Amazon's Fake Review Problem
brianbien.com
Amazon's Fake Review Problem
1–10 of 336 posts
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#2Should we conclude that Amazon does not have sufficient incentive to remove these fake reviews? Surely they could, when third-party sites easily detect them...
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#3I don't care much about the reviews, but I care a lot about the fake / phony / not-as-described merchandise: http://seliger.com/2017/01/09/tools-continued-careful-buy-am... . I've actually changed behavior and tried harder to buy from the original maker, if possible.
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#4I worked at Amazon as an intern in 2005 and recall a talk on fake reviews. There were groups of people who wrote fake positive reviews for each other's books. Today I have friends who sell on Amazon and they write fake reviews for each other's products.
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#5If they're not going to do anything about fake stuff, why should they care about fake reviews? As it is, they're trying to make it so you don't know what you're buying or who you're buying it from, or even be entirely sure what the price is going to be, or who is going to be delivering to your door, so why should they care about reviews?
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#6Social proof via reviews (of products, restaurants, anything) is a great idea if you can assume good intent. Back in the good ol' days of the Internet this seemed plausible for some reason, but now there's real money to be made and that's out the window.
Amazon and Yelp and the like may be better or worse at stemming the tide of fakery, but asking them to be better isn't going to fundamentally help. The whole idea is broken.
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#7I am much more wary about buying from Amazon than most of my peers, who easily click and buy on a whim or out of habit. I went to buy a toy at a brick and mortar, and compared the price to Amazon while there - $12.99 in the store and $27.xx at Amazon! I think they've marketed them to be the low price leaders but that's definitely not the case.
I'm also concerned about counterfeit products - I don't care as much about reviews because I'll usually have researched beforehand or already know what I want. However with brand name items, I always wonder if it's the real thing and as a result have stopped buying shoes, etc from Amazon. I also don't buy anything from Amazon that goes in my body or on my body (supplements, cosmetics/hygiene, etc). I stick with brick & mortar or the online storefront.
It's unfortunate, because Amazon is fantastic as a concept, unfortunately my trust in them does not extend to most items. I'd rather pay more and be confident in the product. I think whatever they are doing is working for them and they have no incentive to change because the vast majority of customers are not so discerning.
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#8The open review system (anyone can review any item) maybe made some sense when it was just book reviews, but makes much less sense for all items. A good start would be to only allow reviews on verified purchases. At least then it would be much harder for bad actors to up stakes on a listing and clone to a new one once the authentic negative reviews piled up.
Verified reviews can be faked and gamed as well, but it is harder, more costly and time consuming.
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#9I usually look at the 1 star reviews first and see if the complaints are user error, unreal expectations or really a poorly designed product.
Re: Amazon's Fake Review Problem
#10Should we conclude that Amazon does not have sufficient incentive to remove these fake reviews? Surely they could, when third-party sites easily detect them...
Third-party sites are not "easily" detecting them. They have no idea what the performance of their "detection" is, in either direction (false +, false -).