shipping -- you can't pay Amazon to store empty boxes in its warehouses. (With perhaps one exception: https://www.amazon.com/Cheap-Moving-Boxes-10-Pack-10MPK/dp/B... )

Forward this to amazon customer service.

Do you honestly believe everybody but Amazon knows this is going on?

I did not say that.

The people who work on this at Amazon read HN, but this article won't be their first exposure.

I received an Instagram ad offering reimbursement to buy a company's product on Amazon.

I signed up with a throwaway e-mail account. They sent a step-by-step guide to go to Amazon, enter a specific search term, scroll until I found their product, purchase it, and then send them the receipt for reimbursement.

They didn't ask me to write a review. They only wanted to generate the appearance of organic search traffic to their product.

The problem really is us, the buyers, who won't purchase something that has zero reviews or only a few reviews.

So in order to even make the first few sales they need to generate a bunch of fake reviews.

This is extremely well known phenomenon especially in the Chinese market where it is also extremely standard to get a bunch of fake reviews to get the ball rolling on sales. Guess what, it happens in the US too.

I don't endorse it, but the sellers are just doing what the buyers incentivize them to do.

Wonder whether they're scamming Amazon's visibility algorithm or if they're inflating "organic" metrics for fundraising or sale-of-business purposes.

do you remember the company name? would be interesting to try lol

Of course they are, it's not like Amazon really cares much. With all the power of AWS and deep learning etc., identifying fake reviews should be a piece of cake if you are Amazon. It doesn't affect the bottom line, so why bother.

It does affect the bottom line, though.

Amazon used to be the place I went to learn about the quality of a product. If it looked good, well, here I was already on the product page...

Now, with the counterfeit product problem I will no longer consider amazing for anything health, safety or food related.

With the fake review problem, I no longer look at Amazon to figure out if a product is quality or not. Which leads to more purchases from physical stores or other websites.

Between the two of those issues, my use of Amazon has dropped pretty significantly (to the point that I cancelled Amazon Prime during the pandemic).

I agree with what you're saying and I use Amazon much less now too, but Amazon definitely monitors the numbers and they're making more money this way. Who knows how much they're trading long-term reputation for short term gains?

> Who knows how much they're trading long-term reputation for short term gains?

I think this is exactly the risk. Amazon didn’t become huge chasing quarterly or short term gains. The damage they’ve done to their reputation over the last several years may take another 5-10 years to show up in the numbers in a significant way, but by that point it’s much harder to turn around.

It’s hard to know what the long term damage will be, if any, though. I’m certainly not their representative median customer.

I have always found it best to ignore the good reviews and instead look at the negative reviews to identify patterns of complaints.

If there is a pattern of failure ,quality, or issues and its not worth dealing with I wont buy the product. Also if the issues are common among vendors or products then I go with the cheapest. Why pay more if they are all crap or just as risky to buy and it sets a more accurate expectation of the product.

I also typically ignore the negative reviews complaining about the package arriving damaged or late as that can happen with anything as long as I don't need it by a certain date.

I also look for customer pictures of the product if available.

Positive reviews aren't the only ones being spoofed though, with competitors often posting fake negative ones for other products [1].

---

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54063039

Yeah I have seen that as well and should have clarified that is a possibility. However to avoid that I also look at the middle reviews and avoid the reviews with no or little explanation. However, I avoid the top reviews at all cost which typically is just the manufactures product description anyways.

It also depends on the cost of the product and the PITA it would be to return if defective on how deep I go into looking a the low to mid range reviews.

I absolutely shop more at Best Buy, Costco and other places because of this reason. Whatever I buy at these places, I know they stand behind the quality. Do I go to Best Buy for a $10 cable? No. But a $3000 DSLR, I would rather buy from B&H.

I guess I feel more comfortable commenting on this vs such posts about Google (my employer) because I don't have to worry about leaking anything important but this is absolutely not a piece of cake.

Anyone who has worked on planet scale anti-abuse systems knows this is a very tough and never ending problem.

You think there are obvious signals for good or bad - the 0.01% cases where this does not hold up turns to 20 million daily mistakes if your product has 2B DAUs. You think you built something that works, spammers need to figure out just one loophole to game the system. Sometimes they don't even have to look at a technical loophole, if the economics works out you can even pay normal users small sums of money and the bad activity is now masked by troves of genuine user activity.

It is a little painful to see how HN loves to vilify people working on these issues, but its a little like saying we have police but the crime is not 0 yet. And if the argument is it happens too often that is actually most likely not true - a 99.999% accurate system will make a mistake 600k times every month for 2B DAU activity assuming one user interaction a day for the product. Which is often a big underestimation for many large products.

I do think like any other area there is a lot we can do better and that we are already working on it. But man it sucks to have spent 6 months working 12 hour days just to see someone making grandiose statements on how something is an easy issue to fix when you know its absolutely false.

I guess its fine though, FANG pays well and I enjoy my work and think its a net positive to the society.

/rant

This is a bit like arguing that Medicare for all is impossible in the United States because it is such a big country.

This is a straw man argument, because only relative terms matter. Nobody cares about the absolute numbers except your boss. The customers care about their percentage chance of encountering spam and fake reviews.

You're saying it's too hard to achieve 100% success (0% failure rate), and that we should settle for 99.999% success (0.001% failure rate). Multiplying these by big numbers is irrelevant. It could be a trillion. Who cares? The implication is that the system is nearly perfect.

Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template.

The same argument applies for Medicare: The citizens don't care about the absolute budget, they just care about their individual tax increase or decrease. Only a handful of people in the treasury care about the absolute numbers.

You've fallen into a common statistical trap. If we assume the volume of auto-generated spam is significantly (several orders of magnitude) higher than the volume of legitimate reviews (which seems to be the case, and would make sense), having a 99.999% success rate doesn't mean that users will observe 99.999% legitimate reviews.

Oh, I get that, I just didn't want to turn my comment into War & Peace.

The equivalent of "medicare for all is impossible" would be that an approach saying "anti spam is impossible so we wont do anything". That is not the case. While I do not know about amazon reviews I would bet its a fairly likely case that they do have teams trying to fight this spam.

The equivalent in your example would be saying we have medicare for all but for some people the system does not work. Thats the state of the world we are in, we are making efforts but they will never be 100% perfect.

>> Meanwhile the experience most online shopping users have is more like a 80% success and a 20% failure rate at best, and often more like a 99% failure rate and a 1% success rate for regular shoppers. I have personally long since given up on every buying anything from EBay or Amazon because of the rampant fakery. Literally everything has a thousand AAAA++++++ reviews that all are obviously generated via a template.

See thats the thing, the only people who know this for certain is the ones who have access to Amazon data. You or I dont know the experience for "most online shoppers". If anything looking at data has repeatedly made me realize that we in tech have a very bad understanding of "generalized overall population" cohorts.

I think it would be very difficult to detect these:

a) with 100% accuracy, and b) without involving humans at all

but I noticed the trend of fake Amazon reviews some time ago, and some patterns were very evident. I'd click on the profile of a five-star reviewer, more often than not every review they left was five stars. And every product I'd click through on also had a deluge of suspicious five star reviews. I even started scraping data into a graph database but then discovered that Amazon tries very hard to resist scraping attempts and gave up.

I think it would be very possible to set up some kind of basic pattern analysis along these lines. Clearly, merchants are buying positive reviews in bulk, so detecting sudden spikes in positive reviews and working out correlations with other product review dumps wouldn't be difficult. Once you've got a sense of it, you hand the data over to human investigators who take it the rest of the way. But despite its insane wealth, Amazon is clearly not interested in spending the money required to do that.

Similarly, only allow reviews from accounts that have purchased the product.

Then admit you can't fix the problem and remove user reviews.

The mistake was in creating something planet-scale before having anti-abuse systems in place. In this regard, Amazon is very much not alone.

I suspect anti-abuse at scale is impossible. The mistake (albeit a hugely profitable one) was to turn themselves into a marketplace and platform rather than a curated seller. The implication is clear: any marketplace is untrustworthy and caveat emptor.

"At scale" is a euphemism for an ideology whose goal is world domination, there's no reason for a desire for it to be protected. Anti-abuse systems being in place is more important than preventing constraints on growth.

I mean seriously, in the past several years we've learned that "at scale" is actually a public hazard.

We will never have anything if we decide only perfect things are allowed to exist.

Its not the best example but even our country/state/local level justice system has cases where it fails. In addition to judges actually making incorrect verdicts, there are many ills that cause this - eg. Police not following procedures, poor people not having the money to right wrongs by appealing decisions, being bullied or scared into pleas etc.

That does not mean we should not have a justice system at all. Just like us, the systems we build are not perfect. That does not mean they should not exist. There is immense value in the valley between non existent and perfect.

Amazon: send requests to your customers at random to review products they purchased (perhaps reimburse them for their time with a gift card). Post only those reviews.

How will that help? The seller can still influence and finance the buyers. It may be more expensive but I'm certain the seller will do what is necessary for those high rankings. The stakes are that high.

Perhaps, but how?

If Amazon sells 10,000 Acme Widgets and sends an email to just 1% of those customers asking for a review. How is Acme going to game that? Pay all 10,000 purchasers of their product so that the 1% that get the Golden Ticket to write a review give them 5 stars?

The problem seems to me to be that the reviewer gets to decide to post a review. Turn it around and have Amazon select reviewers at random and you've made it much harder to game.

Obviously sellers would initially only need to inform all 10k customers that if Amazon would ever request a review for them, there is a $20 reward waiting for writing a 5 star review. Obviously sellers would word things differently. This system would also be much cheaper to game because you only need to bribe 1% of all your customers.

If it's an "expensive" product, you ask people to buy your product and have them send it back to you for a reward. If it's cheap, the reviewer can keep the item in exchange for a desirable review. The sample rate is irrelevant.. you just need enough reviews to out rank your competitors.

I'm not in the industry but I'm willing to bet there are flourishing communities that participate in this type of trade. And it's as sophisticated as it needs to be to get around Amazons countermeasures.

How else are we seeing so many corrupt reviews? Not like Amazon is just passively watching this happen. This is a huge issue for them since it's a bad user experience and Jeff Bezos is obsessed with satisfying customers.

I understand false positives are a problem - but why can't they simply only show / count reviews they are 99.9% certain AREN'T fake.

You might only show 80% of all user reviews - but if 10% of your reviews are fake - then you're only hiding 10% of real reviews.

Who cares? Amazon definitely doesn't have a problem of not having enough reviews. It does have a problem of having too many products with almost entirely fake reviews.

Or, add a flag to indicate "Potential paid review" along with discounting it in the avg calculation.

But this is a total strawman argument. Who cares if you have a few false positives? What is the downside of marking a review as fake when it's not? Next to nothing. You don't even have to tell the person who submitted the review it was treated as fake.

How would you feel if half the positive reviews on your small business were wiped out overnight - incorrectly?

Yes, using AI to spot fake reviews seems like a fools errand to me.

However, why doesn't Amazon only allow those who have purchased to leave reviews?

And to ban any company offering monetary or equivalent incentives to leave reviews?

I suggest they are not even trying to tackle the problem.

You think working for Google is a net positive for society?

In my opinion it is a huge net positive. Its not the popular opinion on HN but I do think it is.

Its personally been instrumental for me. Coming from a solidly lower middle class background in a developing country - Google was the only reason I could get better at my work and eventually do well financially. It gave me access to information that I could not afford otherwise, books were too expensive for my families income.

Even now I see how much services like search and Youtube help people learn. Youtube created a vibrant community of content in a local language that has helped many of my friends learn things. I recently spoke to a teenager who learnt to repair household electronics by watching tutorials on Youtube - in our local language.

Google has a lot of problems. I mean a lot. But its certainly a net positive in my opinion. While its fun to participate in (legitimate) first world discussions on web standards being killed by Google, it has undoubtedly improved the lives of millions of people from my home country.

Just like people, companies have the ability to do good and bad at the same time. For me the scale for Google is pretty heavily towards good.

I agree - in a lot of these Amazon discussions on HN a lot of people seem to believe Amazon does nothing.

But if you look at e.g. seller forums at Amazon, there are a lot of large threads about the opposite problem - Amazon taking out lots of reviews the sellers consider legitimate.

So clearly they are doing something, and it might even be that only a small minority of fake reviews get through, but due to Amazon's scale there are still a lot of them.

No kidding.

What's interesting is the Chinese companies are actually getting better at this. It's usually multi-part.

* Post a meaningful deposit / security to list, more if you list more.

* Pretty involved complaint resolution process and tracking inventory by actual seller (no comingled inventory).

* Product spot checks by platform itself for stuff that sells a better

* Product spot checks let you also pick up the free product offers for good reviews game players this way.

* Real human support for review bombing situations and de-listings. If you can start untangling the knots a lot of the scam folks are all cross linked.

I've got plenty more, and no one is paying me $100K. So these platforms are mostly just lazy.

Eventually someone will build a knock-off amazon with more trust, and we'll all move there and just use amazon for AWS compute.

You're not going to touch amazon with a site with more trust if you cant compete logistically.

Which Chinese platform runs all these checks? Really curious as I don't have much experience with selling on Chinese platforms.

I’m part of a FB group where you can get free product in exchange for reviews. All I did was join and I was offered my choice for 60 different free items.

This is hilariously common.

I'm surprised you can still write reviews for products and services on Amazon you haven't bought from Amazon.

How much of this racket on places like Amazon and Yelp would be killed if you had a unique generated ID assigned to you once you purchased a good or service and it was verified as delivered?

Indeed. Presumably many such IDs exist in Amazon's transaction system. It must be deliberate that they are not used for this purpose.

Amazon does have the concept of "verified reviews", it is just not enforced.

Scamming verified reviews is already a thing, it's called "Brushing."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushing_(e-commerce)

And that's taking advantage of another longstanding Amazon loophole.

They should definitely package a unique QR code for verified reviews in the delivered package.

Right before Christmas this year, my dad got a package of some iWatch bands he didn't order, and some other small accessories. It was addressed to him, from some random name he didn't recognize. He asked around all of his friends and family to see if anyone ordered pseudononymously. Presumably this was done in order for someone to be able to generate a fake "verified review" at the peak of Christmas shopping.

It also makes for a good honeypot.

I don't understand how easy it could be to Google around a bit and find companies offering this service, but its seemingly impossible to stop at scale.

Employ a group of people to go undercover with these firms, who are purposefully violating your platforms TOS, and enact draconian measures against the brands your employees encounter.

The risk would quickly not be worth the reward.

> undercover with these firms, who are purposefully violating your platforms TOS

These “brands” are sometimes a few guys in a garage in China. Shut them down and they popup with a new name the next day, like whack-a-mole.

Yeah they just buy white label cheap commodities and will slap a new sticker on it if you “crack down” on them somehow

This is ridiculously obvious when searching for basically anything on Amazon now. There will be 10 identical product listings with 10 different brand names, many of which have reviews describing, and pictures showing, completely different products.

Amazon has become one of the worst online shopping experiences, only redeemed by their 1 day delivery

Most of the items are now people selling cheap tat from AliExpress and so many items have a suspiciously high number of reviews for such mundane items

This is the same problem as with journalism / sources of information, except for a different domain.

Authoritative sources are considered reliable > newcomers undermine old sources > newcomers become authoritative sources, repeat ad infinitum.

When small shops sold most products, you could rely on the owner being connected enough to the community to not rip anyone off. As communities and local social connections broke down, the penalty for being dishonest evaporated. Amazon and other competitors took advantage and became trustworthy. Now they are slipping...

My guess: in both journalism and in e-commerce, the next step will be a return to “personable” sources of information that are perceived as reliable. Substack is on the right track here WRT journalism. Something that has real people (with good reputations) review products might be the e-commerce equivalent.

Anyone else find Amazon's comingling of stock to be insanity? It must save them a fortune in operational costs to be worth the amount of counterfeit junk they end up shipping.

> Anyone else find Amazon's comingling of stock to be insanity?

They make so much off of AWS now, the market operations are probably just a massive headache to leadership with comparatively lower margins. Unattractive to pay attention and devote resources to, when the same thrown at AWS yields far more profits per unit thrown.

The dynamics that emerge from commingling pushes more buyers to Amazon Basics, which undoubtedly yield much higher profits, so there isn't much incentive to fix it for impacted categories and brands.

I've read that there is a feature that allows Amazon sellers to lock down their SKU's so only specific, named ship-from's are allowed to stock Amazon warehouses. If this is true, then I'd like to hear how this works, and rationales on why more sellers aren't using it.

There might be a core assumption so deeply embedded into the data fabric of "one instance of an SKU is as good as any other instance" that changing the assumption would yield too little benefit to clear some internal IRR metric. I'd caution against that; ceding the market operations to eager competitors to take it away would deny Amazon extremely valuable data. Data whose value I assert far outstrips the decreased margins to fix the commingling problem. This goes far beyond any kind of shopping data. I further assert if Amazon actually unlocks the real value of that data, they'd evolve way beyond their current positioning as a software-driven logistics company.

Even for that current positioning as a software-driven logistics company, this is a curious issue to possess the hot potato upon for so long. Competitors would be well-advised to look and think deeply on what this means on whether they can/should use this to beat Amazon.

Amazon likely is not eager (to put it lightly) to enter into many traditional distributor-retailer relationships with manufacturers, which gives negotiating power back to the sellers. Very far from the commoditize the complements strategy they prefer. The current structure is a manufacturer's Panopticon, even more brutal than the Wal-Mart buyer-department-culture-driven model. Amazon wants to vertically integrate to the point they don't need a relationship, and ideally all the way back through into manufacturing, reaching as far back into the supply chain necessary to secure a welded-shut tight integration, thus capturing all available profits.

IMO, Amazon should buy a few on some honeypot products, and train their AI/analytics on it.

As a manufacturer/seller on amazon, I sure wish I could stop doing business on amazon. Amazon charges me for everything, despite obvious customer abuse, simply because it's their customer not mine. Couple that with high margins and bad reviews sampling for those that don't cheat the system and you get beat up constantly on amazon. The thing is, if you have a shopify stores for your d2c you have an AB test on return rates, customer quality, CSAT etc., and while Amazon dramatically impacts your top line sales, it also really effects your bottom line because customers order carelessly (in our case they buy the wrong size product) which triggers an expensive and wasteful amount of reverse logistics. My customers that buy from my site ask us questions that we help with, get better service, and are better customers because there is a seller/customer relationship. On amazon, we cant even get their email address via the seller/customer messaging so we can't help them if they have configuration questions, troubleshooting, etc.

I just wish there was some sort of antiamazon coalition that would help move more e-commerce away and some standard messaging to make this movement known enough. The problem is that the point of sale and the seller credibility are comingled hence why even our shopify customers go to Amazon first. If you aren't on amazon, they wonder if you are a 'real' company. There must be a better way.

Anti-Amazon coalition is called "anti-trust". That's why we can't let corporations grow this big, at least not this big in such a far reaching industry (ecommerce retail marketplace).

They've captured the market, now they can exert the lever as they please.

Based on how many people are talking about this stuff, I can't imagine how I have survived since 1997 without buying anything counterfeit off Amazon. What are people buying? How are you searching? Do you have any criteria when you buy something?

> I can't imagine how I have survived since 1997 without buying anything counterfeit off Amazon

Did you authenticate everything you ever bought from Amazon?

I noticed my SanDisk SD Card was fake when I studied the printed logo closely with a real one I had bought before.

Since SanDisk is such a notorious candidate for fakes om amazon, why do they even tolerate it?

Surely, for the sake of brand protection, they should make it clear that you can't buy their products on amazon?

Yes, yes, quit buying stuff from Amazon. That's what I said when I went to buy compression socks within the last week. I'll just buy from the vendor (OS1). Hey, they take Apple Pay, too. And, hey, what's this $0.98 that ended up in my cart? "Route package protection"?[0] You mean you're passing on the cost of package insurance to me? Fuck that, you can just cancel that $100 order for that $0.98.

If it's not bullshit like that, then my credit card info gets published to the world. So, fake reviews or not, there is a certain appeal to Amazon in that after 20 years I've not had credit card info published nor have I caught them trying to charge me for package insurance. Though I might not trust Amazon reviews, I trust the rest of their process far more than I do some random vendor. Which is why, much as I might wish otherwise, I continue to shop at Amazon.

[0]https://route.com WTF? Track packages and charge money for it? Who funds this shit?

I got an email from route.com the very same day I purchased a package that was handled via shop.app.

I can only guess that Shopify sold my email.

Someone at http://os1st.com did the same thing, which put me on Route's mailing list. The unsubscribe seems to work, but the whole thing just feels like everybody wanted a piece before passing you to the next vendor in the chain. And now if I see Route's name anywhere near a product, I'll walk out the door to the next vendor that DDG suggests.

Too bad, too, as the items I ordered seem to be good quality. They shipped quickly. They take Apple Pay. They were oh, so close, and then pissed it all away because someone at Route told them that if you make the print small enough maybe the customer won't notice the $0.98 you sneak in there. (I didn't notice until after the confirmation email.) Now it becomes "not the money, but the principle".

For UK users: I'm surprised the BBC are hijacking the back button here when redirecting from .com -> .co.uk. I thought that behaviour was reserved for more, well, scummy websites.

This appears to be the offending client-side code:

  let {isUkCombined: t} = e;
  const n = new URL(Object(c.a)())
  , {protocol: a, host: r, pathname: o} = n;
  if (Object(m.b)(),
  t && r.includes(".com")) {
    const e = r.replace(".com", ".co.uk");
    window.location.assign("".concat(a,"//").concat(e).concat(o))
 } else if (!t && n.host.includes(".co.uk")) {
    const e = n.host.replace(".co.uk", ".com");
   window.location.assign("".concat(a, "//").concat(e).concat(o))
 }

Anyone work there / know someone that works there and could fix?

Replacing "window.location.assign(...)", with "location.href = ..." should do it.

Looks like this comment worked. Thanks for fixing!

It's probably not perfect, but I use Fakespot <https://www.fakespot.com/>, which gives items on Amazon a rating for review accuracy.

https://www.reviewmeta.com is even better, sadly the owner seems to be on course to sell it.

Shame it's only available for Chrome. Do you know of any plans for a similar Firefox extension?

My last review was declined by Amazon and they didn't even bother telling me the reason, why the review was declined...

Buying on Amazon is becoming a real roll-of-the-dice. Last week I wanted to buy refill cord for my string trimmer (weed whacker, in local parlance). Listed among the third-party options was this apparently OEM part:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015T96KLO/

Many reviews say they received a knock off. I ordered from Home Depot instead. I don’t intend to use this right away and don’t want to be bitten later.

I reported this listing to Amazon, but it is still up. I assume this just isn’t a priority for them.

Amazon de facto approves of this - reviews of products which mention "this product came with the offer of payment/discount for a positive review" are deleted.

So Amazon not only doesn't care, they are encouraging it.

Here's an idea that would never work: how about a financial incentive straight from Amazon for leaving negative reviews?

Let's imagine a universe where Amazon does away with the star rating system and replaces it with a pro/con "tag" list. (e.g. "high quality" "smells bad" "broke quickly"). They then only allow reviews from verified buyers of an item. Amazon then contacts some percentage of said buyers proportionate to the number of reviews the item has has/how recently it was listed (to establish a baseline) and offers a small account credit for a reviewer to clearly state at least one thing they didn't like about the item, requiring a response other than "nothing". This would identify trends or common failure points. The more negative reviews a product has, the higher the reward that Amazon hands out. Scammy sellers would have to consistently "beat Amazon's offer" to get fake positive reviews.

In this hypothetical universe... would sellers setup shell accounts to purchase their own inventory and tank their other products' reviews for Amazon credit? Or would they buy out their own inventory to increase the ratio of positive to negative reviews? Would the cut that Amazon takes for using their platform outweigh the cost of paying off buyers/purchasing their own inventory? Would the cost to Amazon be worth the increased customer engagement?

It’s similar to rampant doping in competitive sports, where everyone knows what’s going on. When there are millions of dollars at stake in contracts, prize money, and sponsorships, people will cheat and take risks. Even if they’re caught, the payoffs are usually greater than consequences.

The incentives and payoffs are far, far greater than any type of consequences to the seller. Worst case, they can shut down and start another shill store.

Some sellers simply give out free units for good reviews.

Lots of them are offering a gift card for a review to purchasers - which seems slightly less scammy as you’re unlikely to leave a good review of a crappy product for a $5 gift card.

All the gift card offers I have gotten have required a 5* review.

Sure - but you’re less likely to want to leave a five star review if the product pissed you off.

I had this happen, left a negative review mentioning the pay-for-review scam, and had the review removed by Amazon because it's "off topic". I don't know if it's just aligned incentives, but Amazon doesn't seem to care about this kind of review stuffing at all.

I think this is an inherent problem with the internet. Amazon has an incentive to show products having tons of five-star reviews, or to push their own branded products.

If you buy something and it doesn't work, you can always just send it back. But most of the time it's fine. I found for more expensive items, I feel much safer shopping with Best buy. The prices are generally the same, and there's much more control over what you're actually purchasing. Buying a laptop off Amazon is like reading through a catalog of every laptop ever made in the Last 5 years.

Best Buy has a great selection, and I was able to get my laptop within a day or so.

To be fair to Amazon, they blunt a lot of the really negative experiences with store credit. For example once I purchased a table, didn't know how to put it together, and sort of broke it. I told Amazon I didn't really feel like sending it back because it was heavy, and I got a full refund.

Once you get your money back you're much less likely to complain, I don't have any real incentive to write a negative review about the product now

I mostly switched to eBay or the manufacturer directly. I've recently had to buy another pair of Apple Earphones and the Amazon reviews flat out stated "This is a fake, it is not the original product". It is still being sold on Amazon today and I ended up just buying it directly from Apple for a buck of two more and free shipping.

I'm staggered people didn't know this was a thing, anybody surprised must have their eyes closed or possibly be naive. It was obvious years ago, not just Amazon either... But most retailers. Most of what you see in life is fake and/or a scam, sad but true. Use your mind and stay away from scam products.

Why don't we make it the law for reviewers to disclose incentives in the reviews/ videos, similar to how youtubers have to disclose it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-x8DYTOv7w

There’s no point in more than two or possible three different scores:

Don’t recommend - Do recommend

Don’t recommend - Neutral - Do recommend

It’s rather silly when you rate an app with four out of five stars only to get a “Why didn’t you like our app?” question. And, as an app maker, anything other than a five star review feels like a punch in the face.

The problem with fake reviews is that it creates a truly negative customer experience. I am not sure why Amazon who is "obsessed with the customer" does not see this. All I can think of is that there are two customers here, the 3rd party seller and the end retail customer. I guess the 3rd party retailer is higher value. The only way I could see there being a feedback loop is if 3rd party returns take off.

Fake reviews will be the death of Amazon if Target/Walmart and others can get their act together.

With respect to charging cables, I can buy the same crappy ones at Ace Hardware that I buy on Amazon basically. Ace picks one crappy vendor but Amazon has 100+ of them. The only high quality ones I've found are anker, monoprice and Apple.

Lifx, people who make "smart" lightbulbs, have gamed the amazon seller system to remove critical reviews -- even those by high rank amazon reviewers. They really don't like their product described as: Hardware Malware.

Amazon is Big Data. They could _easily_ identify generated reviews if they wanted.

They don't.

I myself stopped writing reviews as an emotionally abusive department at Amazon discourages critical reviews _albeit_ 5 star. Community Team is staffed by persons with reprehensibly poor English skills not fit to judge review compliance with vague rules.

Don't trust inarticulate reviews.

Don't trust articulate reviews without line breaks.

Don't trust products with more than 800 reviews.

But wait there's more...

Amazon will cancel your account for returning "too many" items. Catch 22.

The US needs public identity services which large platforms like Amazon can be made to integrate with.

In this case the idea would be to link accounts on Amazon with these services, so that users can filter only by reviews written by individuals that have gone through the necessary steps to verify their identity more concretely. Government should step in here, not necessarily as the only provider of these services, but as an alternative to the current insecure and inefficient model of doing this all ad hoc across any number of companies individually.

Sellers can still game this system by bribing buyers with money, gift cards and products. Most fake reviews these days are written by real people with similar demographic profiles like your average buyer.

Once you write enough popular reviews you will receive email offering a variety of remuneration tactics to whore your dignity - confirming the prior reply. All such email is forwarded through Amazon. They do nothing to stop these solicitations clearly violating seller rules or Amazon Vine.

Amazon takes no actions when this behavior is reported. They really don't care.

"We want your honest reviews"

lies

they want lies

I've made it a practice to run ReviewMeta (https://reviewmeta.com) on any unfamiliar item I'm considering purchasing.

neat. Now I'll run that along with https://FakeSpot.com

Seems like looking at Amazon reviews (and not just Amazon!) has become an art form on its own. I actually feel quite confident (likely far more than I should) in my ability to differentiate between product listings that are likely fake review battlegrounds and those that seem mostly legit. Cheaper bulk availability of fakes only makes that easier.

The next meta level would be competitors trying to make each other look bad by sending hordes of fake five stars at each other. Who knows, perhaps this is already happening in some markets?

Amazon actually has no incentive to solve the fake review problem is that it achieved bulk volume. If it were the n the formation stage they would have solved it but now when everyone is conditioned to go to Amazon it’s easier to just refund the money and push the expense onto the seller. That way they get the reviews, have people reasonable happy as they get their money back, and not incur any revenue loss in the process. Sure they cause annoyance to a few but they can live with it as long as their moat is big enough.

It almost feels that sometimes I should/could write a book about all of the shady growth hack's in action (inclusive of what I have and am currently doing) because some of these stories seem old in the grand scheme of things.

Amazon reviews/Trustpilot/Google Reviews/Facebook Reviews etc are cheap as chips and ultimately they work.

I now remind myself that in order to take on board someone's review, I need to know the person otherwise we could be chalk and cheese in likes and dislikes and they are influencing my decision.

I highly suggest people use https://www.fakespot.com/ for any and all buying through Amazon. Unforuntately it only has a chrome extension but you can manually type in the link through the website. It has saved me from a few purchases, where there were 1000's of fake 5 star reviews but all the real ones were between 2-3 (all of them with comments as to how they couldn't understand how the product was rated so high).

Fake reviews and fake products.

I wanted to buy turkish cotton bath towels the other day, and it's basically impossible to find (really, try it). Nearly every listing has misleading discriptions in spite of 5 star reviews.

I feel like unless I know the specific brand or product, I'm using Amazon less and less. I guess there's a niche for competitors - better search and a high quality filter.

I haven't used amazon in years and this was largely the reason why.

After getting scammed a few times by products that seemed to have good reviews I decided to just keep shopping local instead where I can actually see the product and speak to human beings who used it.

Amazon will forever be the one stop shop for cheap counterfeit shit until they actually address these issues.

Same. I canceled Prime two years ago, and haven't bought anything from Amazon in several months. I just buy locally now, and if I can't find something locally, I buy it from the manufacturer's website or a smaller reseller with a better reputation.

So easy to say. My local stores all have at least a 25 to 50 percent markup on anything on Amazon. Cameras to drones to computers to auto parts. Amazon beats on price by a huge margin.

I'd love to buy tyres and oil from the local shop but the 50 to 100 percent price difference is not worth it.

When your counterfeit Michelins blow out and your engine siezes up on the counterfeit Castrol you may have a different view on prices and value.

You have no way of knowing that the overpriced stuff at the local garage is not fake either. I've had the Austrian consumer affairs department intervene on my behalf a number of times when local garages attempt to overprice on items that were either not required during the service or overpriced. I've had local plumbers try to charge double the price on certain items when they thought I wouldn't notice. Your rose colored glasses are quaint. Everybody is out to make a buck and I wouldn't put it past local shops to buy fake products and charge double for it. I'd rather my fake stuff at a decent price thankyou.

I stopped buying electronics after receiving a counterfeit Playstation controller, from the actual, Amazon Choice, PlayStation store. Unsurprisingly, my review that contained a teardown comparing the internals of a genuine controller with the counterfeit didn't ever make it to the product page.

I also stopped buying anything health/body related after receiving some "organic bees wax" for some DIY candles that smelled like a chemical plant and melted at the wrong temperature (who knows what it was) and some vitamin D pills that were all melted.

Wasn't there an app to remove those?

Also, I just stopped buying from Amazon a couple of years back. Only purchase in my history for the past 3 years is an Apple charger since when I changed from Android to iOS they didn't deliver them with the device anymore and Amazon had the cheapest price from the actual Apple distributor (no re-distributor).

I have been bitten by positive amazon reviews buying fake stuff (usually phone/laptop batteries). There is something about seeing two products one bustling with reviews and other not, and the mind biased toward the former. These days i seek outside reviews (wirecutter, reddit etc) before trusting amazon.

I trust Walmart's return policy more than Amazon's reviews. I think Walmart gives you 90 days for a return.

Walmart also lets you (or did before covid) just throw the product at the local store and they’d handle it. Very nice.

I hate buying stuff thru amazon. It's really hard to find what you are looking for and I can't trust it really.

Only upside they have is that their delivery is fast and service is ok (compared to normal retail offering online store)

Can't wait to be able to go somewhere, look at the options and talk to a human.

Online shopping is shit

Right now probably some remote indian village is employing people (like mechanical turk ironically on amazon as well) to write X amount of reviews per day sort of like moderation. In the not so distant future someone will do a GPT3 version of this. Time to reinvent the reviews.

I use fakespot but I’ve noticed merchants now dogging fakespot as well. I am not sure about other folks here, but merchants selling these gift cards to people should be illegal and I am so sure if Amazon announces a reward for such actions people will themselves report it.

> merchants [dodging] fakespot

how?

Fake reviews, that surely Amazom is aware of.

Knock-off products, that again are not a secret.

Unless there's viable competition, these things are not going to change.

Lied to. Stripped of our privacy. Influenced and manipulated by analysis of our own behaviours. And so on.

It's a shame it's come to this.

I only trust reviews of persons I personally know. At least I know the person exists. However, many of these FB likes seem to be over-motivated by some campign trick, but I also know already who are usual suspects there, so can filter them out.

At this point people should just accept that all online reviews are fake. Unfortunately, we've found ourselves right back at where we started. There's just no good way to ensure trust at every step in the system.

A lot of complaints here. I personally never had any problems with Amazon (Germany). I might not have noticed that I received counterfeits for certain products, though. Does the shady stuff only happen in certain countries?

Well, the ratings as displayed cannot be trusted here either. Recently, I saw a product on amazon Germany with 3.5 stars, determined from 4 reviews. The reviews were 2x 5 stars and no text, 2x 1 star with reasonable reviews IMHO (and a high number of 'Users rated this review useful').

Still, amazon weights the 5-star no text reviews higher to arrive at 3.5 stars.

(The product now has 7 reviews with at least 3x 1 star text reviews and the weighting still favors the no-text 4/5 star ratings: [1])

[1] https://smile.amazon.de/Lego-Technic-42125-Ferrari-Corse/pro...

Why buy fake reviews when you can just create them in bulk with a GPT2 model?

Do you not have to have bought the item in order to leave a review? If you do, then fake reviews should not be economical for anything sufficiently expensive -- judging from the article, maybe $20 or so.

https://j.gifs.com/o2vRzL.gif I'm shocked that there is gambling in this establishment. Sir here are your winnigs

RANT_MODE: ON

Nothing new. This has been the case for years. The worst of it was that they used to (I think this might no longer be the case) accept reviews from anyone with an account, whether they bought the product or not.

We have direct experience on this. My wife used to sell products on Amazon. People were leaving reviews that tagged as "Verified Review" BEFORE the product was delivered. Often times they would buy an item, leave a review and cancel before it shipped.

Even worse, these products required some use before anyone could form an opinion. This did not matter at all. People could leave reviews before buying, right after buying, before receiving and when the package was dropped off, etc.

And, of course, 100% of the reviews left before the product shipped or before it arrived were negative. 100% of the review left by non-buyers were negative.

In other words, sellers on Amazon have been conducting armed warfare through negative reviews, star ratings and seller feedback.

The other thing they are doing is consuming competitor's advertising budget before prime time. Say you have a budget of $1000 per day for click-through-ads on Amazon. That's $30K per month. Competitors would hire people --usually in China or India-- to click on your ads furiously right after midnight US time. By the time people awoke in the US and went to buy on Amazon your $1,000 ad budget was gone and nobody saw your product offerings.

We burned through tens of thousands of dollars exactly this way. I had to fight Amazon for months to get them to have a look at the statistical analysis I put in front of them. At the end of that process they refunded us a fraction of our spend. What worse is that we lost all search ratings (some of our products were on page one for applicable keywords) and Amazon absolutely refused to turn back the clock and restore our standing. It was an absolute nightmare. They could not have cared less. This is when my wife decided to stop selling on Amazon. As a doctor she had no patience for that lunacy.

The other problem is that Amazon does not preserve advertising records (or they didn't back then). If you did not manually download your statistics with regularity there was no way you could reconstruct what happened six months ago. If I remember correctly you get a few weeks or one month's download and that's it. I don't know if it's true or not, but their seller-no-service people told me the records are not preserved.

Even worse, they refused to provide us with the identity of the seller or sellers who attacked our advertising budget and through negative reviews. They told me they identified them and banned them from Amazon. If they were in the US or Europe we wanted to seek legal action against them. Amazon, once again, could not have cared less.

Based on my experience and that of others whose lives have been turned upside-down by Amazon product and account suspensions as well as flat out fraud in reviews and ratings, I would not recommend that anyone bet their livelihood on Amazon. They could destroy your existence overnight. I know people who are still trying to recover from daring to think they could "build a business" on Amazon. It's a farce. You own nothing. They control everything. And they can flick you off the platform without consequence because you are less than a rounding error.

In our case we both benefited from having careers and a successful tech business, so the Amazon failure didn't hurt us badly. Not so for friends who, quite literally, depended on their "Amazon store" to live, thought they had a shot at improving their lives, risked money they could not afford to lose and actually wanted to own a nice lifestyle business.

RANT_MODE: OFF

Yes, they accept reviews from non "Verified Purchasers". This is typically a platform for tiresome SJW soapbox palavering.

> before..delivered

Community Team at one time sanctioned this behavior. Now they don't bother.

> warfare

Were you perhaps paying into the minimum number of seller features? Not FBA?

> ad poison

As an ardent adblocker that's a bridge too far. That's more the province of disincentivizing 419 email scammer fake banks.

> nightmare

The consumer side nightmare is Community Team. Spend some time crafting a high value review then yoink "this review violates our terms" but never mentions which rule or with which language. I empathize with your suffering

"Your review has been removed for violating our rules"

'Which rule?' or 'Which part of my review?'

silence ensues or another link to the rules with no qualification.

Differently abusive are single character "reviews". I _HATE_ Communities Team. Everyone should complain about that first; they have a hand in seller misery. There is no department above them. There are no appeals. There is no recourse.

> that anyone bet their livelihood on Amazon

The safe bet as a side hustle seems to be drop-ship accounts paying neither warehousing nor ad spend.

Amazon Retail Customer Service quality has steadily decreased these prior three years about the same rate as FBA packaging atrocities. Ship a teddybear wrapped in bubbles in a giant box. Ship a laptop in a skin tight box. Send an SSD loose in a soft mailer.

Don't allow Amazon to be your sole selling platform.

On the buyer side ask for retail escalation to "put a note for the Auditors"

wink

> Were you perhaps paying into the minimum number of seller features? Not FBA?

Full FBA

> Don't allow Amazon to be your sole selling platform.

Exactly.

I have friends who we know people who have had products suspended on Amazon for nonsense (or unknowable, due to the opacity you mentioned) reasons. They decided Amazon was more risk than they wanted to put on 100% of their income generation strategy. They started to work the direct channel. It took time and effort. Now about 30% of their income is direct and does not depend at all on Amazon. They want to eventually reach 75%, with 100% being the ultimate dream. They want to leave Amazon but they are stuck until they can replace their income through direct sales.

I usually just vet reviews for the same product from other online retailers, re: BH Photo, Best Buy, Target, Walmart (although not sure about Walmart reviews), Monoprice, maybe Newegg, etc

What’s the deal with people answering questions completely irrelevantly on Amazon? Do they boost your review karma if you answer a bunch of questions or something?

When a question is asked Amazon will email blast some small percentage of people who have purchased the product and people selling the product. If a customer who got this email blasts chooses to respond to this email, they may answer the question the only way they know how - completely irrelevantly. Beyond that, I've definitely seen answers where the answerer clearly thinks they are answering a human and not posting to a public page for everyone to read.

The question is framed something like this:

Dwight, as a reviewer of X, can you help this customer? Rene asked <the question>

So it's like it's been directed at you. So people will answer with "don't know" or "I didn't buy this" or whatever.

What’s wrong with only buying products actually sold by Amazon themselves? If only a third party is selling it on their website, maybe go elsewhere?

I received a bulk mailer recently that looked like an "Amazon postcard" that was essentially recruiting for fake reviewers.

It's quite amazing what Amazon can get away with. They really own the marketplace. We need new laws, fast.

I buy the Product; I will write Review as Verified Buyer; I will return the product retaining the Review;

this is an old story

it happens a lot in the past 2017,2018

there's lots of such services sold on marketing forums

in my opinion,

rating should based on how much products sold

whatcha think?

Can accepting reviews only from a verified purchase reduce this kind of fraud?

Better idea: Fall back to trusting brands.

What does Amazon really offer now: 1) Search convenience, which is really not that big of a deal and 2) Fast delivery but everyone is catching up and do we really need that thing in 2 days instead of 3?

I never buy on Amazon and I don't feel as though I'm missing out.

I haven’t bought anything off of Amazon in 2 years. Granted I use eBay a lot, but the only time I’ve been burned is when I’ve bought something used and the seller never shipped. Otherwise I’ll buy things from Part-express, Vitacost, Target, Best Buy, Sweetwater, etc.

3. Amazing customer support.

Living in "Servicewüste" Germany I would still buy from amazon, even without the first two points that you mentioned. Because customer support... isn't a thing here. On top of that there's things like higher prices, and more expensive and slower shipping usually slower by up to a week, not by a day or two.

Amazon's customer support goes way and beyond to help you out, I've had hundreds of euros worth of stuff sent to me again right away, no questions asked - because I called them and said that the official delivery information saying that it's been delivered to me personally an hour ago is not true, and I don't have the items.

That all being said, I do wish amazon would take care of fake reviews, and mixed inventory from different sellers.

The problem is that Amazon likely has an incentive to keep fake reviews in that lots of positive fake reviews probably encourage buying. They may or may not be aware that they have this incentive, or they may believe that they don’t- but if fake positive reviews do encourage buying then they will find their way back to inferior content moderation.

Once you start looking you see this problem everywhere. Why is the Apple App Store absolutely crap? Why is the Google App Store even worse? Why is social media filled with astroturfing?

The problem isn’t just convincing fakes, the problem is also that the platforms have an alignment of incentive with the fakes. While removing fake reviews or fake outrage bait is a tractable problem, wanting to remove it is a harder problem- it just doesn’t make sense for platforms absent more competition.

Tl;dr: Fakes/spam can prosper on platforms if they only harm the user and are helpful to the platform.

I always check out Amazon reviews. Is there a better system?

I know a lot of top sellers who did this, it’s hard for the newbies now

Amazon needs to stop allowing review to be left by people who do not have a verified purchase of an item on their accounts. If you really think about reviews, without honesty, trust, and verification the entire review system is meaningless.

Seems like a good application for GPT-3

i just bought an old reddit account with karma so i can post on wsb.

I recently received a mass CCed email from an Amazon seller to 70 other customers (hello GDPR?) offering free products in exchange for 5 star reviews. There's no proper channel to report this. Tried to leave a review with proof of it and it was denied. I really get the feeling Amazon are ok with it.

permy.link strikes again

IMO having a made in China filter is good enough

Bought a gaming chair that had 5 star reviews.

It smelled toxic. Smell didn't dissipate after a month. Returned it and found out buried under all the 5 star reviews of people citing the same issue.

Foams can be really smelly. You never really know what they sourced to save a penny

the actual seat and back rest was wrapped inside a plastic bag. The fake leather just smelled toxic. Literally the whole room would stink and it would give me headaches until I packed it up for a full refund.

In the past 3 months I have ended up returning 80% of my purchases from Amazon because the 5 star reviews did not match with the actual product's performance or quality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com