It's a tactic that's been abused by third-party sellers for a long time now. They list a product, organize a bunch of paid-for 5-star reviews on another platform (you buy the product, submit a 5-star review, and they refund you the purchase cost, so you get the item for free), and then once all those 5-star reviews are in place, they eventually re-use the product page for another item entirely.
It baffles me that Amazon's item listing system ever allowed this in the first place.
Nominally, this might make sense with a "people liked the v1 of this and now it's a different SKU", with a note about it being for something else.
In practice, it seems very likely harm outweighs the benefits for consumers here, and it's just that it encourages more sales that keeps Amazon allowing it.
Perhaps forgivable that it was allowed in the first place, but unacceptable that it was allowed to continue after the first time they noticed the lack of a review requirement for product page changes being exploited in this way.
I often see reviews for a model that's similar but still different. Not being a seller, I'm guessing the exploit is around labelling a different model / product as a colour variation of the product they're trying to leech off, and voila: now the crappy product has the same rating / reviews as the original, better product.
There have been articles about it, I don’t remember the details, but it is an exploit stemming from wanting the review to be about the product instead of the vendor, and the process of combining reviews from different listings of the same product.
The fact that the reviews are not limited to a single vendor is a major part of the overall problem.
Amazon tracks the "wrong item was sent" returns to find such items. They outsourced the checking to the customers, but they're eating the cost of processing the returns/shipping. Maybe that is cheaper in the long run?
You misunderstand. It's the correct item. The old product page was rebuilt for the new product. Users aren't confused or expecting the original product.
That's the biggest Amazon scam that Amazon itself allows and encourages (indirectly). In my experience, most inexpensive items from unknown brands have transferred reviews.
There is a blackmarket of repurposed Amazon Product Pages. This is a problem that Amazon knows about and does nothing to resolve.
So the way it works is that some company makes a page for a stuffed animal for example. They name the product page appropriately and start selling their toys. They push hard and gets lots of reviews and build up the aSEO (amazon search Optimization) for that page. They build up 1,000 positive reviews for their stuffed animal averaging 4.8 stars. Cool.
Now they decide to stop selling that toy and instead start selling fidget spinners. Why start from scratch and go through the work of building up all those reviews again and the aSEO that took years on the stuffed animal product. Instead they just go in and change the title, the URL slug and the images to represent the new Fidget Spinner. They publish the changes and now, within seconds of posting their new Fidget Spinner is one of the best reviewed fidget spinners on Amazon and starts immediately getting sales because the page has strong aSEO and high reviews which makes it present well in search results. Visitors of the page see the high reviews and buy the product. They start selling thousands of Fidget Spinners overnight and build up to 2,000 positive reviews.
Now that company sells fidget spinners and then gets sued for using toxic glue in the building of their fidget spinners. No problem. THey change their name from SpinnyAltodaWidgetCorpIncUnlimitedPlus to ShenzenSpinnyWidgetToyPlusUnlimitedCorp. New company, now you can't sue them. Then they change the name on the product page and keep selling the same product with a different name and same reviews, building it up to 3,000.
Now the company goes under. But they have all these high performing amazon pages. Here is where the fun begins, they literally go up for auction. Companies will page hundreds of thousands for a top performing amazon page. They sell the page to the highest bidder. Now a new company ShenzenShitzuSuperCorpPlusMegaChargerMorePlusPlus buys the page and starts selling Fish Oil supplements. They just change the name, images, URL, and company information, but it is technically the same amazon page. Then they start selling Fish Oil supplements with 5,000 reviews averaging 4.8 stars. They immediately shoot to the top of the search results and start selling thousands of bottles overnight because people are overwhelmed by the positive reviews of this product and its age and legacy on Amazon tells Amazon to push it to the top of search results.
This is the black market of Amazon pages. These pages change hands often many times a year. Amazon could easily prevent product changes above a certain threshold or even across categories to prevent or eliminate this, but they don't want to. They are complicit in these behaviors by turning a blind eye to what they know is happening.
For example, in one review they find a phone charging cable that has reviews for zip ties, hand soap, shaving cream, and gaming headsets all in the reviews for a phone charging cable. This page has been hijacked several times by entirely different product types.
I have heard similar stories of Amazon fraud like you describe. I don't know if everything is true, but this is a problem which can be solved with PKI.
With PKI, the customer reviews a product, and puts the hash of his review somewhere on the internet. The hash might be the hashed version of a JSON like so:
{company: "Stuffed Animal company",
product: "Stuffed Animal",
review: "Very good stuffed animal toy"}
When the buyer tries to buy the product, he will verify each review against a public key, and check if all info in JSON verifies correctly. If it does not, then something fishy is going on.
The only problem is where to put the hash of the review. An official database of some kind is required, by a government or something like blockchain. That's why some people refer to blockchain as a "source of truth". It has the potential to contain information no human power can delete from the internet or modify in any way.
Centralization or decentralization is a mute point. The problem is solved using PKI, which was defined as a theory back in the 90's. PKI can be supported by any government or official with some computers, even private companies can offer support for PKI.
There are multiple solutions, but the cheaper solution will be offered by a perfect competition system as economic theory suggests. Anyone is free to choose the most expensive solution if so desires. I don't mind at all if someone pays 1000 times more for the same PKI and uses a more expensive system than a blockchain one.
