Any ranking system you can suggest can and will be gamed and exploited. The problem is that Amazon is trying to rank products at all, not whatever opaque algorithm they are using to do the ranking. They need to turn off all the ranking and rating, and start actually vetting their suppliers, but that’s hard and expensive so they will never do it.
> They need to...start actually vetting their suppliers, but that’s hard and expensive so they will never do it.
I agree they need to start actually vetting their suppliers. But I disagree with you about the ranking. "Sort by average ranking" is broken obviously brain dead ways. They need a transparent ranking system that correctly balances number of reviews with average rating. I don't want to user their actually opaque "relevance" ranking.