Amazon is going downhill quickly. I target shoot with a compound bow as a hobby, and as a result I usually buy a set of arrows a year. In 2015 when I would search for "target arrows" on Amazon the first page results would be for legit American companies who make exceptional arrows for about $30 per set of 6. Now, and for the last 2 years if I search for "target arrows" I get pages and pages of Chinese crap arrows (I purchased several sets and returned them). The crappy ones are also selling for $30 per set but they are made out of weak aluminum and come bent up. To get the nice American made ones I have to got 10-20 pages deep or search by brand name and even than the real ones are usually on page 2 with page one featuring the same crap from China. Now, don't get me wrong, I am sure they can make quality arrows in China, but what makes it to the top of Amazon is utter crap.
I noticed this with many other products as well, but the arrows is a particularly noticeable example because it's something I regularly replace as they get beat up and destroyed (I shoot a lot).
It's really baffling to me how despite being one of the largest companies in the world and being centered around e-commerce Amazon doesn't do anything about these issues weakening their core product. I say "do nothing" not "fail to stop" because I haven't seen any evidence that Amazon does anything at all to prevent or discourage these behaviors.
I wonder if it's because they push the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mantra too far. After all, their current approach is successful so why risk changing anything? That would also explain why the website overall looks so dated in many areas.
I don't think it's baffling at all. Facebook is the largest social media company, and what do they do to try to stop all of the propaganda, troll factories and hateful things going on there? Naught. They know that they are the largest company and therefore doesn't have to do anything as long as their position stays the same. Which it seems to be doing. Yes, there are people leaving the platform but where do they go? There is no real contender, therefore Facebook will remain number 1.
On my city Startup Facebook group, I see lots of posts offering fake Facebook & Amazon review services. When I report such posts, the response I get is, the said posts doesn't violate Facbook's Community standard Guidlines.
I don't think it's completely the same thing though, this propaganda and trolling could arguably be a positive for Facebook by driving engagement. Of course there's a balance to maintain but it's not necessarily all bad. Socially and ethically it might be bad but bean-counting-wise it might not be that terrible. Facebook doesn't really care if people trust what they see on the platform as long as they generate pageviews and get ad impressions.
On the other hand I don't see how fake reviews and bootleg items do anything but hurt Amazon by making people distrust the platform. You don't want to add friction to the buying process by making people triple check that they're not getting duped.
And it's not like it's a new problem either, lack of trust was a huge issue in the early days of e-commerce, I'm sure Amazon doesn't want to return to these days where you felt like you were swimming in a sea of scams.
The problem is that before you bought stuff largely from Amazon.
Whereas now it's more akin to eBay which always suffered with scam problems (and responded by giving buyers far more power - which then resulted in buyers scamming sellers instead of the reverse).
I wish it could return to the days where you just bought stuff from Amazon - or at least make it very easy to only search for their products.
I have friends who work on teams in Facebook who use ML to detect and filter out “undesirable content”. It’s a difficult problem but they’re a pretty intense team (workaholics) so I wouldn’t say they spend 0 effort.
That seems shortsighted for such a traditionally longsighted company. If you sell tents to people who sell fruit, and don't screen the fruit for disease, and then people get sick, they will use other bazaars.
I think a major reason behind this problem is that their entire seller system to Add/Edit Amazon product listings (Amazon Seller Central) is run almost entirely as an outsourced division.
The website is entirely different (although Amazon themed/branded). It still doesn't have full mobile support. Phone support is almost non-existent. Most customer support is outsourced to foreign countries. It is a joke.
It once took me 3 months of arguing back and forth to get an erroneous $30 seller fee refunded since there was no "supervisor" to speak to and only a broken ticket system where I would received canned apologies and promises - just to have the same result over and over.
They are clearly understaffed and/or don't know what they're doing most of the time, so counterfeit, duplicate, and junk/low quality listings get through all the time.
They're betting on the regulatory force of their review system and product listing SEO, which is linked to their search algorithm.
The truth is that it's easier for smaller sellers/brands who laser focus on one or a few products to outcompete bigger brands with many products, and as a consequence appear first in the search results.
The more niche a product is, the easier it is to compete. It's just hard to tell an establish brand apart from a brand that just does Amazon, if you search for something (brands) outside of your knowledge domain. Smaller private label brands can appear more professional as a result of that mentioned laser focus and having Amazon as only channel.
In my opinion it's also the fault of the bigger brands not investing enough into the optimization of their listing, they don't depend on it.
>also the fault of the bigger brands not investing enough into the optimization of their listing, they don't depend on it.
I wouldn't call it their "fault", per se. Thought experiment:
If I'm a third party seller on Amazon, why should I / what do I gain by investing into the optimization of my listing if I do not depend on my Amazon listing for the majority of my revenue?
>If I'm a third party seller on Amazon, why should I / what do I gain by investing into the optimization of my listing if I do not depend on my Amazon listing for the majority of my revenue?
Sure, you're right, that's how businesses think, and it makes sense. But the side effect is the situation that was brought up, that customers don't understand why their favorite products don't show up higher up in the list, if at all. there might be a point where it can affect a brand and their domain authority. Like Google search, the stuff that doesn't show up on the first pages is perceived as less relevant.
Sorry for this late response, just saw your reply.
A cynical explanation would be that Amazon has looked into it but have decided that it is more beneficial to promote Chinese crap over quality products, precisely because they break more often (more replacements sold) and more people buy low priced crap than high quality products that cost more (more earnings for Amazon).
It's amazing the extent that Chinese crap covers in meeting product market demands. I could see why some people will just chance it on cheap electronics like a Chinese GoPro when the real thing is already expensive and may be 4-5x the price. But what's infuriating is when obscure things like fake ear plugs and knock-off lighters get delivered to you because it's so unexpected it becomes nonsensical. Lower value discretionary things are now prevalently faked to the point that it makes you wonder why the hell would someone go through the effort of manufacturing and shipping a product that brings in such a small profit after fees and expenses unless millions of items were being sold. In the end, sellers supplying cheap crap through Amazon now have a huge market in reach, Amazon makes more money from more transactions, and customers are stuck hoping Amazon will still provide proper support and refunds for legitimate purchase issues.
thing is, you perceive it as a problem. it’s not. like google dumbing down email and usenet and so on, the next growth market is the folks that want the cheap shit.
I was recently researching car dashcams. On Amazon the top brand has thousands of reviews but the most critical one accuses the seller of offering free mounts in exchange for 5* reviews. The second most prominent one is featured heavily in a deal aggregator website which I knew about from before.
I decided to do my research outside of Amazon. The most reliable brand which I chose based on independent review sites and user forums does not actually appear on first 10 pages of Amazon search results. I bought it anyways, and it is so good value for money that I have ordered another one. Safe to say I don't trust Amazon recommendations at all.
One way to overcome this sort by "Most reviews" which normally Amazon hides (I think they do it to give chance to sell new brands/products more). You have more chance to find the product you want and more trustful if it had 10K reviews instead of 10 reviews. I wrote about how to do it. Full disclosure, I am the author of free web app tool on the article.
https://medium.com/@ceyhunkazel/amazon-search-hack-eliminate...
I've noticed that sellers have been gaming this metric as well. I was recently shopping for a phone case and other phone accessories. What I found is that sellers are re-purposing SKUs from other highly rated products. I found a ~4.5+ star product with thousands of reviews but saw that most of the reviews were for a completely different item that is no longer being sold. So they'll take a highly rated product, put a different item in its place.
In Europe each country (with an Amazon presence ofc) has its own website, each with its own stock and sellers. Buying from the US website is often a no-go, because of the shipping times and the customs fees, and also buying from other european countries is often bad as you forego free shipping and returns.
But anyway thank you for your product, it's already pretty useful for brand products. :)
Site is recently reopened (2 weeks) with new domain https://www.junglesearch.net and I get feedbacks to add other countries and I really like to add them. It requires some API work to get new country's categories and checking which options are working on which department so it required some work. CA, UK are on my top list to add.
Thank you for the comment. It is really free , I do not sell user search data I do not even record them, I only use Yandex Metrica to see how users use the site to improve site usability. One main problem is user try to chose "Most reviews" sort option without choosing any Amazon Department (When All Departments is active most of sort options will not work so I do not show them) and I even placed a site tour to make users notice it and it worked for some some users but not all of them but it is an improvement. Actually money comes from Amazon Associates Program that's the only way to monetize the site.
Sorry for the late reply, I went road-tripping with the new dashcam. I went with Viofo A119. I think it's pretty reliable and good value for about $90 (plus an SD card). Also ordered a CPL filter got one of the cams, it's not arrived yet.
Quite often, thanks to eBay, Amazon and other online, those retail stores simply aren't there any more. My options are destroyed, and I have no choice but to try and buy online or drive miles on a "maybe chance".
There used to be a superb hardware store and a great outdoor store near me. Both have closed along with so much else on the high street. If I try and get a lot of what the hardware store carried either online or in other retail (the big DIY sheds) I'll get a far inferior cheap and nasty Chinese equivalent for surprisingly little saving. The items I actually want remain elusive.
The outdoor store had staff that climbed, hiked and so on, and were great for advice as well as product. If you wanted something a little out of the ordinary (either specialist or more unusual sizes) they could order it in for next day at no cost. I got a couple of super cheap items in their closing down sale. :(
I could probably drive 100 miles to Manchester or Glasgow and find a suitable retail option. That would make anything other than carefully planned bulk purchase crazy expensive.
Online has been great for rare niche items, or electronics. For an awful lot of the day-to-day rest I'm left feeling that after the initial boost when they first set up, it's left us far worse off. To cap it all Amazon are rarely cheaper any more.
For any product I care about, I do my best to find online retailers who specialize in that category. I'll buy disposable stuff off Amazon, or something I literally cannot find anywhere else, but that's about it.
I broke my rule last week to buy a CB radio that was about 66% the usual retail price, so of course the seller rewarded me by having it delivered 600 miles away (either that, or USPS seriously messed up) and then failing to respond to my inquiries.
I much preferred the convenience of a single source which already had all my payment details setup, delivery addresses set up, and which I knew wouldn't give me any bullshit with returns.
Fulfillment should be a commodity, and I don't want to have to deal with how different brands have structured their own fulfillment.
Supporting a tiny store that does something for the community (ie real reviews) is more important to me than not having to fill out my address on another form.
I live off grid, 2+ hours from any store that would carry such arrows, and I used to buy them just fine from Amazon. My comment was about the decline of Amazon, not a request to solve my arrow buying problem :)
Amazon wants to automate & eliminate manual tasks, not add more manual tasks to what they've already got.
But Amazon's bright sparks might be able to come up with an automated approach to solving this problem (e.g. via machine learning to identify the suspicious patterns of behaviour that Which? and others have observed) if they are suitably incentivised (e.g. sufficiently embarrassed)
I agree with this, but would like to say, if you open your orders history, you can order the same arrows again assuming the business is still selling them on Amazon.
In an effort to get completely off of Google, I moved my music library off of Google Music and was going to just use an MP3 player. I had some suggestions from friends (Sony, Phillips, Onkyo, Pioneer) and decided to search Amazon to see what I could find.
When I did a search on Amazon, it was page after page after page of Chinese MP3 players, all under $50. Most of the Hi-Fi players my friends recommended were in the $4-$500 range and up. Even after searching for the specific models they recommended, I still couldn't find them. The search results would return the same sub $50 players.
After a few minutes I gave up and went directly to the manufacturers site. Even more discouraging, when I was googling "Pioneer MP3 player" the Pioneer website was completely buried in the search results, but the first two pages of SERP's had a myriad of Amazon results.
There was a time when you just expected a company to be on page 1 if you searched directly by the company name and product. And these were not fly-by-night companies nobody has heard of. These were major electronic and audio companies I was searching for. Depressing to say the least
Why not order online from a sporting goods store, or, if possible, direct from the manufacturer?
"Get everything in one place" was more valuable when we had to travel from place to place and it took 30 minutes, but traveling from one website to another takes no time, so the proposition isn't as strong.
Return policies, security, etc, are concerns still, but those cons come along with the pros of no commingling, probably a lower price if ordering direct, and supporting the economic diversity of having more than one store.
Yes, at this point I'm considering cancelling my Prime subscription since I noticed that for many product categories I frequently buy (audio equipment, HIFI, biking gear, clothing, hardware) Amazon is a subpar option.
- Product exploration, curation and comparison is a huge problem at Amazon. Unless I know exactly what I want, I don't even bother searching on Amazon. This issue extends to the quality of the product selection - I think the marketplace approach is a mistake. If I wanted to browse a sea of cheap low quality items from dubious sellers, I'd check eBay.
- The selection for niche categories is limited and the listings are terrible to browse. Particularly clothing is bad: The same item is scattered over countless listings, featuring inconsistent attributes/options
- Pricing is competetive, but rarely exceptional. These days things are priced very similarly between different stores.
- return policies aren't issue here in the EU. There's a mandatory 14-day return window. Sure, 30 days are even better and Amazon handles them flawlessly, but it's basically a non-issue at any store for me.
That said, I still very much enjoy their reliable next-day delivery enabled by Prime. This is what makes me come back to Amazon again and again - after doing my product research elsewhere, of course.
> Why not order online from a sporting goods store, or, if possible, direct from the manufacturer?
I don’t want to share my info with more websites / services than necessary. Amazon already has my CC. I don’t want to spread my info any more than I have to.
I think this is his whole point, Amazon is not competitive with other retailers. At this point they seem to just be relying on their name and being the first place someone will look. I went a long time with Amazon being the first/only place I looked for stuff, but that started changing 4-5 years ago, and today I almost never buy anything from them.
There has been a huge increase in the number of dodgy sellers and obviously fake reviews, and Amazon does not seem to care.
I reported a few dishonest listings and absolutely nothing happened despite a number of reviews corroborating it.
Prime deliveries have also started to slip (here in the UK), with 'guaranteed next day deliveries' suddenly being delayed with no update or anything.
Amazon got so successful because they earned a pretty much blind trust from customers, but trust is lost quicker than it is earned.
Except when sellers game the system and flood it with fake reviews, it’s pretty strongly suggestive that this isn’t a grassroots shift in consumer preferences.
Relatedly, if someone else can make a business out of helping your customers sort out fake reviews on your site, like Fakespot has, it pretty clearly means either there’s something wrong with your site or you don’t care about the sham reviews because they still drive business for you.
Agreed. I recently heard in a talk an example of NLP being used to help rank sellers by analyzing messages between buyers and sellers, before and after transactions.
Another example was how Taobao increased the number of useful reviews by allowing sellers to pay for reviews, and used NLP to determine if the review was useful. If it was, only then would the reviewer get paid. This would then dis-incentivize sellers expecting bad feedback from paying for reviews, and incentivize good sellers who were seeking honest, relevant feedback.
Seems like both examples can still be gamed, but it seems like a step in the right direction.
> The crappy ones are also selling for $30 per set but they are made out of weak aluminum and come bent up.
Low price, low quality is a real value proposition; outside the context of wristwatches, no one legitimately prefers lower quality at the same high price.
I suggest Amazon solves this by requiring ALL purchasers to leave reviews of ALL products they buy. Or by adding a $10 fee to every purchase that can only be refunded by leaving a review.
Door Dash more or less forces users of their app to review the last delivery they had in order to place their next order. Maybe there is a way around it but it’s non-obvious. As a result, the worst rating of a restaurant I’ve seen is a 4.2 out of 5. Because people, myself included, just tap 5 stars to get it out of the way.
I don't think I would agree to that model. I wouldn't like my money being held hostage for a review. If they give me a dollar discount, on the other hand, I would be much inclined to leave a review.
It is the same model, just semantics. Either way they are increasing the price of the product by some amount and decreasing it when you leave a review.
I would love that too! If they had some sort of stat meter next to a product saying x% of the purchases were returned, it would be great. Plus it would force the seller to up their game or die.
Isn't the solution to that problem branding and not nationalist policing by the retailer? I mean, reading your post I don't see what Amazon can do to make you happy except ban "chinese" manufacturers.
If you're seriously a regular buyer of these products, surely you have a few manufacturers that you know and trust, just like serious hobbyists in other activities have preferred brands of balls or shoes or guitar strings or whatever. Can't you just search for those?
Arguably, it's actually Amazon's search algorithms that are to blame. Those have been known for a long time to be sub-par, now, at least since 2012 (when I worked there).
If you search for a brand name, products without that brand name anywhere should just not show up, period. (I suppose an exception is if you just don't have it, kind of like when Netflix shows "shows related to" when they don't have what you're actually looking for.)
> kind of like when Netflix shows "shows related to" when they don't have what you're actually looking for.
I wish they would fix that and make it communicate clearly that they don't have this show, and the following are just the alternatives. Because with the UX looking identical for when there is a match and when there is none, this feels like a cheap attempt at duping people into watching something anyway.
> I wish they would fix that and make it communicate clearly that they don't have this show, and the following are just the alternatives.
I'd like if they'd say "we have this show in the markets X, Y and Z. If you'd like a change, write an email to <insert mail of studio here> or tweet to @studio."
This way, studios could finally be subjected to shitstorms. After enough of these, maybe they'll turn down their greed somewhat. I don't want to pay six different streaming providers, that gets more expensive than US cable tv prices...
"kind of like when Netflix shows "shows related to" when they don't have what you're actually looking for."
I wouldn't mind that to be honest. And I've discovered some shows/ movies which were pretty damn good (but not mainstream) just based on this sort of logic. I most likely would've never discovered them otherwise.
Showing related shows is a nice feature. The Netflix implementation feels mildly manipulative. It is as if they are pretending the film or show you are looking for does not exist and hoping you will just watch something else on their network rather than leave for another network.
I'd much rather see an acknowledgment that the show exists and that they don't carry it, and a list of related titles separated by actor, genre, director, etc. If contract allows, they could even include a "Coming on %month %date" if a licensing agreement has been reached but is not yet active. That might make me just wait until they have the title and find something else to watch now, rather than checking if (say) HBO has the movie. Additionally, they could have a "request this title" button, even if it does nothing because they're already basing their leasings on search data.
I'd also like a list of places I can view it a la gowatchit.com, but I can understand why they don't do that.
Right, but those other products pay Amazon to show them when someone searches the competitor’s brand, so they will keep showing them even if you don’t want to see it.
> Arguably, it's actually Amazon's search algorithms that are to blame. Those have been known for a long time to be sub-par, now, at least since 2012 (when I worked there).
You’re conflating direct experience with the masses. My parents didn’t work there. They wouldn’t know if I didn’t tell them. I think most people aren’t having this conversation.
Two things: First, he covered that by saying searching by brand still had his "real" search results on page 2. Second, maybe you're super young, but Amazon used to be "good stuff", not just "hey, let's compete with eBay, on their level." What if you actually don't know the difference between "good" arrows and "bad" arrows? It used to be that Amazon had already made that call for you.
Amazon used to be the place you bought from without effort. "Of course Amazon's going to give me the best item for the best price" was the ubiquitous mindset.
Now the Amazon brand name is garbage (to me). Their prices are so mercurial you can't rely on them being even "average" and odds are they're even predatory (since it's just some random guy setting his selling price, not amazon nor MSRP).
"Fool and His Money" capitalism rules the Amazon Marketplace.
It's the worst part of eBay without the low expectations and transparency.
> It used to be that Amazon had already made that call for you.
This is why I've gone back to buying from brick-and-mortar stores. They've done the curation. They're not going to carry junk that always gets returned. Ten years ago, if I could buy it from Amazon, with Prime shipping, I wouldn't leave my seat. Now, if I can buy it from Target, Best Buy, or Kroger, I'll just make the trip. Good work, Amazon. I've canceled my auto-renew for Prime. I'm done.
Unfortunately, NewEgg also seems to be following in Amazon's "marketplace" footsteps. If you're listening, guys, you have an opportunity to NOT do this!...
Yes, ditto on newegg. My heroes for fighting patent trolls and building the best shopping cart ever and having good products at good prices. Lately it's been in decline though. Haven't bought anything there for over a year.
Maybe, but any website that does that is being so unbelievably short-sighted and consumer-hostile that they deserve to go out of business and bankrupt their owners.
I'd love a retail site that let me search by useful criteria, like country of origin, ingredients (e.g. food must contain or must not contain X), dimensions (not just '3" to 9"' when I want exactly 6.5"), etc. Amazon has most of the data already listed in tables on the product pages.
I check Fakespot, and click on some reviewer profiles. The idiots doing full-time positive product reviewing are so easy to spot by their hilarious review history that you start to assume that Amazon doesn’t do anything against them on purpose. They also mainly flock on the crap within a single month or so (but this is one of many Fakespot metrics).
I tried buying a new bicycle light last week and literally every product was crap with fake reviewing. After wasting an hour on this I ended up not buying from Amazon. Rolling out the red carpet for the Chinese crap and counterfeit industry on their platform is likely to become Amazon’s death if they don’t admit their mistake and turn the wheel now.
While this could be seen as off topic, I don’t think it is: I strongly recommend purchasing that bike light from your local bike shop. If you have a local bike shop, it is likely struggling. But it is also likely that the lights they have on offer there are specifically selected for their utility, particularly their utility in your locale. Perhaps it will be a few dollars more than Amazon, but you will reap the benefit.
Depends on the shop, I guess. My local bike shop carries quite a lot of cheap garbage too, but at high markup. I also have trust issues with many such shops. I know some where at least one person working there seems competent, but in most I've been, I get the distinct vibe of employees being domain-clueless salesmen paid to push things (similar to what's typical in electronics/home appliance stores).
I got a bike light on ebay and after a few months the battery failed. Even though legally I have 1 year warranty I just can't be bothered arguing with a seller for days and then having to pay return shipping which is almost as much as the light is. I ended up getting a light at the store. Cost me a little bit more but the quality is soooo much better and the battery can be replaced rather than having a sealed plastic casing.
If I ever have a problem with this light its only a 3 minute ride back to the store to return it and I know they won't try and dispute it.
It might be worth reaching out to Ebay and asking for a return—they have ridiculously consumer-friendly return policies, and even if the merchant doesn't want the return, Ebay can force it and hold it against their PayPal earnings.
Plus, bike shop employees are usually very passionate and genuinely interested in your best interest, at least around here, which is not the norm with other businesses. If you're happy with your bicycle, you'll keep using it, and that's more business.
I just looked for a headphone splitter for an iPhone. Every result on the page had pretty high reviews, but when you click on the results and look at the reviews you see weird five star reviews like "great planner with a great cover" and "this was the perfect organizer for my daughter's drawers" at the top of the reviews for a highly rated headphone splitter. I don't know what's going on with Amazon, but I ended up going to best buy to look for peripherals.
It is sellers abusing product variation feature on amazon. Basically it works like that - they find out of stock product with high number of positive reviews, add it as a variation to their own product. Since this product is out of stock, it would not show up on the product page as an option to select, yet they gain all reviews/stars from that product. This needs to be reported to Amazon.
That's very interesting and completely believable. If I may ask, how'd you find this? Do you work at Amazon (is this known at Amazon, I would assume so)?
I am a seller and have to scan daily for competitors pulling this trick. From communication with seller support, it appears that Amazon is on the way to stop reviews from one variation to propagate to all product in the "family" as a way to stop it, but when it happens - who knows. More pressure from both sellers and customers should push Amazon towards it.
Amazon rolled out the carpet for counterfeit when they mixed their inventory with seller inventory.
Do not buy common automotive parts from Amazon. Really good chance you will get a knockoff part.
They have to clearly separate between Marketplace and Amazon again. Everything used to be fine when people knew from whom they bought at any time. They are removing the line in multiple ways right now (one of the worst being comingling).
Completely agree. I think a better way to get reviews now is just to type "(product name) review" into youtube. Seems more honest review. Stay away from anything that is Chinese product. Most of it is so sloppily made.
These are also paid - the barrier to entry is just higher because the reviewer needs to have a little equipment and be able to speak cogently for five minutes.
Personally, I start with ensuring I know the correct "(product name)" I want. I start with going to Wirecutter if they do reviews of a given category of products, or otherwise trawl through domain-specific subreddits.
Shit like this is what made me lose confidence in Amazon and I stopped my prime subscription.
My wife bought me “luxury” branded jackets and clothing for fall. Half of them were counterfeit. I called Amazon and they said I can return them and they’ll send me new ones. Ok. How will I know those won’t be counterfeit? Worse, I found a jacket was counterfeit after the return period when it literally started to fall apart at the seams. Welp, Amazon said they can’t refund me.
Multiple times my packages are either not delivered on time or aren’t delivered at all. 2 times they were half way across the state. When I called them to ask, they wanted me to confirm my address since they magically and suddenly couldn’t find my address anymore. Well guys you’ve delivered 10k+ worth of goods to me at this address this year alone. WTF?!
My customer service experience also degraded every other instance. When they missed my last delivery date I called them and threatened to cancel and the rep said “Sure, Sir, let me do that after I reorder this item”. He figured it was quicker or reorder an item than wait for it to get back from across the state.
Technically, the pervasive Amazon counterfeit problem is unrelated to the fake review problem. Both are serious problems that Amazon does little to combat, but they're not the same. The counterfeiting is more insidious because Amazon is entirely at fault for mixing legit merchandise with counterfeits. Fake reviews on the other hand aren't Amazon's fault. That's just the world being filled with heinous assholes out to make a buck by cheating, lying, and stealing from everyone else. At best Amazon could independently audit and review all products themselves. Actually if they did that I'd probably start buying from them again...
Amazon absolutely has to deal with the fake review problem. In some ways, you can think of it as analogous to google search. Google's moneymaker isn't the search; it's the ads. But Google spends a lot of time fixing search quality and dealing with people gaming search results because otherwise the ad revenue disappears.
I wouldn't be surprised if the actions Google took to push Amazon results off the first page product results skewed the Amazon product catalog towards gamed marketplace results. Amazon was getting a free ride on Google's results sort of like Wikipedia for a fairly long time. Now you have to dig to find links to either of them. The effect on Amazon may also be a result of pricing changes Google made around 2015.
I'm surprised to hear about this, as I frequently find myself having to explicitly -amazon -$ and other things to keep garbage product listings out of my google search results.
Amazon kind of audits and reviews products, or at least has an official program for sellers to solicit user reviews: it's called Amazon Vine [0].
For the reviewers (the "Vine Voices"), it looks like this: on a regular basis, you can choose a product to review (based on your past reviews, purchasing history etc., maybe - they don't disclose how that works), and Amazon sends the product to you. Within one month, you have to post a review.
You can post whatever review you want; to become a Vine Voice, you need a reasonably high reviewer ranking (mostly based on "helpful" votes: [1]). The reviews are labelled as written by a Vine Voice.
As a side note, I know a Vine Voice, and they get emails from companies offering to reimburse them for a product in exchange for a five star reviews every few days.
The incentive structure can get seriously misaligned if you receive the product for free. You want to keep getting free products, which means that you want to make the person giving you the products happy. Amazon is giving you the products. Amazon is happy, or at least there is a common perception to that effect, if you rate things highly because then more people buy things from them. So you rate more highly so that you can keep receiving free products.
Not only that but, IMO, you can't really objectively review a product you didn't pay for and buy out of your own free will. "That's neat" for a product you got for free can easily be "waste of money" if you had to pay for it.
Most product reviews you see by bloggers and youtubers are seeded this way. Vendors understand that when people are curious about a product, they search for it and click on some reviews. It’s common practice to make sure that they have results by giving them to reviewers.
Reviewers generally fall into 3 categories.
The small time reviewers who are excited to get free stuff, and want more free stuff in the future. Aside from their delight of free product, which gives a major positive bias before they even unbox, there is also the fact that if they trash a product, nobody is sending them one again.
Then there is the professional reviewer. They monetize their website and youtube channel heavily, and they live or die by getting product to review. If they trash a product, they face a huge risk of not receiving anything from that vendor again.
The third is the fully independent outfit that has a revenue stream completely detached from the product, and often have to buy it on their own. This is very expensive, and not many consumers pay for reviews. Consumer Reports is an example.
As a result, almost any kind of review you find is likely worthless, and should be treated as a paid ad.
> As a side note, I know a Vine Voice, and they get emails from companies offering to reimburse them for a product in exchange for a five star reviews every few days.
> Actually if they did that I'd probably start buying from them again
Not that it would inherently solve the problem or prevent pay for play, but it would be a great strategy for Amazon to have an independent review company.
There are problems, though:
1. How do we trust that there's some objectivity, particularly as it relates to things that compete with Amazon products?
2. How could reviewers possibly cover any significant amount of the vast number of products Amazon sells?
Amazon customer service is now quite terrible. Anecdote: I know somebody who has an office that is literally within a 2 block radius of Amazon HQ in Seattle (the new Doppler and Day One buildings). Getting Amazon's third party delivery contractors to successfully deliver to their office suite door, in a high-rise office tower, has been an amazing struggle.
Deliveries get sent back as "rejected" all the time, when the delivery person has actually not even bothered to sign in at the lobby and go up to the office suite floor. More than a half dozen phone calls and chats with Amazon customer service, requesting that they edit the delivery info for the building, have been pretty much fruitless.
This has been similar to my experience recently with a package marked as rejected.
It's a shitty caught in limbo situation - they refused to acknowledge even the possibility that the delivery service might not have made an honest effort to get into the building, and they wouldn't let me cancel the order without a penalty, but they couldn't tell me where my package was and had no way of contacting the carrier for me to schedule another time for delivery. There also seems to be no policy to automatically retry the next day. All they could do was take my phone number and then the delivery company might call me later if they felt like it. It was very bizarre.
Since then I have stopped using free 1-day shipping, because at least in larger buildings UPS and USPS can generally get in fine as they're delivering multiple packages every day. The random small companies that handle the one day shipping seem to be a lot less reliable.
At least in Seattle, the "random small companies" are frequently some random dude with a van and a phone app. They're doing ubereats type package delivery now. There's a pickup center at north Aurora and 145th where a motley assortment of drivers pick up packages and take them to the customer destination now.
This reminds me a bit of my own giant techco bugbear: for the longest time, Google Maps mishandled my home address - literally across the street from their local office - because it didn't recognize the 1/2 in the house number. It would direct users to 1 Fake St rather than N 1/2 Fake St.
To be fair, I imagine a lot of systems don't handle noninteger house numbers very robustly. That "1/2" business just seems like asking for trouble.
The best solution might be to convince your building landlord or management to rename the units as 1 Fake Street Unit A and Unit B, or something like that. Assuming they don't have to fight City Hall to make that happen, they might be willing to help.
You would think, however, that the "1/2" works fine in the text field used for a standard North American address... At least with Amazon and 99% of ecommerce sites there's two separate freeform text entry fields for street address. It's not like these are fields that require a precise integer.
This should enable the actual human making the delivery to see the same thing printed on the label, and visually match it to whatever is labeled "1/2" on the building.
> It's not like these are fields that require a precise integer.
If you are treating the street address as more than a string something is wrong. Its supposed to be a string by design unless you are trying to be efficient by storing ints as ints but then you shouldnt be evaluating them from user input and if you are... Treat it as a raw string.
IIRC Google Maps used to interpolate between points with known addresses on streets to estimate where other numeric addresses were along the street, when they didn't have exact points for them. So there's at least one legitimate example of not treating an address as a string.
With some knowledge of the ordering scheme, you can determine relative locations and route drivers without storing every address on a street. I think it's very easy to imagine a cases where have "1/3" as your street number could cause problems (0.33333333... out of memory) or just dealing with floating point conversion and typing can lead to seemingly random bugs.
Accepting non-integers should be fine, as long as there's no delimiter or reversions to numbers ( e.g.- 321A Main St.), but I could see it being a problem with delimiters. It greatly expands the solution space for recognition tasks.
Is 321 N Main Street: 321 Main St. Unit N or 321 North Main St?
Is 321/A Main St: 321 Main St Unit A, 321-A(ths) Main St, 32 Main St. Unit 1 or A, 3214 Main St (A/4 character recognition failure), 321 Main St (A is escaped by /), 321 AMAIN St., 32 Main St Unit VA.
Where does it switch from a unit number to an address? 321A21B Main St could be read at least a dozen different ways, especially if we allow for recognition errors. Can't we at least agree that a physical building has an integer value and anything inside the building becomes a separate field (Unit, Suite, Floor, Cabana Room, etc)? No one's pumping money into post office modernization and we're not going to see Unicode or Emoji address support, so can't we simply agree on a few rules?
We have a security camera at our front gate. One reason why I no longer order from Amazon is that our porters could actually show me videos of Amazon's delivery contractors going to our gate, pressing the call button, and leaving before the porter could even start speaking.
I had an $800 electronic item that was delivered at 11:30 PM on a Friday night and was left outside of our office building where 300 people worked because we were closed. Took massive effort to convince customer service i never got it. Of course it walked away before i went back Saturday morning to pick it up.
We basically stopped getting any products that go on or in your body from Amazon due to the pervasiveness of fake products on there. Tons of fake makeup, shampoos, vitamins, electronics. imo Amazon is worse than ebay lately with the amount of counterfeit goods.
Regarding a counterfeit product, is the return period relevant? It’s a case of fraud. It seems it would be an open and shut case for a small claim court, if they didn’t provide a refund.
I've had the case that the delivery company didn't get the full address to deliver to. They tried to deliver multiple times and said every time that the address didn't exist or couldn't be found. I called the transportation support to complain and I was dumbfounded that they simply didn't have a correct address.
I don't know who screwed up, Amazon or the delivery company but something definitely went wrong on either side.
I wonder how this is in Europe where the buyer can get very hefty fines for buying counterfeit goods and even heftier fines for bringing said goods across borders.
Personally I don't shop at Amazon so I don't know if it's a problem here.
I was used to always buying on Amazon in Europe and I never had issues. Then I moved to the US and the whole experience is so much worse. Counterfeits, opened/unsealed packages, disappearing packages, 1 day delivery fee paid and package arrives 5 days later and so on.
It's as if it was a different company.
I've never had a counterfeit item, as in not the actual brand I bought. There is a lot of crappy cheap stuff though.
One thing I've noticed is items with the "top seller" tag but if you actually check the category in which they are top seller, it's a category that has nothing to do with the product.
There could be various legitimate reasons, though.
The brand could be overstocked in a particular item and want to get rid of inventory without harming their brand cachet - you're probably not going to find a clearance section on Gucci's website, but that doesn't mean they don't have a need for it.
This is true. But why would they have an overstock? Either it is unpopular and not worth counterfeiting or it’s counterfeited immediately because it’s popular to undercut. The scenarios seem difficult to distinguish.
The consumer looking it up on Amazon isn't going to know which of those two scenarios it is. Thus, my point - blaming the consumer for purchasing it is unfair. There are legitimate reasons for a consumer to think the product is a) real and b) cheaper than usual.
Amazon doesn't deliver the things you bought. I don't understand why you are buying luxury goods off of Amazon when you aren't able to distinguish between counterfeit goods. There is a reason designer stores exist. There are many reasons that Amazon as a company and service are bad but almost none of what you describe is a valid complaint.
Amazon logistics deliver at least 1/3 of the items I purchase from them. A "Prime" branded van literally pulls up to my house and someone who I assume works for Amazon drops the package on my stoop.
> I don't understand why you are buying luxury goods off of Amazon when you aren't able to distinguish between counterfeit goods.
I read this sentence four times and still don't quite understand it. Particularly in response to someone who said they tried to return an item to Amazon exactly because they realized it was counterfeit.
Can you rephrase whatever it was you were trying to say there?
I meant to say distinguish between counterfeit goods and the genuine article. I just think when you spend at least 4 digits on something you should either have experience in the area or buy with someone who does. Should Amazon do a better job on stopping counterfeit? Yes but that doesn't stop you from using common sense.
Also the use of Amazon logistics is very regional and I assumed the OP would have mentioned that.
There is always going to be a good enough margin for selling counterfeit goods of luxury brands that this will most likely never stop.
> I don't understand why you are buying luxury goods off of Amazon when you aren't able to distinguish between counterfeit goods.
His wife bought him a gift. I assume she thought that a company as big as Amazon wouldn't allow sales of counterfeit items on their platform, like I once did.
> My wife bought me “luxury” branded jackets and clothing for fall.
This is a serious problem. My wife goes to Amazon and just buys the top seller of whatever she's looking for(even if its from a no name marketplace seller). I don't think she realizes people can game this system.
Until 2010ish, I thought that Amazon sold all of their listed items and that I had to specifically choose "New & Used" from other sellers to purchase an item from someone else.
Amazon does do deliveries. This is also a valid complaint. Amazon doesn't say don't order X, Y, or Z; they let you order anything. They just need to work harder on solving these issues because I've seen many other complaints like this.
Wow. The Facebook groups mentioned in the article have 87,000 members, who are offered full reimbursement of product costs in exchange for writing five-star reviews on Amazon. The only way to describe this is as a large-scale effort to deceive and defraud mass consumers. Ugly, ugly, ugly.
> using ingenuity to trick money out of americans, that's a recurring theme in the modern world.
Fake reviews aren't "ingenuity," they're dishonesty and fraud that exploit a high-trust culture.
High-trust cultures are valuable, hard to create, and easy to destroy. The reaction to all this online review fraud is going to be default mistrust and wasted effort by consumers who are going to be forced to constantly second-guessing information or get scammed.
I'd say of unmoderated (or poorly moderated) review systems. E.g., we don't see this on Angie's List or Houzz.
I've found that the only way to get useful information out of most Amazon reviews is to look at the 1- & 2-stars, trying to filter out the fake competitor hits, and see if there are any consistent issues that aren't DEU issues. Then look at the 3- & 4-stars and see what seems to be good. That said, I expect it'll only be a matter of time until this strategy is no good.
I'd say this is exactly where some kind of web of trust could work. Meaning that everyone is shown the reviews of their added family members, their trusted people (with less weight) and so on and on. If they betray the trust the system could even have a "trust less" button. It'd actually give people the ability to choose who they trust.
You don't normally need to trust their judgement as long as they aren't straight up lying. As long as they are making an attempt at being truthful, you just have to try to evaluate their review from their perspective.
E.g, Janet says product X works really well and she loves it, but you know she likes them with a certain feature that you don't like. therefore you should stay away because the product probably has that feature you don't like
It all depends on how you use reviews, I guess. I look for obvious problems and cost that in. Anecdotally it’s fairly difficult to hide bad reviews. It’s your expectations that make you unhappy; I don’t expect much buying a product sight unseen.
You see the same issues on Yelp. Reviews are always a secondary indicator of quality compared to, say, experiencing it yourself or getting a recommendation from a friend. I’d guess that the review style that is best depends highly on the good or service being sold, much like establishing consensus, and there is no general purpose review pattern that works well.
I imagine automatic reputation building for socket puppets will be right next on the market after such change.
People used to pay a premium for people that got out of their way and found the actually good stuff. Nowadays it's just more lucrative to build some trust and use it to defraud people as soon as possible.
I don't know where this path leads, but it's not looking nice.
I am really curious if this would actually work. I also think if you trust a reviewer and it turns out they are a bad reviewer than your trust rating should lower. (you turned out to be a bad reviewer reviewer)
That said I have no idea if this would. Seems those 87k people mentioned above would just trust each other to raise their trust ratings.
Its not about total trust "rating". That not how web of trust works. You, the informed and responsible user, have to look at who their connections are.
It's more like Linkedin: if someone adds you and they are a mutual connection with a bunch of coworkers you like, that's good. But if their mutual connections are all social climbing spammers, you know they either are one themselves or don't know enough not to fall for that stuff.
So now I have to spend time reviewing reviewers? This smells like the next bullshit job (or, since I'm not even paid for it, just a huge waste of time).
I'd say this is exactly where some kind of web of trust could work.
There is a temporal dimension to this too. Everyone loves their new toy just as they unbox it. What interests me is reviews after having used it for a few weeks or months.
Amazon has all the data it needs to filter reviews by “people who have actually bought this, review left after n weeks”.
Another factor is reviews with pictures depending on what you are buying. In any case I cancelled Amazon prime. They wont be getting my money once my membership expires. I rather pay for a service thats worthwhile to me. I rather get my things at Walmart or BestBuy due to convenience and now BestBuy will price match Amazon.
For all the problems that Amazon has, there is a long history of Best Buy actively pushing consumer-harmful practises that I would still rate them a lower choice.
The first one that comes to mind is forcing printer manufacturers to not bundle USB cables so they can separately sell them at a high markup
I usually only buy things they can't bully themselves into like Macs or Surface devices, or gaming consoles. However, I was not aware of such awful nonsense.
Not only that, but Angie's List covers services that only reach a small market. So a fake review for any individual product has a much small potential reach.
Most products sold on eBay / amazon are too simple for detailed seller ratings to matter. The usefulness of a 5 star review system is far higher when there is a wide and fairly continuous spectrum of expected performance (food, airbnb) compared to a binary choice between "something this simple really shouldn't break so easily" and "it works fine".
There really should just be a "things went fine" and "something went wrong" toggle, with the option to leave a more detailed bit of feedback. "93% of people had no issues" is a lot more meaningful than "4.3 stars" to me.
Important to mention: ugly in terms of i assume illegality of this in many countries. I’m also convinced there are many countries when something like this is either fully legal or not covered by law this or another way. So “ugly ugly ugly” but technically and legally the caravan goes on.
*-star reviews on all of the major review sites are 2-dimensional. They should be 3 dimensional (0-x stars) + time. This way if clusters of 5-star reviews show up in an extremely short period of time it's a red flag. Instead of seeing a static "this product/service got x stars", we should be able to see "this product/service, within the last 1 month, received on average x stars". And then you can extrapolate, oh they received on average 2 stars before they upgraded their product, and now the product is getting 4 stars. Or something like: "this restaurant was getting on average 1.5 stars last year, but recently they're getting glowing reviews. Maybe they fired the manager?".
Fake review services have already figured out how to slow-drip reviews. If you put a mediocre product on Amazon and buy reviews, there will be no legit review history to compare against either. It's a tough nut to crack if the fake reviews are linked to real purchases already.
I'd say by slow dripping the reviews won't they have to contend more with the "real" reviews? After all by pushing a bunch of 5 stars quickly the average will be bumped up substantially and be unaffected by real reviews. At least in this case they'll have to contend with legit reviews and will not be as easy to sprout all the way to the top of the search results for same reason.
It's the same no? If there are 10 times more fake reviews than legit ones and they can spread them over time, you can't use the distribution to detect it.
I think there are probably a number of reasons it's different.
1) 1000 5-star reviews with maybe a handful of 3,2,1 star reviews trickling in as actual consumers realize their mistake is less of a signal not to buy than if I see another low review trickled in amongst the 10-20 5-star reviews.
2) The company defrauding by purchasing the reviews is not going to make their money back as quickly probably since they won't end up on top of search results as often. So these companies will be stretched a lot thinner and probably recoup their expenses a lot slower than if they start instantly showing up on top of peoples' search results. And in order to keep from "floating" a bunch of free stuff without reviews they'll have to be extremely coordinated about how they distribute their products and request recipients to provide the reviews in order to make it a worth while pursuit.
Also this very interesting Planet Money episode #838 about people all over the world receiving weird packages full of random Chinese items that they never ordered.
Turns out they are phantom packages from vendors on Ali Baba and TaoBao gaming the review system. This is called "brushing".
They managed to interview a "brusher". So the brushers have to make themselves look completely real during the buying process, hesitating, clicking links from different vendors and only after a while select the actual item they target. To get the "verified purchase" tag something has to be mailed somewhere. But instead of the actual item the vendor sends a package with random stuff and sometimes they send these to addresses of previous unknowing international customers to make it look more real.
I feel unaffected by such fake reviews as the only ones I ascribe much value to are the negative ones. Also, I've extremely curtailed any purchasing on Amazon as I've come to perceive the majority of their marketplace to be a degenerative crap house.
I met a family member (like 2nd cousin or further away) at some wedding a few years ago. I only talked to him once, but he was very clear about this situation. He owned a hotel, and was trying to track down the writers of bad reviews on Yelp. Primarily, as the owner of the hotel, it was his job to find out what's wrong about the hotel and improve it.
But he started to investigate some of the 1-star reviews, and came to the conclusion that these people didn't exist. He dug through all the receipts, he tried to track down and correlate the time with when these reviews popped up and tried to track down any issue. His ultimate conclusion was that a number of the 1-star reviews on his hotel were simply fake.
The discussion continued to talk about tort law, and how he's unable to even get a person to sue. He can't sue Yelp, because Yelp wasn't the author of those posts. So he was basically helpless to defend against 1-star reviews. In any case, if people can fake a 5-star review, they can also fake a 1-star review. And based on what I discussed with this man years ago, it seems like it really is happening right now.
Its probably easier for a Hotel-chain to leave bad reviews on their competitors. There are only so many hotels in a given area, and Yelp easily allows you to list all of the competitors in your region. Its probably less of a thing on Amazon, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't exist there either.
> The discussion continued to talk about tort law, and how he's unable to even get a person to sue. He can't sue Yelp, because Yelp wasn't the author of those posts.
Yelp doesn't need to be a party to the lawsuit for a subpoena to be issued to them. You sue the poster as John Doe, send a subpoena to Yelp for the poster's account information and IP address, send a subpoena to the poster's ISP for the account information of the user assigned that IP address at that time, and keep following that trail. Eventually you might find some person who was paid to post the fake reviews, and you can use the legal system to find out who paid them. (In fact, they'll probably cooperate with your investigation in exchange for dropping them as a party.) There's no guarantee of success -- you might find the trail ends up with a no-logging VPN, an open Wi-Fi hotspot, or some other multi-user shared environment where the activity can't be linked to a specific person -- but it is possible to try.
A heuristic that I've used quite a lot recently is to look at three-star reviews and see if the reviewer's gripes are relevant to me. Works quite well, but I guess it is only a matter of time and we'll soon start seeing fake three-star reviews.
And eventually when people start to favor two and four star reviews those will start being gamed as well, and then, just like in a math problem where all the variables magically cancel out, all the fake reviews will exist in perfect equilibrium and average review scores will reflect only the real reviews! Genius!
How would you even implement a verified purchase? For a hotel maybe you could forward an itinerary (which can be faked) but there’s probably no receipt for a random taco stand that only accepts cash. Granted the latter does not care as much as the hotel but whatever they do would need to cover everybody.
After thinking about this problem for... umm... 30 seconds...
Allow users to write reviews, and then send a message to the hotel owner saying "X has posted a review of your business. Do you accept that X was a guest on X date?"
The hotel owner is forced to verify the stay before he gets to see the review.
Of course he'll know all about the outliers who had a bad experience and complained at the hotel and might want to lie about the guest staying, but such guests are usually very motivated and willing to prove their stay with receipts, photos, etc.
With a receipt system to authenticate real customer and an opt-in inscription to the service by restaurants/hotels, it could make it.
It could be linked to an order/invoice number the owner could check or enter in the system when the client check in or check out. The client would then be required to enter that number to authenticate he's a real consumer.
That's not how Yelp works, though. It's not opt-in or even opt-out. I'd guess most businesses reviewed on Yelp have no relationship with Yelp.
And ones with primarily bad reviews (which may not be their fault: cheap motels in particular seem to attract bad reviews from people who expect too much for the price) could just refuse to acknowledge any reviews.
Plus I think users are attracted to the illusion that the business doesn't know who they are. People would be less inclined to post reviews if they knew they'd be emailed directly to the business owner for sign off.
How would Yelp know if you made a purchase? You’re not buying anything through them. Lack of a verified purchase describes pretty much every review long before there was a Web although there were of course gatekeepers like newspaper editors.
I bought a problematic item on Amazon and left a negative review. The seller contacted me three times via email and offered me $30 (the cost of the item) to remove the review. I didn't take it but maybe others had. And I wonder if I was duped into buying the thing because previous negative reviewers had been bought off.
Considering the fake reviews and the number of counterfeit items I've received from Amazon, I default to Costco, Target, Lowes, etc. for shopping now. I have a lot more confidence that their suppliers and their vetting of products are legit.
I consider Amazon a flea market at this point. I'll buy some things at a flea market, but not much.
My sister's used to do the same thing to the Coca Cola company when we were young. They would call the hotline and complain they had some come that tasted like dishwashing liquid and they would get loads of coupons sent to them for free coke.
I think they did it every time we moved house and we lived in quite a few houses. It was always entertaining.
Now that I think about it my 8 year old sister was committing fraud.
I’m an amazon seller with our own brand of products, and many of our 1 star reviews are fakes by the competition. For awhile we also had a bunch of returns and Amazon temporarily closed our listing because of the poor performance. When I looked into it the addresses on those orders were to a variety of different motels in Alabama. People are shady af and it’s frustrating trying to do business legitimately.
Although fake positive reviews are surely much more common, I'd also keep a skeptical eye on the negative reviews, especially if the product is politically controversial.
A couple years ago, there was a book critical of Internet service in the US and how it lags behind countries with more public funding. It received hundreds of obviously scripted 1-star reviews like "I am a [blue collar profession] in [middle American state], and I appreciate how great my Internet service is. The US is bigger than [smallish European state]. The author is [ad hominem], etc." Someone posted it to Reddit, and then it got a bunch of fake 5-star reviews as well.
Fake negative reviews are a tactic of nasty competitors. I'm an Amazon seller and they are rampant. The more competitive the category you're in, the nastier it gets. They will bomb you with negative reviews using certain keywords that will trigger an Amazon algorithm to shut you down.
Amazon has a few systems in place for QC, things like 6% negative customer experience rate or certain keywords like counterfeit or related to safety that will get you flagged. Once you're flagged or shut down, it might take a week or two or more to sell again. You will probably have to pay for an expensive specialist to help you clear Amazon's red tape because if you mess up, and many people do, you might be banned forever from the Amazon marketplace. Almost like a sick video game.
It's a little funny but maddening how people will abuse every gear that makes the Amazon system tick. I use a number of Amazon softwares to scrape data from Amazon and I love seeing the bad players. I'm also in an expensive mastermind and their tactics are dirty. These are Americans so I can't even imagine the tactics that Chinese sellers might use. Honestly, every month I spend in this business makes me lose faith a little more. It's a dark system and I do not like where I think it's going.
Great insight - what services do you use to watch your own & other sellers? Been meaning to write software in this space for a while. Feel free to dm me email is in profile.
I use Viral Launch's Market Intelligence to get data on # of reviews, estimated sales, review %, etc. I also use Helium10 to get keyword search data supposedly from the Amazon Advertising API. Between those two sets of data- it's very easy to see bad sellers.
There's dozens of tools for Amazon sellers and I think what they're missing is something that connects ALL the moving parts together as well as helps Amazon sellers expand outside the Amazon marketplace. Amazon software tends to be expensive.
Helium10's cheapest plan is $100/mo.
The software I use for inventory is $50/mo (Inventorylab),
a repricing software was $50/mo- now maybe $100/mo (Appeagle/InformedCo).
Feedback email software is $20-50+/mo (FeedbackGenius, ZonPages, etc).
Restocking software is $50-100+/mo (RestockPro).
Sourcing software is $50+/mo (Pricechecker 2, Tactical Arbitrage, etc).
I learned Python to automate some of my processes because I was spending thousands of dollars for my own tiny Amazon store with $100k+ annual sales. There's over 100,000 sellers on Amazon that do $100k+ annual sales as well hundreds of very big sellers ($10m+) that need custom software solutions. So it's a niche but interesting market.
It's a pretty exciting space. Amazon changes so often, every few months, making it difficult for small sellers and software providers to keep up. The best software last year is no longer the best software today.
Currently I see the biggest competition in Amazon PPC software companies: Teikametrics, Feedvisor. If anyone's interested in building software for Amazon- I'd love to connect.
Yes, that is food for thought. Although the Amazon situation doesn't fit the fake-yelp-reviews-about-a-hotel scenario because one's Amazon competitors are nearly infinite and constantly changing, whereas there are only a geographically limited number of restaurant or hotel competitors to pillory.
That reminds me of this video about the beauty industry. Brands will pay influencers $15k for a shoutout or good review about their brand, but will pay upwards of $60k for a disparaging review of their competitors brands:
Let's not forget that these fake reviews are being paid for. That's clearly better than non-paid-for fake reviews. That is, there's some friction for the malicious actors.
Imagine how much less spam we would have if it cost 1 cent to send an email. Friction can do a lot of good.
This is all to say that it looks like Amazon and others (e.g., Steam) are doing the right thing in requiring a verified purchase in order to leave a review.
But it does seem like there's an easy improvement that Amazon could make: offer amnesty to people who report (after the fact) that they left a fake review. The review would be marked internally as fake (and this would impact rankings, etc.) but the vendor would be none the wiser.
> That is, there's some friction for the malicious actors.
Fake reviews are just another form of marketing, like traditional junk mail. Making mail spammers pay postage doesn't seem to have changed the fact that most of the snail mail I get is junk, even in the digital age. Charge reviewers a quarter or a dollar to leave a review. If I was passionate enough -- one way or the other -- to leave a review, I'd pay it! I'll bet it would squelch the fake reviews overnight. Just tune the charge to find an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio.
Charging for reviews doesn't solve anything. The company paying you for the review will then just reimburse you for the cost of the fake review as well. But you'd get rid of almost all honest reviewers
Bitmessage had this and it would burn up my laptop cpu trying to send a text message but spammers with gpu farms could still take out the whole network with no troubles.
Seems like in a mature implementation your phone/laptop would route the message to a GPU farm and the work requirement could be scaled appropriately. And for whitelisted everyday contacts the computation cost could be zero.
> Imagine how much less spam we would have if it cost 1 cent to send an email. Friction can do a lot of good.
Except the spam email problem was solved without opening the door to another place where uninformed consumers could get nickle-and-dimed? Aren't we all glad the pay-for-email push failed?
I read somewhere that fake reviews are technically illegal in the USA. Reviewers who received a steep discount or for free are supposed to disclose based on some law supposedly- because it may be promotional. Like YouTubers, Twitch streamers, or influencers.
I don't know what law this is but I'm sure if someone ever got angry enough at Amazon and hit them with a massive lawsuit to enforce the fake review problem, Amazon would probably fix it within a few months. Amazon's pretty proactive and they tend to respond best to lawsuits. I follow lawyers for Amazon sellers who sue or threaten to sue Amazon and/or Amazon sellers in the US.
If you were a purveyor of fake reviews, you would want to track the reviews you peddled. It's knowable if reviews disappear over time.
What would be the incentive to come clean to Amazon about your own fake reviews? I don't think the people who sell fake reviews are likely to grow a conscience spontaneously.
A bit off topic, but companies/organizations that use punctuation in their name make sentences look screwy. The organization in this article is “Which?” which the Guardian faithfully reproduces (without the quote I used). As a result, every time the name of the organization comes at the end of a sentence, the Guardian doesn’t end it with a period, they end it with a question mark. This made me go back and reread at least one sentence because I thought I misread it. I read the sentence as a statement, not a question (and it was a statement.)
Definitely HN is the latest in a long string of sites that were good until the general public discovered them, Reddit being the most recent example. You're right: love the suggestions here and I hope the signal : noise ratio remains favorable for a good long while.
I was looking in Amazon for a protective case for the iPhone XR that my SO has preordered.
Apparently there are many cases and even more reviews of very happy customers (verified purchasers as per Amazon) who were making very positive comments on the perfect fit of the case (on a phone that is not yet on sale).
I don't live in the US/UK/Europe so Amazon deliveries are things I pay a lot for and take a while to get to me. So when I buy something, I have to be damn sure I'm going to like it. That's lead to the following strategy: filter reviews to only look at 1-star and 2-star reviews and make sure you can live with it if all the things people say there end up being true. It's served me well so far and no amount of 5* reviews will change my decision to buy or not. Also, I look for things elsewhere, and only go to Amazon for buying, I don't use their search. That helps a lot as well
A colleague recently pointed me to fakespot.com, where you paste the URL of a product (like an Amazon product) and (it seems) it does an ML type analysis to score the likelihood of fakeness in the aggregate of reviews with a score and then highlights the likely fake ones and why it thinks what it thinks.
There's surely a market for verification for customers as much as there's one for the criminally-minded sellers.
Which begs the question of why Amazon isn't offering this themselves, or doing it in the background in a way that prevents this from being the problem it is.
I have to wonder at some level if in the short term this boosts their sales figures, but long term erodes trust in buying from them and diminishes their stranglehold.
I used to trust Amazon reviews to the point I'd often not read a ton or research reviews else where before purchasing.
These days I often opt to just buy from a retailer from a name brand. With Amazon increasing prices it often isn't much difference in price and there's better quality control.
It has officially become a chore to buy something on Amazon if you care about doing any due diligence.
I would guess that the reason that Fakespot works is that not too many people use it (relative to the total number of Amazon users) so people writing fake reviews don't specifically try to beat it.
Anything Amazon is doing, the people writing fake reviews will specifically try to counter, so Amazon has a much harder job cut out for them.
This sort of thing seems pervasive these days. I see it on Yelp, Google Reviews and Amazon. (hell, the NYT has had pieces on people buying their competitors products en-masse just to give them 1-star reviews and move the relative needle in terms of Amazon reviews).
It will have to be fixed though, it seems that buying things sight unseen only really works when you have a lot of evidence (reviews) that the product is good.
Seems like a good way for an upstart to differentiate themselves.
There's no great reason to believe that fakespot is actually good at telling you when reviews are fake. Compare the absolute maximum that fakespot can ever do against the description given in the article, and you'll see that fakespot is no panacea. Fakespot can only ever catch a certain kind of low-effort fake review that is becoming less relevant as markets find new ways to cheat people.
This is a fascinating construction. To me, it makes perfect sense (and reality seems to be heavily underscoring this perspective) but I feel it challenges some profound assumptions very commonly held by Western culture, about how the world works.
If markets replace normal transactions with the optimal ways to cheat people, as a natural consequence of what markets are, how can we disrupt that phenomenon and replace markets with something else that selects for other values?
Traditionally the answer to "How can we stop people from getting cheated?" is to introduce consumer protection regulations and actively punish the cheaters.
Amazon should come up with a proprietary and secret algorithm (the way Google search is) to do the same thing. They are in the best position to do this, since they have all the info. They could leverage purchase history, payment methods, addresses, account age, etc...; they even have the resources to use slightly more invasive information such as credit score. It's knowable what products are having fake reviews bought for them, they could secretly flag accounts suspected of this and lower their weight. Fakespot can't get half of the information Amazon already has. Amazon needs to fix this for themselves.
One way to solve this problem would be to create a curated directory of reputable sellers on amazon and just link to their products. Sprinkle some Algolia magic dust for search and voilà. Easier said than done but it’s a start.
Actually it seems one site/app is doing that [0] haven’t tried it personally but they seem to have the right idea IMHO.
Edit: I should have linked directly to their about page [1]
Amazon is worth an enormous amount of money. They can afford to solve this problem. Here's one idea: invite regular amazon users with accounts active for at least > 1 year, who have some kind of verified identity/address, and ask them to become certified reviewers. Give them amazon credits/coupons in exchange for reviews of all the items they've purchased in the last 6-12 months (if they haven't yet left a review for those items). Don't pick people who have only been purchasing a few items from the same vendor. Find people who have a purchase history in line with the average user, not a company insider trying to game the system.
This way you don't have this perverse practice of incentivizing people to leave positive reviews on items they want for free. If a reviewer is found to be fake/scamming the system, just remove all their reviews and block them from future reviews.
It's time to stop allowing the raw internet to leave reviews. The scammers have won. Time to move on to a more sophisticated filtering system. This feels like email before gmail came along and largely solved spam. It'll get better again.
The more I think about it the more potential weaknesses I see at Amazon that can be exploited by a competitor. At least in the traditional retail business, I cannot judge AWS.
Even bigger issue on FB is fake ads. About 2 out of 3 ads I see are usually of some very bad product but with very attractive video and headline. I've seen people in my family buying often and getting regrets. Now I have developed muscle memory to absolutely not trust any product/sign ups on FB.
There's another side of the medal. Merchants that are trying to sell anything on Amazon have to have some positive reviews, otherwise their product will not be sold at all, even when the product is great. I guess that here two factors contribute, the product is being outranked by others, which have good reviews, and users not trusting such products.
I totally see how in this chicken and egg problem merchants would choose to buy some fake reviews.
Now, add the problem of lack of transparency in reviews, i.e. there's no record of rejected legitimate reviews, no record of removed reviews; and now you have a dysfunctional system. No one is happy about it, but it degrades both quality of Amazon and trust in it.
On this post, many commentators seem convinced amazon will have issues resulting from lack of trust. Any leading indicators that would bring some credibility to this claim that anyone can share? In general, the HN community seems to be a bit more opinionated (and informed) than the average nonHN reader wrt privacy and other things that get attention in the tech circles. Always looking to understand the difference between HN community and the broader populace.
Markets where you can not tell how good a product is simply by reading the technical spec or scientific tests, eg markets where fake reviews will have a strong impact is not a market you want to enter, because everyone is hustling and the price people are willing to pay will keep dropping.
What are some solid sources of product reviews these days, where the reviewers are both competent and unbiased? I will occasionally go to sweethome or wirecutter, but I'm never sure if I'm just reading a well hidden PR piece from a sponsor or if this is their actual opinion.
Ive been having a direct experience with follower bots on soundcloud.
I'll post some weird music, and bots will immediately like or follow.
I do not follow them back, so they unlike and unfollow.
Yeah it looks like there is a "reputation economy", even for platforms where money is only indirect. Instagram auto follow/unfollow, Twitter followers, Youtube likes and subscribers, etc.
You can buy likes/karma/points, followers/subscribers, and also whole accounts.
It wouldn't surprise me if there was a burgeoning market for GitHub followers and stars so you can look good during background checks. Or that you could buy LinkedIn "acquaintances" and "skills" and even Facebook "friends".
I'm worried about what's next. Rotten Tomatoes? GoodReads?
I despise Amazon now. Every search returns ads for Chinese fakes and other overpriced fba products. I absolutely love Costco and dream about having Costco prices and impeccable quality with Prime.
I assume modern journalism is just the pursuit of the ability to conflate as many big tech names into one headline as possible. Jackpot for the Guardian here!
Protip: if you find a crap product that's being shilled for in the reviews, you can talk your way into getting paid decently for your silence. I know someone who was paid several hundred dollars to not leave a bad review for a something that cost under $50. One scathing review that exposes their scheme might lost them tens, maybe a hundred multiples of their unit profit margin.
This is unrelated comment I know. But i did not found any suuport or FAQ on this site. Can anyone tell me why it's saying that I am still a new user so that I can't post anything on this site?
how much time it will take to aactive my account?
The offers on those Facebook groups all seem to ask for amazon profile name before agreeing on the deal, to check your reviewing history. I doubt your proposed scheme would be long-lived.
There's no great reason to believe that fakespot is actually good at telling you when reviews are fake. Compare the absolute maximum that fakespot can ever do against the description given in the article, and you'll see that fakespot is no panacea. Fakespot can only ever catch a certain kind of low-effort fake review that is becoming less relevant as markets find new ways to cheat people.
Honestly, I'm shocked that in 2018, anyone believes anything they read in online reviews written by strangers on the Internet. It's got to be common knowledge by now that most of them are fake and often paid for, and that some companies manipulate which results you see based on not-quite-above-the-board criteria. Who actually takes these things seriously anymore?
I'm more interested why this isn't something that Amazon didn't decide to police. They know when someone purchases something from their store, they can limit reviews to those people who have many confirmed purchases from them and perhaps have some kind of human validation to them (showing ID?). Just spitballing here, but it seems like a solvable issue.
I noticed this with many other products as well, but the arrows is a particularly noticeable example because it's something I regularly replace as they get beat up and destroyed (I shoot a lot).