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Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

> To make their blackhead remover listing look legit, Amvoom then submitted several hundred orders over Amazon, and immediately cancelled each order. These depleted my Klein bottle inventory on Amazon - even though nothing was paid for, and nothing was shipped. In turn, this removed the "second color option" for their blackhead-remover, since Amazon felt that the Klein bottles were out of stock. Result: their black-head remover listing got 199 positive reviews, and the Klein bottle did not show up as a "color choice" in the Amvoom black-head listing.

How do people manage to figure out such elaborate ways to manipulate Amazon results without getting banned? Getting banned has minimal cost? Poor detection? Inside information?

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> How do people manage to figure out such elaborate ways to manipulate Amazon results without getting banned? Getting banned has minimal cost? Poor detection? Inside information?

They don't actually ban the accounts doing this. They only remove the reviews/listings, but don't take any action on the accounts (so they just re-list 24 hours later)

Apparently when Amazon acts, they are just removing the fake reviews, sometimes the whole product but never actually banning the sellers account (even if every product that seller is listing is pumped full of fake reviews)

It seems to be a endless cycle of a item being hijacked or a item filled with fake reviews, then when reported to Amazon they simply remove the fake reviews or the product but don't take any action at all against the seller (or accounts making the fake reviews)

This thread[0] on the Amazon Seller forums is crazy with people finding products that are scam listings (with 10,000+ fake reviews), they report them, the products get taken down, then 24 hours later the same sellers have re listed with more fake reviews.

Amazon simply do not care, if they did they would:

A) Address the root problem

B) Ban the seller accounts clearly manipulating the system.

Amazon is quick to permaban accounts from real sellers, who make a single mistake (sometimes completely out of their control) but are happy to let these fake review/sellers keep their accounts.

[0] https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/review-manipulatio...

> Amazon simply do not care

Why though? How does this not hurt Amazon long term? What are they gaining from attracting dodgy sellers in the short term?

Messed up internal incentives, I guess. It happens to every large company.

Revenue.

The answer to _almost_ every question that starts with “why don’t they” ultimately ends up being “money”.

The marginal edge cases boil down to “power” or “stupidity”.

Retail is a low margin business, whereas being a platform for third party sellers is a high margin business. As long as their reputation amongst sufficient number of people is high enough to keep them paying for Amazon prime, then that is the most amount of effort they should put into retail.

Long term is subjective.

But the more important point is, Amazon is a must-use shipping provider with a crappy platform. They don't give a fuck about the retail part. They diversified with AWS, Jeff plays with his billions, fights unions, tracks piss bottles, cancels or renews Prime shows, goes to space, etc.. etc.. the site at this point is almost just a cute idiosyncrasy. As long as it runs and the orders are flowing, it's A-OK. Of course there's are probably many teams working on "reforming" it. The NEW amazon.com. The redesign. The refactor. The revamp. The modernization. But all of those are just to keep people working there so they maintain the old behemoth while their project slowly gets put on the backburner (and/or gets scaled down to a small demo page somewhere that no one ever sees or uses).

If you can get someone else's account banned for having fake reviews, it would be easy to take out the competition that way.

Fundamentally, it is too easy to sign up as a seller.

> Amazon is quick to permaban accounts from real sellers, who make a single mistake (sometimes completely out of their control) but are happy to let these fake review/sellers keep their accounts.

They banned my customer account from leaving reviews, though, because I mentioned that I got scammed from a listing I left a review on.

Sean, I just added a few things to my note. I'll try to copy/paste 'em here, although I suspect my sleepy fingers will goof up:

I haven't really reviewed what I'm posting here - heck I can't spellcheck at 12:30 in the morning:

Amazon, through its "Brand Registry" allows anyone with an issued trademark to take over other brands, whether or not the brand is covered by the specific goods that the trademark was issued for.

Brand Name Hijacking takes advantage of several bugs in Amazon's seller business model:

1) Amazon Brand Name Registry allows the owner of a USPTO trademark to take over listings of non-trademarked brands.

2) Amazon Brand Name Registry does not prevent a registered Amazon brand from over-reaching beyond the regulated goods and services associated with that trademark.

3) Amazon combines reviews of different item variations and colors, even though they are from completely different listings and manufacturers.

4) Amazon debits inventory even when an order is cancelled, allowing a denial of service attack to exhaust inventory in a seller's listing, at no cost to the attacker.

Effects of Brand Hijacking:

1) Shoddy or unproven products receive five-star reviews, apparently from several years.

2) Consumers, relying on Amazon star ratings, are grossly misled by the summary reviews.

3) Disreputable sellers are rewarded (at the cost of honest sellers) by large volume sales caused by high ratings.

4) Unscrupulous sellers of reviews receive money from Amazon sellers in return for inflated reviews.

5) Independent sellers on Amazon -- specifically those who have delivered extremely high customer satisfaction -- are locked out of their listings and pushed out of their long term business.

You forgot one. Amazon uses seller data to target which products they will produce under their own Amazon brand. So creative entrepreneurs eventually find they are completing against Amazon directly.

This is why Amazon will eventually be replaced by a company that can do things better, faster, and cheaper.

Walmart was correlating credit card information in the 80's. My mind still boggles at how poorly they have handled the Internet. If there is a company that can best Amazon and provide unique experiences with their tens of thousands of local warehouses (their retail stores!) it should be them. It's utterly mystifying that instead of leveraging their strengths they ran off and created a less functional clone of Amazon. Yikes!

The Walton family that owns Walmart has a higher net worth than Bezos, according to google ($235B Walton vs $196B Bezos), so the owners of Walmart are still more wealthy than the owners of Amazon. And whatever they are doing in brick and mortar is orthogonal to Amazon, Amazon can't do B&M at the same scale, and Walmart can't do online sales at the same scale.

How is that metric relevant? If any, market cap is the one that would show what the market thinks each company is capable of.

Does Walmart operate outside the US? Because Amazon is pretty much everywhere around the world. If Amazon were to die tomorrow, I'd have a real problem getting a lot of equipment for various projects, especially PC hardware, in a timely manner. As much as I hate how things have gone downhill lately, it doesn't seem to be as bad (yet) over here in Europe with getting fake items. The main issue I see here, is that there's been a huge influx of cheap Chinese items which flood out all the known brands that I usually buy from, making it hard to find actual quality items. Prime is also still 69€/year. And they offer delivery to their own containers which you can unlock with a barcode on your phone to get your package 24/7, avoiding house delivery altogether, which is a huge reason why I still use them as opposed to competition, since where I live in is a real pain to find and often delivery people just give up trying to find me and just send the items back, or drop it at some shop at the end of their shift, which is often at the opposite side of the city.

In fact it seems most of the issues I see people complaining about on HN are US-centric issues? Perhaps all this brand-hijacking is happening over there because of the market size and thus pay-off to do the "dirty" work?

Getting a trademark is not that expensive or complicated. Why do sellers not get trademarks?

Looking at the articles from that seller, I don't even think they attach the articles for the reviews directly. It seems like they attach them to articles with many reviews, so that they can add their own fake reviews without being detected.

If they made a new article, which immediately gets a lot of 5 star reviews, that'd be suspicious and Amazon would probably detect it.

But if they attach it to an already established article, they can happily add their fake reviews and then detach them again, making it look legit.

Just a theory though.

Getting banned has a minimal cost if you are a throwaway goods reseller running off a newly registered business in a region where you can effectively ignore all foreign laws, falsify documentation, or whatever else.

Getting banned has a high cost if you are a single small business with a long-term decades of time in business as the same company registration.

> How do people manage to figure out such elaborate ways to manipulate Amazon results without getting banned?

Because Amazon doesn't care, they still get paid if you buy a real product or a shitty counterfeited product.

In fact, such manipulation can result in increased sales and driving up the price of a product. You're more likely to buy something that has a ton of reviews and purchases, and more likely to pay more money for it if it has a ton of positive reviews.

Either they have played around , experienced a similar issue and went on to discover more, or maybe from inside. I think it's the first option, though.

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